oh but certainly. Healthcare, social security, education, … just to name a few
I think the women who couldn't independently own property, had no protections against marital rape, being beat by their husbands, or most any other form of abuse would agree that even the comparitively tepid protections offered by modern France are priceless in comparison.
I think children forced to labor without pay, homosexuals forced into hiding, Native Americans kidnapped from their parents and forced into boarding schools, and any number of other now-protected classes would also agree.
Sure, if the government only serves a small fraction of the population at the expense of all others, that small fraction can debateably get comparitively good value. But it sure sucks for literally everyone else.
The end of slavery was really due to slavery being uneconomic. That's why the Northern states didn't have slavery. It would have ended in the South as well, even without the Civil War (which was a kind of big state thing, of course).
Children forced to labour without pay -- also an economic issue.
The latest votes, and your comment, only seem to indicate that US people on average find that to be fine enough, the price for a (for me weird) kind of freedom.
"Here's the non contextualized percentages, what do you think of the difference between this two percentages which are more than two centuries apart, and from different countries?"
It's also noteworthy how people ask this question about the government but never ask it about private corporations.
I don't think anyone has a problem with the question being asked. It's the non-scientific method of experimentation that is troubling people.
What people called the "Government" provided rather different things 200 years ago, let alone issues with defining a comparable "GDP" in such different environments.
To really design experiments we really need to be asking meaningful questions about comparable metrics, after all.
Very likely, yes.
Who was the last person close to you that died after buying poisoned food?
Asking these questions is fine -- good and necessary even. But the evil comes when one of your reckless experiments shuts down an agency that's providing medical care to HIV-positive pregnant women in Africa, and when their babies are born during the disruption, we find that they have contracted their mothers' HIV, because of that missing medical care.
This is just one example among many. It's not hyperbole to suggest that people will die because of what DOGE is doing.
> Are the people of 2024 France really getting 28x the value from their government as 1800 USA?
I think that's a very easy "yes".
For example, you are in a restaurant, you can drink tap water for free, or sparkling water for $3, is sparkling water infinitely better than tap water? Infinity doesn't exist in the real world, but the real world has plenty of people drinking $3 sparkling water, which tells us that the reasoning is broken.
A more sensible reasoning would be: would you get better value by paying 55% (57%-2%=55%) of your income to "upgrade" from a 1800 US government to a 2024 France government, or you are better off doing something else with that money.
Here's a pretty large fish to fry: the breakdown of democracy, and a shift towards autocracy and dictatorship.
This is a fish that affects everyone's gardens, like it or not.
=> 30% social services
=> 10% military and education
=> 10% healthcare
Leaves 10% for infrastructure (road/rail), governmental services (police, regulation of trade, traffic, construction), damage-control for innovations like leaded gas, CFCs, asbestos. And of course overhead to run the whole thing.
I'd honestly say thats not really a bad deal. Are there gonna be inefficiencies in the whole apparatus? For sure! But getting rid of those services, and trying to do this personally with the taxes you saved strikes me as completely infeasible.
edit: forgot research (CERN, ITER, etc.), which would be particularly tricky to fund privately.
PS: I was initially skeptical myself, and expected double digit percentages of unclear worth. But actually breaking this down gave me strong Monthy Python ("what have the romans ever done for us") vibes, and now I think that your point is much worse than it looks first glance (still don't understand why it would get flagged, though).
Destroying the government services that allow disabled people to get healthcare and other basic needs is toxic to my literal, physical body.
You're talking like this is all a genteel philosophical disagreement. People are going to die.
Interesting that you specifically chose a covid year. In 2024 spending was 23%. The 50 year average of spending a percentage of GDP is 21%.[1]
Yet again, anyone who believes that we have some crazy out of line spending right now is in a media/propaganda echo chamber.
And if anyone believes that hacking apart our country under the guise of "cutting spending" again is falling for the same playbook. What is being done is not at all driven by cutting spending, that's just the justification bring put forward - any amount of looking into what's being done, vs what's is claimed is being done makes that obvious.
The echo chamber that had been created is out of control at this pointas somehow a significant number of people believe what is being said.
[1]https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60843/html#:~:text=In%20tota...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare%27s_effect_on_poverty
There are diminishing returns, though
In 2020, the government of the USA spent 30% of GDP.
In 2024, the government of France spent 57% of GDP.
Are the people of 2024 France really getting 28x the value from their government as 1800 USA?
It is not evil to ask these questions or to experiment with government,
And more people should consider backing off from political-media consumption as it is clearly toxic to the soul.
The reality that counts most is the one around you, and I see far too many people destroying their relationships with family, friends, and colleagues over national politics when there are much bigger fish to fry in one's own garden.