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Comment by ktRolster | Hacker News Reader

It's an old debate, and I think it can be summed up in a single sentence:

Government would be awesome if it worked right

I would give the FBI everything if I trusted them. A monarchy/dictatorship would be most efficient if there were a way to guarantee a good monarch/benevolent dictator.

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Madison said it best:

> If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.

People are bad, therefore we need a government made up of people are bad...

Well, yes. If you are bad, you want what's best for yourself. But if you know that the other guy is bad, then you know he wants what's best for himself. So you set up the rules of the game to ensure that he can't get what he wants without you also getting what you want.

See the prisoner's dilemma. If both people are bad, they will have the worst outcome. If either of them thinks the other is bad, then they will also be bad in order to protect themselves. So the best outcome (you are bad, and they are good) is impossible, because they know you're bad and will be bad themselves.

So two bad people have a good reason to write a law preventing them both from being bad, because that's the best outcome they can get for themselves.

That is assuming rational self interested actors and equal cost/benefit. We don't need to look very hard to find examples of irrationality and imbalanced incentives. Also, how many times have you been exhorted to act against your own interests and think of the children? The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

If these objections that you are raising were wrong, then we would live in a utopia. You're right that people fall short, but I think the point still stands that checks and balances can help overcome human unreliability, even if every human involved is unreliable. Just look at democratic institutions without checks and balances.

I'm actually a big fan of the competing interests concept, it is a very eloquent solution. Where it goes off the rails though is the combination of that concept and the involuntary surrender of individual sovereignty to the very same people with whom your interests compete.

people are not perfect and that is why we need a government made up of people accountable to all people.

So that they can imperfectly be held accountable by all imperfect people. Now let us find a nice foundation of sand to build a castle on.

If you're going to debate this, at least read Federalist 51.

The whole point of checks and balances is to get good results from imperfect people. You can use the ambitions of one individual or group to hold the ambitions of another group in check.

I feel like you're just trying to be snarky and or gratuitously negative though.

Oh I remember my highschool civics lessons, but I then went on to study game theory. Consider the incentive imbalance: if it costs me 10k hours to legislatively get one penny from every citizen, and the same number of hours are required to frustrate my attempt - guess who has the greater incentive.

Checks and balances are fine in theory. In practice, the executive and judiciary are overpowered. Judicial review quickly becomes judicial activism. Executive orders are a unilateral get-out-of-checks-and-balances-free card in many cases, lamentations of scholars notwithstanding. Additionally, there is no proper "federalism" so to speak of. It's a marble cake federalism of various entangled relationships and procurements between federal, state and private institutions with disparate enforcement and contractual obligations.

Americans have deified their Founding Fathers to such an absurd extent that they seem to be unable to think critically. That maybe Hamilton and Madison were engaging in wishful thinking. That maybe the anti-federalists were right. That maybe Henry Clay's American System and his antecedent in Hamilton largely botched the ideal separation-of-powers republic from the beginning.

<quote> Executive orders are a unilateral get-out-of-checks-and-balances-free card in many cases</quote> If congress wants to, they can overturn most of the executive orders by passing a law. It's not like those are magical powers.

Assuming they can get past the veto-2/3 majority dance. It also strongly depends on the nature of the EO. Major economic restructurings have been struck down before, though usually by judicial review. Military deployments, most infamously WWII-era internment, are less likely to be challenged - especially if they're perceived as "ephemeral" irrespective of consequences.

And congress isn't overpowered because it just makes laws and authorizes spending?

Reasonable results that allowed most people to go about their lives unmolested from imperfect people. I don't think they imagined "good results".

> The whole point of checks and balances is to get good results from imperfect people.

Granted, it uses an imperfect system of consensus to "do" this right now.

Well, better throw that Von Neumann architecture in the TRASH then.

I could rip a piece of paper with my bare hands. Give me 300 million pieces of paper sandwiched together and I couldn't.

But they burn quite good.

Actually stacks, sheets, or bindings of paper are extremely difficult to burn compared to individual sheets.

Stacks burn, but not as energetically as a single sheet with a high surface area to volume ratio. The stack might just smolder for 229 years, because the flame resistant treatment turned out to only be flame retardant. Something something Alien and Sedition Acts... this metaphor cannot be tortured any further.

airbubbles + manstrength: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3yvxuMGwCg

Unfortunately all we have is sand.

By that logic, politicians need to be the worst of all people; compulsively lying, corrupt, scheming, psychopathic, sociopathic paedophiles.

Oh wait....

It's not just trusting the organisation as a single unit - but every single hire they ever have or will make.

Pissed off FBI agent taps his wife's cellphone? Probably has happened and will again

Happened with the NSA, it's appropriately called, "LOVEINT":

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2013/08/24...

Note that most of the instances that the NSA 'found" were self-reported.

It's actually amazing to me how fast the abuses happened, and how many of them.

I figured it would be a typical program, starting out with good intentions, but slowly deteriorating as people who care are replaced.

But no, any capability they were given was abused almost immediately.

It's not whether the people care. It's whether they're willing to abuse power. And the people the program started with are just as likely to be willing to abuse power as the ones who replace them are.

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