Comment by nemothekid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nemothekid | Hacker News Reader

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This breakdowns tremendously in other situations, mainly because of imperfect information. Humans are notoriously bad at pricing things. Lets say I'm a very wealthy man and I'm also a serial killer. In your example, I assume I could just pay any amount of money to kill someone. I'm a wealthy guy, and I go around killing 8 year olds and paying the parents huge sums of money (10 - 20 million dollars, who would refuse?)

However, what is the real price of an 8 year old boy? Lets say I go and kill little Mark Zuckerberg. By doing so I have zapped almost 100B dollars from the economy and paid his parents 10-20 million. I'm doing a disservice to everyone by killing him, should I also pay everyone who Zuckerberg will make a future millionaire, how will I know this?

Even in your example, how does his neighbor know what the perceived cost of your action are? What if his property value goes down, because of your party and noise making? How will ever be able to calculate that cost? What if he has his elderly sick mother staying over the weekend? How does he put a price on his mother's piece of mind?

Price is subjective and only depends on your action. If you take a deal, it means you are satisfied with the price. There is no real price.

I'm pretty sure a large portion of society would bet against you if you decided to kill an 8 year old boy. You would never have enough money to outbid the society. It doesn't matter how much money you pay to the parents, the society would still be willing to put you in jail, since it doesn't want people killing other people, no matter how rich they are.

You can go right now to Liberia, hire enough mercenaries, and start killing bunch of people for fun if you want to. The entire society of Liberia wouldn't able to stop you from doing so. Let's see how willing they are in putting people behind jail. It is the ultimate paradise of weak government, one that cannot/will not protect its own people. On the plus side, you can avoid paying any tax.

So would the same thing happen in the US if people woke up tomorrow and realized there is no government and they don't need one? Because, you see, a weak/strong government says nothing about the well being of the people. You can have very strong governments, yet people would be suffering a lot more under those regimes.

How? Where are these mythical people suffering under good governments? These people who are enslaved by theft of taxes? As a rule of thumb, people living in countries with strong social democracies, with strong rule of law (enforced by strong government) are the healthiest, the happiest, the most well fed, innovators of science who have launched humanity beyond earth and touched the stars.

On the other hand, we have places with weak rule of law, where the governments are corrupts, or cult of personality places men above law. These are the places where people suffer, have little hope or freedom to progress and have constant boot of power pressed on their face.

If strong government is what is stopping the utopia, why is there no such utopia in Somalia? I am finding it very hard to match reality with your claims.

So why is there no utopia in North Korea and Cuba and Iran? Very strong governments there.

Because they are following a wrong way of forming a government, one where the rule of men trumps the rule of law. Even then, you can see degree of their progress. NK, with almost mythical god like rule form single person is way worse off than Cuba, where the politburo rules, followed by Iran, where the power is shared by large amount of clergy and secular government.

A good government is quite different than absence of any government, which the anarchist claim would lead to utopia. History and current situation are littered with examples of weak rule of law with practically no government. Why doesn't this fabled anarchist utopia rises there? Why does every time there is a power vacuum, some local warlord arises to fill in the gap? Why don't these mythical "good humans" just learn to live without ruling other and being ruled .... just as proposed by anarchist/libertarians?

I have given you examples of good working government, and pointed out what I don't consider to be the proper idea of government. Provide me with evidence of your utopias.

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