Comment by MCRed | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MCRed | Hacker News Reader

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Snowden exposed a vast amount of criminal activity within our government, and the governments response is "lets prosecute snowden!" ... no reforms, no groundswell for reform.

The spying isn't even a topic in the upcoming election.

Since 2001, we have only seen the government go the opposite way- gathering more power, from the creation of the TSA to NDAA they are clearly not beholden to the people. (I don't believe most people support this, if accurately educated about the scientific and legal basis of these- thousands of TSA agents have been arrested for crimes that victimize travelers, they fail tests to see if they will catch bombs, and no terrorists have been found...and this isn't just Bush's doing - NDAA and the porno scanners happened under Obama, and during the whole period we haven't been seeing congressmen of either party attempt to stop it (though Rand Paul did a filibuster at one point.))

The fundamental problem is that the US government- at all levels, and across parties- is not answerable to the people or for their crimes.

This is why I'm an anarchist- I believe no government can be kept accountable.

The anarchist position is totally self defeating. We live in a complex society so some systems are needed. You can't do without a functioning justice system, functioning infrastructure, a financial system you can trust not to steal your money and other things. The market can't provide these things without some rules.

I really wish people would start asking for government accountability instead of wanting to abolish things that don't work and thinking that there is some magic fairy that will jump in and make it work. Getting systems to work well is hard, never-ending work and there are no simple solutions. Most of us here build technology systems so we should know this first hand.

Not that I'm advocating anarchism, but you misunderstand what anarchism is if you think that it doesn't involve complex systems. The dream of anarchism is to have a stateless society, where there's no top-down control, not one without complex social institutions. In fact, an anarchist society would require more complex systems in order to function.

That's the same fantasy like extreme libertarianism. How do you build a power grid? How do you build national defense? How do conflicts get resolved? I have never heard a real answer to those questions.

As a not-so-extreme libertarian:

>Power companies are responsible for their own infrastructure.

>National defense is a tricky one. Maybe PMCs.

>Conflicts are basically impossible to resolve without some variety of authority; this is why more moderate libertarianism works better

>Power companies are responsible for their own infrastructure.

You think they'll be able to negotiate easements and rights of way to each house? (without starting to look like a public entity?)

>National defense is a tricky one. Maybe PMCs.

So, Somalia? Blackwater?

>Conflicts are basically impossible to resolve without some variety of authority; this is why more moderate libertarianism works better

Extremely moderate libertarianism? There are more conventional names for that.

> Extremely moderate libertarianism? There are more conventional names for that.

Per my understanding, mainstream Libertarianism retains the court system as mediator of contractual disputes as well as criminal law.

Because the people peddling this philosophy are all lawyers and they want to be at the top of the heap after knocking everyone else down.

I...don't know where you get the idea that libertarianism is about knocking everyone else down.

Perhaps if you focus entirely on removing welfare, it looks like that. And then, I (and other libertarians) believe that a Basic Income Guarantee would be extrenely useful, and a BIG would cover more people than current welfare systems.

Or perhaps you think that deregulating business will lead to massive monopolies, ignoring that the regulations you defend make it harder for new companies to enter a market (thus making it easier to hold a monopoly).

> Or perhaps you think that deregulating business will lead to massive monopolies

A reasonable belief, given what happened before regulatory controls were imposed to prevent massive monopolies.

Fair enough.

It's not like there haven't been regulations that cause more harm than good, though--for instance, regulations on pollution that only apply to new powerplants, leaving old ones untouched.

Libertarianism treats regulation like engineering: Simpler is better, and the ideal solution is the simplest; complicated solutions add more points of failure, which leads to a more broken result.

>Power companies are responsible for their own infrastructure.

How exactly do you build infrastructure without government powers such as eminent domain, or without inserting easements for utility access?

A libertarian landowner could simply refuse to allow utility lines to cross their property and thus cutoff others from access, or require expensive routing around their property. Roads, power/sewer/water/gas lines, phone/cable/data - all would be at the whim of landowners large and small as to whether it would even exist.

There is no realistic way for a private company to negotiate access between them and every single landowner they'd need to in order to build infrastructure that serves a sizeable population. Hence government "coercion" is required.

In Spanish regions controlled by anarchists during the Spanish Civil War (a country which at the time had a lot of dirt poor farmers and a lot less large landowners), landowners were given the choice between working their lands collectively, or keeping only the land they could work themselves. That's not the same thing as Ayn Rand-style libertarianism.

If you're not the person with either the most money or the most guns, anarchy ain't going to work out very well for you. Because once those with the largest amount of power don't have to play by any rules, well, it's game on. And I suspect almost all of us will be in the 99.99999% of the population that loses that game pretty badly...

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