[fredkbloggs]

I don't feel that I'm a weaker counterparty. If I find myself feeling that way in a relationship, I am going to renegotiate its terms or end it.

The problem that you Progressivists have is that you cannot distinguish apparent power from real power. A bank may be evil, but its power over you is illusory. You are still free to terminate your relationship with it at any time. Real power comes only from the ability to use violence, which in the developed world is associated primarily with the government. That you cannot tell the difference between a tax assessed by the government and a fee charged by a commercial entity as part of a voluntary business relationship is the reason for your confusion and frustration. And mine as well.

[darkmighty]

Going on that line of thought, consumer protection laws, agencies and regulations would be nonexistent. Hopefully not everyone thinks that way.

Also, I never read about progressivism before.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressivism

Can you sincerely say you are not progressivist after reading the introduction?

[fredkbloggs]

By the original philosophical definition, I'd probably qualify, though my affinity for the ideas is marginal. I'm not really convinced that our "advances" have improved the human condition. A few have, many others have not, and on the whole I think our species is in worse shape than it was 300 years ago. I'd like to think that an increase in our empirical knowledge would lead to an improved human condition, but empirically that doesn't seem to be happening. It might end up being one of those theories that lends itself to proof by elegance, but when tested just plain doesn't hold up. The string theory of its day, perhaps.

Unfortunately, Progressivism in 21st-century America bears little resemblance to Enlightenment thinking. It is a toxic brew of extremely hardcore Communism (Marx would have been appalled), beyond-stifling political correctness, defeatism, and a vicious temporal smugness that glorifies both ignorance and denigration of anything at all involving the past. Because of course we're so much better than they were. Not just more knowledgeable about the Universe, not just given the benefit of more experience, but better. Anyone who says otherwise is "speaking from privilege" and must be ignored, shouted down, or ideally punished or removed entirely from society (so that it can make more progress, naturally). Better men than I have commented on the astonishing narrowness of the range of ideas and narratives acceptable to these ideologues who demand inclusiveness. This philosophy wouldn't even be worthy of comment were it not occupying the entirety of the Overton Window.

To bring this to bear on the topic at hand, since Progressivists hold that everything that exists today is superior to whatever version of it existed in the past, it must be true that our gigantic bureaucratic regulatory regime is in every way superior to what it replaced (small government, laissez-faire market capitalism, individualism, etc.), we can make further progress by doing more of that. Since our system of laws has become so large and unwieldy that it's essentially impossible to comply with it, we may well make further progress by simply penalizing anything that smacks of success (undeserved, of course). Since our taxes are so much higher than in the past, we can naturally improve our lot in life by raising them further. Since we're better people than previous generations, we know better than they did and may safely ignore the lessons they learned in these matters (the Soviet Union, the 1950s-1970s tax regime, etc). When it comes to government, more is better, always and without exception. Anyone who has money, regardless of how obtained, is to be punished -- not for stealing it, but simply for having it. It's much easier than punishing crime, after all, and since people with money had a lot of power in the past, the future will be better if they have less. Ideally, less than none. Instead of punishing individual behavior, it's easier to just punish people who seem similar to people who were successful in the past (the decadent, evil, exploitative past again). It saves the trouble of finding evidence of wrongdoing, and after all, everything balances out in the end, right?

So we don't need to bother with the rule of law or written contracts; whichever party, historically speaking, was in a position of lesser advantage must prevail in any dispute. Anyone who's less than hopelessly impoverished and disenfranchised must have achieved that exalted position through fraud, theft, or murder; how else could one prosper in that past? And surely anyone who is poor today owes it not to any defect in himself but to the inescapable injustices of that past. Else what progress do we find in the march of history?

So if you're a banker, it doesn't really matter whether you've followed the law. It doesn't matter if you've disclosed your policies properly and timely. It doesn't really matter because you're a banker and the other guy isn't. You're wrong, and you'll always be wrong, and you'll keep being wrong no matter what you do until you give up and die.

Progressivism, in a nutshell, seeks to replace rule by law with rule by victimhood, just as the original version sought to replace rule by sword with rule by law.

Afraid I'm just not having any. But HN sure is.

[dang]

Please stop using HN to conduct ideological tirades. You've been crossing into personal attacks, taking discussions into flamewars, and behaving high-handedly. None of this is good conversation.

Everyone with an agenda thinks that they're enlightening the world with their rhetoric ("in the desperate hope that some young people will read this and understand") and imagines themselves surrounded by enemies ("this is one of the most heavily Progressivist boards on the entire Internet") while they of course are simply offering "facts". What's striking is how predictable this pattern is and how little it depends on the content. You could easily, and many do, have the opposite politics and behave the same way and make the same claims about other people. On HN this typically includes self-flattering interpretations of downvotes.

This is little different from preaching on a street corner, haranguing passers-by. When passers-by react badly, it's apparently irresistible to conclude that they're cretins. But really it's just that most of us don't like being preached at. I'm sure many of the people downvoting you agree with at least some of your views. But when you're trying to have an interesting conversation and ideologues show up with megaphones, it's a real bummer. And HN being a public forum, it's not like there's a quieter street corner we can all retreat to.

[darkmighty]

> I'm not really convinced that our "advances" have improved the human condition

I'm baffled. I can't comment on this, if you really don't believe things like going from a life expectancy of 30 to 80 years improved human condition.

So you just wrote several extended paragraphs of arbitrary philosophical justifications that I don't if someone would really fit in, lest any group homogeneously makes assumptions such as "it must be true that our gigantic bureaucratic regulatory regime is in every way superior to what it replaced".

What we're arguing here is about a specific consumer protection mechanism; you seem to oppose consumer protection in general, in principle. I don't see how that is justifiable, that simple.

By the way, I own a significant amount of shares of several large banks. So technically, I'm a banker, but I sure don't want me to "give up and die".

[danharaj]

I'm not a 'progressivist'.