Can we create a failure rate from supposed "mistakes" made by government?

I've been thinking about how many huge mistakes are made by those in control of things? The latest is a corporate one in the BP Gulf disaster, but more important are the mistakes made by the (USG) US government. The USG makes more mistakes than seemingly possible! They're error percentage seems to increase with level of importance. The more critical the situation is, the more failure you'll see. Whether it's about economy, global climate, pollution, education, disease, hunger & homelessness, immigration, civil/equal rights, safety, foreign policy, war, or anything else of importance, the failure rate is staggering! In fact, it's not easy to trace any positive outcomes back to decisions made correctly by the USG? Harder still is to find one that didn't result only after long drawn out suffering throughout the process!

It took years of murder, torment and finally a civil war to end slavery, yet slavery was only a piece of the civil rights problem. For years after women still couldn't vote, which is the exact same issue! Even today this goes unresolved in the subject of gay marriage. The USA has been celebrating equality since Abe Lincoln, yet we are not all equal? This is continuous failure that still goes on today.

The recent US economic event was created by failed decisions, actions and events. The USG was wrong about exporting jobs and allowing offshore manufacturing. The USG was wrong about loosening regulation on banking practices and money managers. The USG was wrong about the severity of their accumulative mistakes on the economy when they made their plan to fix it. Then they were wrong in every way and failed miserably in that plan and continue to do so today.

The USG was/is wrong in protecting public health in literally every way possible. Damages to public health have, and still do, come from almost every feasible method. Toxins and poisons are in everything. The air, water, food, body products, medicine, soaps, detergents, perfumes, cleaners, etc.. have been engineered for maximum profit at the expense of public nutrition and safety. Mistake after mistake to this day.

Then there's the wars. Every reason for why they start and why they continue comes from a mistake, error, failure, miscalculation, over/underestimation or screw up. There's no need to go into the details on this.

What I'm getting at is that, on one side, all this human suffering comes out of these mistakes, bad decisions and failures. On the other side, these same supposed "errors" bring benefit and fortune. Historically, none of the "mistake makers" have to endure any significant suffering from their actions, but many can be shown to have benefited? When unemployment, homelessness, hunger, bankruptcy, death and poverty are resulting from "mistakes" made by corporate/financial giants and the USG and they are not effected by them, that's suspicious. When they also happen to benefit from them the can no longer be considered mistakes.


It appears statistically impossible for government to err so often? I'm wondering if it would be possible to form an equation explaining the unlikelihood of this error percentage? Is it possible to categorize this type of data and create a statistic, i.e. for every 25 critical decisions they make, 24 are errors? What I'm looking for is a way to show these are not mistakes by showing such a high failure rate is unlikely, if not impossible.


Reading back through this post I realize it's confusing. If you can be patient I'll try to break it down as we go. I hope this thread encourages debate on this thought. I'm no math wiz and cannot possibly come close to an accurate statistical answer to this myself, so I hope to encourage those that can?



[edit on 6/27/2010 by Zerbst]

So if I am understanding you correctly you are saying all the poor decisions made by the USG are not mistakes but intentional for whatever reasons TPTB have for making those decisions. I don't think that is any big surprise, at least not to the people on ATS. If you are looking for a percentage I'm guessing 95%

It would be impossible as gov are mostly made up up of scum, who make mistakes all the time.