> Yes, governments make mistakes; but most governments work somewhere between “well” and “adequate” most of the time.

Yes, and they could meet that standard with 20% less tax revenue, too. There's zero reason that any government needs 42% of anyone's income.

If it was easy to provide the same services with 20% less tax, they would’ve already done it or lost elections to someone who would.

Nonsense. The feedback mechanisms are very, very weak. "Choose between X candidates every 4 years" is a ridiculously weak feedback mechanism. Compare a market, where the feedback mechanism is:

- passive (consumer doesn't spend money)

- fluid (trillions of transactions)

also, feedback is more granular by several orders of magnitude. In a political democracy we roll up every single issue (including mutually contradictory ones) into a bundle of policies, multiply that by an uncertainty factor of the personality of the person you are voting for, and then a fraction of us actually turn out to make the decision.

Meanwhile in the market I can decide down to the level of "no, these oranges aren't sufficiently orange-y for me".

I'm no market fundamentalist, mind you. I'd rather find ways to make the public sector more responsive to public feedback than through occasional elections.

There are other feedback mechanisms in governments besides elections, which are pretty much the same as those you get in businesses. Shareholders ~= party donors (varies by country, certainly in UK and US, my German is nowhere near enough to follow politics); opinion polls ~= customers surveys; exchange rates (yes, I know the Euro is shared by many nations) ~= share prices; tax base ~= business-to-business (not B2C!) customer base; EU-internal migration ~= B2C customer base.

For much the same reasons as in the private sector, anyone who can demonstrate a way to save 20% — heck, even 5% — of a national budget would have their idea taken up by any party: a big-government party has more national improvements to spend on (e.g. “let’s put half the country through university!”); a small-government party would want to pay off the national debt.

You have convinced yourself with a "~=". It doesn't address passive feedback as I mentioned, and the volume of transactions matters quite a lot, and is not even close to comparable.

Companies like Amazon, Walmart, and many more, solve problems at a scale and difficulty far exceeding any government, without a compulsory 42% draw against the population.

What do you even mean by “passive feedback”? The only things I would (grudgingly) give that description to are available to governments and businesses alike.

> volume of transactions matters quite a lot

Why? I only see a reason to divide between “lots” and “not much” (a spreadsheet vs a census) rather than anything more fine-grained, otherwise fridge manufacturers would be meaningfully different to Amazon because they sell so much less.

> Companies like Amazon, Walmart, and many more, solve problems at a scale and difficulty far exceeding any government

I think you’re radically underestimating the scale and difficulty of government. For one thing, governments have to balance the interests of all the businesses which operate in their jurisdiction against not only each other, not only against national security, but also against the interests of those working for those businesses and the consumers and any externalities of the products and services.

> without a compulsory 42% draw against the population.

The figures I’ve seen put German tax revenues at (2014) €593 billion from a GDP of €2.938,6 billion, or 20.2%. I pay more than that because I am well paid, something something whales something, it doesn’t bother me.

Then there’s the matter of what counts as compulsory: Amazon sales fees seem to be “the average seller paying 15%”, but they also have enough profit margin — effectively though not literally a tax on the employees, because it’s wealth the employees created but don’t get — for Bezos to gave his own private space race with Musk.

You might reply that this isn’t compulsory, to save time I repeat: I chose to move to Germany, my taxation in any particular nation is not compulsory because I can move away if I don’t like it. Therefore any argument along the lines that “business fees are not compulsory” also applies to taxes.

I'm not convinced. The public generally is not really aware how the money is being spent. And all parties tend to promise tax reductions that never come. How exactly is the population going to get out of this?

I consider that failure to be evidence that the cuts which can be made without consequences have already been made.

Also the fact that the UK has spent the last 9 years trying to cut everything to balance the budget and instead mainly managing to damage the nation.

You really think that there is no savings potential for the German government? I think there is lots and lots.

And BER is costing money every day. It might be cheaper to tear it down and start again from scratch.

I think there is publication by the "society of tax payers" listing all the wasted tax payer money. Too few people read it though.

https://www.schwarzbuch.de/ - I see it is even free. And I have never read it, either. Will order a copy now :-)

I think as long as people are reasonably pampered (enough money left after taxes), they don't care enough.

In my opinion it is also the way the system is set up: taxes for employees are deducted before people even receive their money. So they have less feel for how much is being deducted. Self employed people see it differently.

I had an employed person deny this recently, but I am not convinced.

Effectively, but not literally.

With perfect information I might expect 3% savings from optimal changes. As perfect information is NP-hard, I expect the the reality to be that attempting to cut the waste will result in mistaking useful things for waste, and cutting those useless-seeming-useful-things will cost at least as much as is saved from cutting the actually-useless-things.

This reply ran away from me a bit, for which I apologise. I don’t see how to improve it though.

Governments are not free markets. That is the problem. What you describe is exactly what governments do. They try to do better than free markets (human hubris, I guess), and therefore they produce waste. Few, if any, political parties try to reduce government.

Free markets are not magic, and furthermore they have been shown to only be efficient if P = NP: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2895474

This problem is equally present in the private sector. If it wasn’t, we’d never — for example — have had the financial crisis. I would go so far as to say that the waste in the private sector is the main signal for improvement in your own argument, so eliminating it becomes asymptotically difficult in the same was as error reduction while training an AI.

To put it another way, how many businesses use free markets internally? It’s not none worldwide, but it is none of the places I worked.

You don’t have to go to a crisis before I would count performance as neither “[going] well” nor “adequate”. Things like the global financial crisis — never mind the collapse of the Soviet Union which led to Berlin becoming the capital again and leading to a need to think carefully about the airports — is why I said “most of the time”.