The Government is a Mixed Bag (Good News!)

Once you realize that the government is composite, not a monolith, you’ll find incredible variety in effectiveness, goodness, corruption, etc that exists across the totality of “the government.”

The lesson: government is most often a mixed bag. Even within one agency (like sanitation, police, education, transportation, etc) you will find mixed bag variety. The interesting question often isn’t whether a part of the government is good or bad, but what is its proportion of good to bad? Even in dramatic cases where that proportion approaches 1, you still have to deploy a composite-oriented, mixed bag kind of inquiry and analysis to determine that.

Most people will find, once they realize that and how government is a mixed bag, that their estimate of the government rises. That’s because most people are infected with the anti-politics meme, so their default assumption is that it’s all bad and broken. A mixed bag analysis can almost only add good things to that picture. Good news!