Why Americans don’t trust government
I went to a very liberal public school, where my teachers taught me to be an independent thinker, and to distrust authority. We were rewarded for solving problems on our own, and for investigating the evidence behind claims.<p>My middle school history course was taught to a backdrop of Beatles music. One of my High School history courses was taught in terms of Monty Python movies, which it turns out have a fair bit of historical accuracy to them.<p>A common refrain was &quot;Why do we do things this way? <i>OLD DEAD WHITE MEN</i>.&quot;<p>When I went to college, I learned who funded the American Revolution. I took a philosophy class that taught us how to deconstruct sentences into logical statements. For practice we used political speeches, which amusingly enough, when diagramed out would often times turn out to be equivalent to null.<p>For me, the answer is, I don&#x27;t trust the government because my government provided education deliberately taught me better.<p>This is also why I get upset when I see people insist that schools are &quot;just indoctrination centers for our youth&quot;. Heh. Maybe all my schooling experiences from middle school on up were just serious outliers?<p>All that said, I do think people&#x27;s relationship with the government in regards to infrastructure investment is a bit... different. Growing up with a father who worked Union Labor, I learned that the men and women who build this country up have a lot of pride and love for their job. I also learned that everything is far more complicated than I could possibly imagine, with far too many moving parts.<p>Working in software I know the overhead cost of communications between different teams, within the same company and across company lines. With the number of suppliers and vendors that come together for any given public works project, I am actually impressed that work gets done at all. To a large extent, I think a huge source of problems is organizational efficiency.<p>Yet the public demands a certain level of accountability and transparency for our public works projects. We want open and honest bidding, and that means dealing with all the overhead of having 20 different vendors win different contracts for different parts of a project. There is an inherent inefficiency there that would not exist if we could just trust &quot;one person&quot; or &quot;one company&quot; to completely execute on a project.