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Comment by polyamid23 | Hacker News Reader

Please build your own roads then...

Just fyi, this is one of the biggest running jokes as a low effort, lazy rebuttal. I'm not saying that's you, just in general It's been refuted ad nauseam and there are mountains of answers to this just a duck duck go search away. Most ancaps/Austrians have spent significant time researching and learning, so the tolerance for low effort over confident retorts on forums is minimal. That's likely why you weren't given a serious answer.

Before people reply to this comment arguing with me about roads, it's worth stating that I'm not an ancap myself and do not believe everything including roads are better privatized.

Please don't call market extremists Austrian. We, the people of Austria, want nothing to do with them and their philosophy is seen as crazy fringe theories here.

Point taken, although it's an extremely common/well known term here because it was Austrian economics (such as Mises) that formed the basis of it.

Can you suggest a better term? How would you feel about "Austrian Economics"? I once tried "Mises economics" but that caused a lot of confusion.

Economics in Austria are still strongly influenced by the legacy of Austromarxism [0] (the city of Vienna is the largest landlord in Europe) and, more recently, the Socialists under Bruno Kreisky [1], who built the modern welfare state.

Given this reality of economics in Austria, the term "Austrian Economics" also seems like a misnomer.

Maybe something like "Austrian Marginalism" would be clearer?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austromarxism [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Kreisky

Well this is obviously not a serious answer since the initial statement was: "The problem is that the State exists to abuse the rights of the people"

Which, sure, that's like your opinion man (or you are talking about some North Korea'esque regime). But what can even be argued here?

Everything the State does robs you of your freedom and gives power to corporations, not in North Korea, in all countries

Oh no, what a nightmare, if you want something done you have to pay for it

There is a lot of material to read on the denationalization of roads, it's not impossible by any means

If only those authors had channeled their fantasies into an art form other than economics, perhaps the world would be a more beautiful place.

At least the combination of ideology and internet connection is mainly psychologically destructive. It’s a step up from ideology and gunpowder’s uncanny ability to provide close-up views of friends bleeding to death.

Pragmatism might be defined as anti-ideological or it might be rooted in empiricism or actually it is quite the opposite of pragmatic to even wonder about such things.

We can talk, we can agree, we can use our physical and common senses, and we can do things together that are meaningful and make sense. We don’t really need the modernist requirement of axioms and their extrapolations.

Sure, rocketry benefits from models and empirical results and for a very simple reason: reproducing the results and proving to yourself that your ideas work through direct experience, the foundation of science itself.

The liberal arts are by necessity of a different epistemological foundation for a simple reason: we cannot currently model the entirety of our world in ways that are conducive to falsification. We get hints and generalizations. History is the foundation of these disciplines and trial-and-error across decades of lived experience the laboratory.

This necessarily adds a political dimension as everyone needs to be convinced to be willing participants in near planet-sized experiments.

For the most part people are satisfied with public roads and conservative with their approach to locomotion.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. There we go, a workable definition of pragmatism pops out at the end.

You actually wrote a huge wall of text without addressing anything in my comments, and even managed to insult the intelligence of me and every anarchist in existence in the process, cool

I actually have NEVER heard of someone being satisfied with the roads or strees in their city/county/

The problem is that the State doesn't work, it continually murders tons of people every year, it continually suppresses peoples rights every day, and it continually robs everyone of us of a better world.

The fact that you are currently privileged enough to not feel the oppression, or not understand as oppression and just accept it as a fact of life, is good for you, but it is incredibly abhorrent to just dismiss what I say by saying absolutely nothing

I like my public roads and public transportation. Now you have heard of someone.

Actually (and ironically), Chile has a really interesting experiment in private toll roads. So it can be done.

Is there an in-depth article on the topic? I’m interesting in learning about this, but I haven’t had much luck with English language articles on Google.

I'm not an anti-government person or anarcho-capitalist, but in my third-world country (Nigeria), private roads are better built and maintained than government-funded roads. Private companies build their roads to standard because they actually want to please customers, while government-funded roads are given to substandard contractors at a low price and the rest of the funds are stolen...the government maintains a monopoly, so there's no other choice than to drive on the horrible roads they build.

But in this case, this is more a problem of corruption and incompetence than the existence of a government...just saying that "build your own roads" is not the absolute rebuttal you think it is.

Yes, this was not a serious answer to this. I replied a stupid statement with an equally stupid statement.

Sure, you were being stupid only because you though my argument was stupid

Kind of... I was being stupid, because there is no argument but a statement without any reasoning behind it. I could say that the state that I live in provides free education, which is not something that necessarily robs my freedom and gives power to corporations. So at least, it's not "everything" the state does, right?

Yes, the education system is hand made to make the students into good employees for the corporations

Not sure if you are trolling... Do you have any references or something. Again, this is just a statement without any arguments or am I missing something?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_schooling has several sources if you want to read, specifically the first argument, of the school system as government control

But I didn't think I'd need sources, it's almost a meme how everyone thinks school is where your curiosity dies.

Everyone says we need schools, just not the ones we have, or the ones we had, or the ones we will have.

The school system is the monopoly of the government to say what is important for children to learn, mostly to obey authority

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