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The first thing mentioned in that article is that housing isn't being built because the government is actively getting in its way. Sure, a government deadlock will, sadly, not stop the regulators, but it'll (at least temporarily) stop lawmakers from tossing even more monkey wrenches into an already-completely-dysfunctional system. Also, "new rail systems won't get built" just sounds like the status quo to me...
I mean, I still vividly recall that during the long Obama government shutdown the only way they could actually get us hoi polloi to feel any pain was to actively shut down public parks (requiring more effort than doing nothing). When you're doing a performance review, and the answer to "so what do you do, exactly?" is "as long as you pay me I won't set fire to the building", it's time for that employee to go.
Correct, and when governments are broken the old regulations stay in place. YIMBYs are constantly stymied by all the veto points present in American politics.
Surely you must think at least some regulations are good, like "don't put poisonous substances in the drinking water". Other regulations can obviously be abused by rent-seekers, while others still can be bad if they were just poorly thought out. The solution to the latter two is to... just make better regulations. This is hard and it won't always go in the right direction, but it's pretty dang important for a functional society.
The "regulations are always net-negative" idea is a goofy right-libertarian version of Whig history that will have us drinking the equivalent of cyanide-laced water for some future problem. Sure, it might look like there's nothing critically important to regulate right now, but society and technology move on, and it's not very helpful if the machinery of state is completely paralyzed by people endlessly throwing sand in the gears because they thought regulations were impossible to ever do correctly.
Sorry, it sounds like you want some easy slam-dunk argument against some sort of cartoonish capital-L Libertarian, but that's not who you're speaking to. :) I don't want NO government and NO regulations - of course some regulations are good. But that says nothing about whether we have TOO MUCH government and TOO MUCH regulation right now. Most of the important obviously good stuff has been in the system for decades (if not centuries), because it's, well, important. And even if we kicked legislators out for 51 weeks out of every 52, the important stuff would still pass because it's, well, important. I happen to believe that most of what our modern legislators do IS net-negative, and I'm afraid you can't just hand-wave that away with a strawman argument.
As for YIMBYs, bless your heart Charlie Brown, you keep trying to kick that football. Surely one day they'll win! You yourself linked an article about the dire straits we're in. "Don't try to stop or slow down the government, we need it to fix all the problems caused by the last 50 years of government!"
If you think all regulations can be monolithically grouped into a giant "is bad" category then there's probably no convincing you no matter what I say. If the difference between "bad regulations" and "good regulations" don't matter since you think legislators will almost always do the wrong thing, then yeah, no point in trying I guess.
Comments like these are pretentious and unnecessary.
I have no idea how you're extracting these arguments from what I said. (shrug)
For the record, I wasn't trying to be mean-spirited (just "funny"), but I see it could come off that way.
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That's because there are a bunch of practices in place to minimize the impact of government shutdowns as long as they don't run too long. They could've ended the practice of requiring critical Federal employees to work without pay, leading to shutting down airports, not sending SSI checks, a ton of law enforcement activity being suspended (send CBP home), etc... If you're middle class and/or old you're insulated from most of the negative short term impacts by design.
Cool, cool. So, the obvious follow-up question is, can we just keep those critical federal employees, and drop everyone else? We might even survive firing the seven critical workers who were kept off furlough to keep people away from the Washington Monument.
I'm being a little facetious. You have a point, of course - lots of government services seem extraneous right up until the point where you (or someone else in a worse situation) desperately need them. It would be great if there was an option somewhere between 0% and 100% of our current government, where the first 10% to go isn't the part calculated to maximize spite.
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A government shutdown that lasts more than a month or so would result in the border patrol being offered employment by the Texas state government en masse, albeit probably with very different policies.
I mean, honestly, being a young enough person to not expect social security anyways who lives in a region that would almost inevitably be the imperial core for at least some portion of the continental US if the federal government collapses under its own incompetence and infighting, just shutting it down and not worrying if it reopens seems fine I guess.
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