Doing recon listening to state propaganda NPR, and they had a guest on to talk about how RFK Jr. gutting the HHS was bad because "the HHS saved the government money by preventing fraud and abuse in the system with their oversight."
Okay, that might be true. But it begs the question of why is it even possible to have this fraud and abuse in the first place. Maybe we shouldn't be granting money so easily for every request for funding. That's the real problem, not the cuts to bloated institutions.
@houseoftolstoy you cannot have efficiently working government when you have population size in hundreds of millions. i have no clue what the situation in China or India is but at least China has total control and can do things in a way that no western democracy can.
@Justicar And I could see that even that system would have issues, but at least the states being the bigger factor would allow for better governance than our overarching federal government. California, for example, would probably still suck, but at least other states would have their regions be more functional with the principle of subsidiarity instead of the top down system we have now.
I see balkanization being a very strong possibility in the US's future.
@houseoftolstoy you cannot have a large country/society without total power to rule. we are naturally tribal, tribes are small. dozens and hundreds of people. not thousands. sure, we grew into villages, towns and cities. but even then, monstrosities like london or los angeles are inhumane constructs. let alone europe with 0.5B or usa with 0.35B citizens. we should not even have federations. just countries that are not larger than few millions of people.
@houseoftolstoy even then, you end up with different cultures due to distances and large cities having their own style and flavour. trying to put everyone in the same box, let alone when we're talking hundreds of millions of people is complete nonsense of egomaniacal dictators that want to control everything and everyone.
@Justicar I would not consider India to be running things smoothly overall, but I cannot speak from personal experience. China is not perfect either, and you are correct that their total control is a major factor in them functioning as well as they are.
We could definitely have things working better if we actually enacted the principles of federalism, where the states themselves are the most prominent governing bodies, but that has long since been a thing of the past.