Neither is obviously more efficient than the other overall, it depends on the structure and the incentives. People worry about private prisons for example. If you make it so the government sends people to prisons and you pay the prison a fixed rate per prisoner, of course you’re gonna get skimping on services by the prisons. If you instead give the prisoner a voucher for a prison and make them pick where they go and prisons get money per voucher they get from prisoners, you’re gonna get competition on quality so you’ll get high quality prisons. Opposite outcomes with just a change to incentives.

In this case it’s the definition of efficiency. Efficiency = (resources used up) compared to (resources taken in). How else would you even calculate it?

It wasn’t the giving money, it was the fast tracking in terms of regulations. Many people in Trump’s position would not have done that and would have waited the expected 18 months instead of the 11 that it actually took. Some in the industry were concerned as it was happening. Plenty of other countries dragged their feet in the approval process more than the US did.

Trump wasn’t single handedly responsible for the approvals. Far from it. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if he didn’t know much of the details. But it still seems he was pushing for it where other people wouldn’t have. I’m not sure Biden would have. Trump likes to play fast and loose where Biden is a bit stuffier.

If your bit was sarcasm, then that makes more sense. Trump was not particularly good on Covid, but we would have had a big problem regardless of who was president at the time.

Every country got Covid, basically. You know that, right?

I’ll be honest, unless you were in a special circumstance, that sounds like a you problem not a Trump problem. I didn’t and wouldn’t vote for him, but for most people he did not affect their day to day that much. 2020 was the peak of actual influence on daily life, but I don’t think that had as much to do with Trump as people imply, either. The whole world got Covid. The US had a bit more deaths per capita than the rest of the developed world (less than UK) but it also has a less healthy population in general.

I think we all sort of trained each other to fixate on the president and be anxious if they’re not on our team.

There are several different groups supporting him for different reasons. The biggest, I’d argue, is the slightly right very populist. They’re not into fascism per se, they just want a wrecking ball like Trump to go in and break apart the elite institutions they blame for all the problems and see no other way of influencing. There certainly are supporters who are encroaching on fascism territory. Then there’s long time Republicans who have flipped on a bunch of issues to try to get support from these people Trump activated.

At least he did Operation Warpspeed. Funny that some of his supporters turned on him for that.

Don’t be silly. There were lots of waves of migrants before European settlers of America. They’d be more than the 2nd wave. 😉

Winter Soldier is the peak for me, with Civil War just barely below it.

Sure, different ones have different levels of dictorshipness. To be clear, democratic and authoritarian are not opposites at all. Chattel slavery in the US was extremely authoritarian and awful, yet it was democratic. Abolition was a minority viewpoint until around the time of the Civil War.

That’s the cartoon version of capitalism just like how “socialism is when the government does something” is the cartoon version of socialism. Capitalism just means that the means of production in a society are owned and controlled by private owners instead of by workers or the government as a proxy for workers. It says nothing about whether people are compelled to be greedy or anti-sharing or something.

Sometimes corporations get bigger, sometimes they get toppled by new competitors. A lot of them that we think of as unstoppable are barely hanging on by a thread. Twitter/X and Facebook are examples that come to mind. People don’t realize how much power they as consumers have.

If we set a national policy today and didn’t allow local governments to set their own policies, I’m pretty sure we’d have a national policy of no help for the homeless at all. Be happy the places that do have support are allowed to because of states’ rights.

Given the choice between greed with poverty vs greed with wealth, I choose greed with wealth aka capitalism. Like I said, capitalism at least does some good with the greed. Socialism, etc. pretends it can make greed go away, but it obviously can’t.

Sidenote, a vanishingly small portion of people in the US are killed or injured in school shootings. They’re obviously bad, but when comparing societies on the societal scale, they make basically no impact.

No European country or the US is anything like Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Orders of magnitude different.

Billionaires get arrested and taxed all the time in modern China.

They don’t get arrested for the reasons you or I would arrest them, they get arrested for crossing the CCP. Billionaires do face punishment in the capitalist West.

I’d say the fact that leftist socialist or communist movements keep decaying into authoritarian dictatorships is a pretty big weakness of communism, actually. I think Western capitalist countries are not perfect by any means, but they’re winning the quality of life game, even of poor people.

I’m just laughing to myself about the thought of Reddit being primarily capitalist. Lol

I’m a big fan of capitalism, but I appreciate your comment nonetheless. To me there’s nothing anti capitalist about sharing or wanting to take care of the people around you.

That’s kind of true in some parts of the US, indirectly. Some places criminalize not being homeless but all the things that are the result of being homeless like sleeping outside or in public places. But there are a lot of places in the US that do provide for the homeless. New York City has a right to housing provision, for example.