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Government’s wins are often invisible: Systems that avoid plane crashes; alliances that avert war; surveillance that prevent pandemics. Government wins are often *the avoidance of loss.* So how do we tell the story of the destruction of government? The story of future losses *not* averted?

among other things, we need an accounting innovation. even now, we treat disaster recovery as a GDP gain and prevention as a fiscal cost. without the dollar figures, it's an uphill battle to show citizens the value of government

Money isn't real — the fiction is used by those who understand it to profit from disaster and to undermine collective success. Perhaps we need to invent new methods of accounting, and new methods of prioritising human choices, beyond the paradigm of imaginary numbers in fictional ledgers?

It is being used to count things that count differently: investment, savings, opportunity costs, income, wealth, etm. IMHO the usefulness of one currency unit for such cross-purposes is a core fault in the way we do things. That's also due to market dogma pervading Western thinking for fifty years.

the Communist Party in the USSR had to count things, too. I grew up listening to news reports of factory and farm production. so it's not just market dogma. what is dogma is that government is regarded as a cost when it is in fact a massive source of GDP.

When I was about twelve I got a short wave radio, and one of my favourite stations was "Radio Tirana Albania". I used to fall asleep to the sounds of agricultural reports. "The ministry of agriculture reports a 40% increase in grain production". Counting is important and so is counting wisely.