I’m sorry, Rlovelady but I’m not sure you totally understand my essay.

I agree with you that they suck, but I think you misunderstand the full reason why they suck, and therefore the nature of my argument. I am libertarian socialist (often called an anarchist), and my primary argument is that the privatization of government services is the primary reason why government websites suck. There is bloat in government because government is being used by business interests to make money and protect their own profits. You want to improve the government then you have to excise the parasite.

Judging from reading your Medium profile I don’t think we fundamentally have to disagree, I think we have a lot of common ground. Your medium page has positive comments about social democracy. Social democracies like Norway actually have a larger share of the total GDP owned by government than “socialist” countries like Venezuela.

The issue is not “socialist” versus “social democracy”. The issue is who is controlling the purse strings. America is a corporatist oligarchy in which regulatory capture of government has slowly destroyed democracy from the inside out. The way to fix this is not to kill democratic government, but to bring to heel the private interests that seek to use our institutions as a means of profit.

My proposal for this is for the government to only operate, use, and develop open source software which is developed internally and funded by taxpayers, much like how the research and development produced by DARPA that created the Internet in the first place was run, or the way in which NASA research to get us to the Moon was funded.