> The stereotypical Gray Tribe position is, "This government program is poorly-run; let's debug it"
Until the Gray-Triber realizes that there's no real feedback loop between policy effectiveness and actual policy and end up as either a resigned left-winger or bitter right-winger
It depends on how cynical you are, I guess. Seeing how even nominally intelligent and educated people approach politics and policy, I'm pretty firmly on the "never" side.
Sometimes it's a enemy-of-my-enemy effect. Acknowledging that a government program needs substantial improvements may mean admitting that the evil conservatives and libertarians who were criticizing it had a point. (And yes, this often happens to the right as well when they can't acknowledge that a particular government program has worked well).
That's a bit reductive. There's another thought - the government program might feel poorly run, but there are in fact a million contingencies that they have to pay attention to, that a startup doesn't; or the government program is poorly run, but it's better than the alternative (a profit seeking corporation driving down costs, but, ultimately, providing worse service at the expense of returns - see prisons).
I guess it all comes down to your definition of "poorly run".
I assume you're talking about the Federal Insurance program (Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security). Because a lot of people on the left want to spend more money on those.
Those are some of the most functional, most loved programs in this country. Social security is our sovereign wealth fund, and only comes into crisis when it is tapped for purposes it wasn't intended for. Medicaid/care allows a profitable, private health insurance industry to exist. These programs basically saved capitalism in this country, be grateful.
>>The stereotypical left-wing position is, "This government program should be left alone, even if it's poorly-run"
No, it is "This government program is poorly-run probably because it is severely underfunded."
After all, "government is poorly-run" tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy: it is used to justify spending cuts, which does in fact result in performance problems.
"I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." -Grover Norquist, 2001
So why not perform studies and actually look into whether the inefficiencies and performance problems are caused by insufficient funds?
Oh wait, studies require funding too, so we can't have those.
I mean do you honestly believe that a Republican would propose increasing funding of a non-military, non-security agency if they were shown hard evidence that said agency's problems were in fact caused by lack of money?
Anecdotally, I've worked as a business analyst with many government agencies, and I've found that in most cases they are underfunded, sometimes horrifyingly so.
I'd be interested in seeing some of your analysis on government agencies. Especially considering most government agencies are bureaucratic nightmares filled with unions more concerned with head counts than efficiency.
More likely than not, an honest analysis would see the 80/20 rule show up, dozens of needless and redundant positions will be exposed, and when presented with the data the agency is most likely to scoff at the idea of cutting headcount and spending through efficiency as that means a smaller budget for next year. A fun example of this is Detroit Water and Sewer's egregious spending on asinine positions such as a farrier, despite having no horses.
Ironically, I believe that we should be throwing money at problems, even as a Libertarian. Government program funding was what turned me into a libertarian. I couldn't for the life of me reconcile how we can task an entity (the government) to fix a problem, and then look idly-by as its agents throw table-scraps at the program that is instituted to complete that task.
E.g. Crime in inner-city neighbourhoods. It's 2017, we should be able to put cameras (facial-recognition and license-plate-reading) at every street corner, inside every store, track every single gang-member, and subsequently institute curfews for them that would probably eliminate 90% of crime. But, we don't. We skirt around the issue, we try fix it using "round-about" "ways, means, incentives" and all other manner of things instead of tackling a problem head-on with near-unlimited funding. If it was up to me, I'd ramp up funding to a ridiculous degree, and then start scaling back after the problem is solved. Not the other way around, whereby the program and society as a whole has to beg politicians and the rest of us to fund things properly.
> The stereotypical Gray Tribe position is, "This government program is poorly-run; let's debug it"
Just skimming google for Gray Tribe stuff and seeing that it's basically another name for 'libertarian tech workers', this isn't their stereotype. The stereotypical libertarian position on government programs, poorly-run or not, is the same as the right-wing position: "let's get rid of it".
Gray Tribe is wildly different from Libertarian. The former supports universal healthcare, free high-quality public education, and generally a strong social safety net paid for by high taxes on the wealthy.
Everything I skimmed talked about them as libertarians, and keep coming back to the same two articles as source material which describe libertarianism as a starting feature. I didn't get a sense that they were for strong welfare and public education. It doesn't matter anyway, because the issue itself is 'tribal politics', and so 'making a new tribe' doesn't solve that problem.
To be honest, the OP's description where the favoured group was clearly superior than the dumb-as-rocks alternatives reminded me of a book I once saw. The author had decided that since there were 13 lunar months in a year, there should be 13 zodiac signs. So she invented a new one - the spider. It's defining features were 'magic' and 'mystery' and it was just all-around better than the other signs... and conveniently her birthday happened to fall in the range of this new sign. :)
The stereotypical left-wing position is, "This government program should be left alone, even if it's poorly-run"
The stereotypical Gray Tribe position is, "This government program is poorly-run; let's debug it"