And insinuating that it is the best and that it is the only one that can do these things is better?
This is a straw man argument.
If you want to get into the question about government power then start with the question: what is the government supposed to be doing and not what is it doing in spite of not having authority.
Dept of Energy doesn't give out monopolies although it does heavily regulate. The company actually generating the power is a private company usually for profit.
FCC does not regulate channel content as implied. More appropriately it would be better to point out regulation of frequencies. The regulation implied here is censorship which is very much something the FCC should not be doing.
National Weather Service / NOAA would exist in some form without the government. There are private weathermen!
Private firms design and build satellites usually and are launched by NASA due to government regulation of space flight. Private companies have interest in satellites. Implying there would be no helpful satellites now without these organizations is absurd.
USDA has helped aggri-businness corps more than its original intent of crop variety. We still have food problems with this in place. They usually come in after a problem is happened even though most people assume there are inspectors everywhere checking out everything to protect us.
FDA holds back and keep drugs from being more beneficial by creating cost hurdles for companies. There are drugs out there that have known beneficial effects for diseases they were not designed for. Due to cost hurdles and regulation by the FDA people do not have access to them as they should. It has created an environment in which giant drug companies produce tailored drugs by playing politics instead of allowing good research. Safety has lost way to control and power. And the FDA certainly has no power when congress writes stupid policies that increase the price of corn and waste resources.
Is the US a sovereign nation when we have sold so much debt to China. A communist nation that 50 years ago we were putting people on trial just for the thought of being associated with? Invasions and the break down of counties happen in more ways than foreign troops on our soil. The 'tireless vigilance' of the armed forces is being wasted on undeclared wars for personal policies of the republican and democrat parties. We are dumping money and lives into things that hurt our country in the long term. We are wasting our volunteer military on politics and special interest gain. We still cannot learn the lessons from the mistakes that have been happening for decades.
Clean water is provided by private businesses in some municipalities. Again, the implication that government is the only one that can do this and is best is absurd.
And now we can't keep time without the government? You also get in an automobile that you assume is better because of the increase cost burden put on manufacturers from regulation but you have never actually bothered to look into it. I am pretty sure all those families and helicopter mothers would put enough pressure on automobile makers to build safer cars if the industry wasn't regulated. Where I live the federal government hands transportation money down to the state and it gets diverted to other programs or misused. TXDoT is a corrupt and wasteful government organization that lost a billion dollars and uses taxpayer money to pay lobbyist to tell taxpayers that we need tollroads because they don't have the money anymore to pay for public roads. And then they want to sell them to private companies after the public money is used to back the bonds.
The EPA is an agency that has absolutely no teeth and is routinely ignored by politicians. The government itself is one of the largest polluters and rights itself exemptions. The Federal Reserve should not exist. It is complicit in helping the government carry so much debt. Its policies help inflation which is a hidden tax. The USPS is a monopoly that is having trouble paying for itself. It is inconvenient and slow. It delivers more spam to my government mailbox than actual mail because people are using it less and less except for bulk mailers. This is one of the constitutionally created government entities though. I just think they should remove the restrictions about letting only US postal carriers us the 'government' property mailboxes and delivering mail. Public schools are a failure. We have created a system that has no improved since the 1950s while doubling what we have spent on them. We have created dropout factories that have destroyed communities over decades and released ignorant students out into the world. Colleges are having to teach remedial courses for the students that are attending now.
NHTSA & DOT reduntant statement. Housing standards can exist without government. If someone is poor and can't afford living in a house that someone make some material 'code' in why not let them pick another material though? Codes and regulations are taxes on the poor too. Fire Marshalls only inspect places when they want to throw government weight around. Assuming government official do their job as routine instead of politics is absurd. Police do not proactively protect your house. What happens is they come to a crime after all your valuables have been plundered and write a report that will turn into a statistics. They estimate the value of the property and if it is under a certain value then your insurance from a private company is your only resort because the police will do nothing. If it is over a certain amount they will do a few checks and maybe look into it a little but most likely they are putting resources into crimes that generate money or make them look good like citations or drugs.
What is we had beautiful parks maintained by a private environmental organization that is driven by principle and not politics?
us private environmental orgs. Some of these federal parks are just stealing land from the state.
Saying that what DARPA did and what the internet is today is just ignorant. The internet as it is simply would not exist without private business. Without DARPA something would have developed like the internet as well. Technological advancement is inevitable. You think we would all be sitting around stand alone systems without government?
Any time you take peoples' free will and resource away from them for 'public good' it is socialism. A free society does not make citizens show their papers. The SSN card was introduced as a promise that it would not be used like and ID card. Look how it is used today. Voluntary systems suddenly become involuntary once they are in place.
The government can do almost anything in some form although the 'rightness' of it is subjective. I am sure there were people proclaiming the 'rightness' of communist policies as millions of people died. The real question is not how effective government is at something but whether it should be doing it at all. There is one thing that the government is very good at, and in fact it is why we have government. That is the use of force. It is really the only power that government has. You cannot use force to heal someone, make their life better, or make them make good decisions. You can use for to protect life, liberty, property, and contracts though. Freedom is about not letting one entity impose its will upon another. You need an external force to stop this action. When the government becomes not a protector of liberty, but a tool used by one party to impose its will upon another then it is no longer a good government but a tyrannical one that is at the faddish whims of those who happen to be in power at the time.
So now that your straw man is dead can we get back to the point?
