TheRedPill wrote:The worst possible administrators of money is the government.
That's clearly false, as the inferior societal outcomes in small-government societies prove. While a large government may be bad or good, a small one is always bad. There is no country on earth where a government that spends a single-digit percentage of GDP has resulted in better societal outcomes than in the advanced democracies where governments all spend more than 1/4 of GDP -- and sometimes more than 1/2. The "meeza hatesa gubmint" ninnies are just factually wrong.
The worst possible administrators of any type of industry, service, or necessities of life are the government.
Silliness. Some goods and services can't be provided efficiently by anyone
but government, for reasons that are well understood by economists.
Anything performed by a government can be done more efficiently, far less expensively, and far more effectively by private enterprise or local community associations.
That's just objectively false. There are several market failure conditions that make it economically impossible for private enterprise or local community associations to invest efficiently in some of the services and infrastructure that governments provide. The most important of these is the externality of land value: as the Henry George Theorem shows, all the value created by provision of services and infrastructure -- whether public or private -- is taken by landowners. That is why, e.g., without government help, the builders of private highways always go bankrupt, while those who own the land beside the highways get rich without effort or contribution.
This would include things such as the distribution of food to the needy and health care. They would be better tailored to fit the needs of those who required such assistance, better monitored for effectiveness and relevance, far more transparent to those who were assisting in the funding.
Nope. Whether they are publicly or privately provided, all such charitable efforts are in vain, because the benefits are simply taken by landowners in the form of increased rents. That's why we have increasing homelessness in the very places where food stamps, food-banked food, Medicaid, etc. are being given away: poor people have to pay private landowners full market value for
access to everything government and the community provide, and many of them can't afford it.
The farther we are from the operation of such things, the far less accountability.
Accountability is determined by institutions, not distance.
Taxes aren't high because the need is plenty. Taxes are high because the money doesn't belong to those in charge of it's distribution.
No, taxes are high because governments give away almost all the value of the services and infrastructure they provide to rich, greedy, privileged, parasitic private landowners, instead of recovering it to pay for the services and infrastructure that create it. Land value is NOTHING BUT the MEASURE of how much the market expects the landowner to take from government (i.e., taxpayers) and the community in return for nothing.