[DictumExNihilo]

There is a group who have proposed a solution to this problem for decades:

Shrink the state.

Until people stop believing that any effort to do so will result in everyone literally dying in the street, the state will grow. Until people's first impulse towards someone doing something they don't like ceases to be "there ought to be a law", the state will grow. Until people stop demanding that laws must affect the entirety of the country instead of just their state, the state will grow.

What sort of government did we start with? "A republic, if you can keep it." according to Ben Franklin.

We didn't keep it.

Keep it small, keep it close, and recognize that there are limits to the problems a bureaucracy can solve. Be suspicious of all power. Be suspicious of all taxation. A massive government can, and does, wield incredible fortune like a weapon against the population.

Shrink the state until politicians are no longer worth buying and it barely matters who holds the reins. Trust your neighbor a lot more and your government a lot less.

Or do none of this, but don't ask why nobody told you this could happen. Because we did, and you laughed at us and told us we were juvenile, loathsome, heartless people.

[dang]

Please don't take threads here on generic ideological tangents. Those are predictable and therefore uninteresting by the standard we're trying for here.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13570278 and marked it off-topic.

[DictumExNihilo]

Call your ideological adversaries "fascists" and "brownshirts." Just fine by Dang. So much for "light touches." The mask slips, sir.

[dang]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13571166

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13110004

[DictumExNihilo]

Because calling people fascists and brownshirts (Nazis) is not inflammatory political rhetoric.

Linking me to some comments that essentially say "your opinions are not valid, stop calling bias on the moderator" is in no way a persuasive argument. That's just getting other people to say the same thing you're saying, and the popularity of a claim does not make it true.

By your own values then, either calling people fascists/brownshirts/nazis is "partisan passion" or it is not. I contend that those are extremely inflammatory words. They are intended to provoke, not debate or inform.

Ask yourself where I attacked anyone for their beliefs. HN is just another site where politics are allowed to be discussed (with a wink and a nudge) as long as they include a technology buzzword, but only if you don't say anything that is wrongthink to those left of center. I've seen you do this precise thing many times over the years and never bothered to create an account here or speak. That creates a chilling effect: only voices who agree with Dang almighty's political views are welcome.

[braveo]

I'd give a name to my opinion of Dang, but he'd just mod it.

When it's all said and done, you won't win so you may as well drop it or leave HN. Dang considers himself the adult, with people like you as the children. He'll chide you, but he won't give any credence whatsoever to anything you say, so don't bother.

And while I don't necessarily agree with your initial posting, it didn't need moderator attention.

Just as an FYI, Dang will also harass you in an effort get you to either escalate into a bannable offense or to get you to leave the site.

I've seen it happen, so my advice to you is to decide if putting up with Dang's bullshit is worth being a part of HN.

[kalkin]

Getting rid of social security or making our healthcare system even worse won't do anything to shrink the FBI. A stronger welfare state is compatible with considerably less out-of-control police than we have in the United States; witness anywhere in northern Europe.

If you don't want people to laugh at your principles, maybe don't immediately turn a conversation about the security state to an argument that you should pay less taxes.

[ChefDenominator]

For the life of me, I can't find any mention of social security, health care, or taxes in GP's comment.

[messick]

"Shrink the State" is code for "I want to pay less taxes". And with less taxes, things like SSI and Medicare can't exist.

[int_19h]

Not necessarily. I know it's often used this way in practice, but this is also partly because people perpetuate the notion that you must be a libertarian to believe in such notions, and that sensible liberals are supposed to be in favor of a large state capable of solving any social problem.

Well, I think that's not true.

There's certainly room on the ideological spectrum for a kind of "liberal minarchism", for the lack of better term. If you think about it, conventional minarchist right-wing libertarianism is often defined by "state as small as it needs to be protect its citizens from aggression, theft, breach of contract, and fraud". But this formula has two parts, each of which can be adjusted independently.

If you take the second part - the list of goals - and add "..., to provide for a basic standard of living, and to constrain economic inequality within reasonable levels", then you basically have a liberal minarchist credo. With libertarianism, it shares the central idea that state is a necessary evil, and it must be only as big as it needs to be, and no bigger. With mainstream liberalism, it shares the desired goals.

In practice, the difference is how you approach the expansion of government. Mainstream liberals often see any expansion that tries to solve some social problem as good, regardless of how important that problem is, and whether non-government solutions exist. A minarchist approach is to start with the premise that any expansion is unnecessary, and require clear justification, with evidence, as to why it is actually necessary.

Would it result in lower taxes? Probably, but that's not the point. The point is to ensure that the government doesn't become a juggernaut that can be easily repurposed for oppression.

[swsieber]

No - they can exist with less taxes if other things take the hit.

[wyager]

> "Shrink the State" is code for "I want to pay less taxes".

Or maybe it's code for "I don't want the kind of totalitarian programs mentioned in the OP".

[danans]

It's right there in paragraph 5: "Be suspicious of all taxation."

[ChefDenominator]

Clearly, the statement was in regards to paying less in taxes, which is what was specifically mentioned. Being suspicious of taxation does not translate to exclusively wanting to pay less in taxes.

[kalkin]

What does "shrink the state" mean, then? Are those not part of the state? If only the FBI or other armed wings of the state are meant, why not say that?

[braveo]

You're purposefully misrepresenting what was said, if anyone in this thread needs to get Dang's attention it's you.

[DickingAround]

Good, let's start with the FBI, CIA, NSA, and Military. But don't think for a second that any penny you give to the feds won't accidentally find it's way over there. Social security was originally intended to be separate. And yet now here we are, those funds being drained into the general coffers that go in large measure for war. We say it should be smaller overall because unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a way to separate the wheat from the chaff on this one. So unless you want this too-big-to-fail system to actually fail one day in a bad way, we just need to make it overall smaller.

[hueving]

>stronger welfare state is compatible with considerably less out-of-control police than we have in the United States; witness anywhere in northern Europe.

Or Cuba or Venezuela?

[legodt]

Venezuela had a command economy that bet everything on an unstable natural resource. Terrible move, not related to socializing health care or helping the poor.

Cuba was economically starved by the US and its allies and unable to interact with the global economy. This paired with its early history of horrific human rights abuses led to a rough state that continues to this day. But, and this does not excuse how violent the state was in its early days, Cuba does have no unemployment or homelessness which is something remarkable.

Those are edge cases though. Look at the northern european countries, canada, or germany

[BurningFrog]

Sweden actually has a much smaller state than the US.

Mostly because it's 10 million people vs 320 million for the US.

Letting the US states handle everything the federal government doesn't have to manage would leave all Americans in a much shrunken state, with just as generous social security, healthcare etc as now.

[losteric]

What about option C: none of the above.

I think it ultimately boils down to civic engagement, or lack thereof. Democracy is not a state of being, it is a system that requires perpetual participation to maintain.

Casting a vote every 4, 2, or even every year is not engagement. Participating in the primaries is minimum engagement.

Yet for the past 20 years American voter turnout for Presidential elections has held steady at roughly 50%. Dismal. The primary participation numbers are much worse.

America struggles with a massive burden of "civic debt" - disengaged citizens that are not actively participating in the democratic system. People that don't read current events, don't follow the news, don't talk to their representatives, and ultimately embody the polar opposite of an "informed electorate"... these people contribute taxes and tacitly grant the system power, but they do not hold it accountable for improving their lives.

When people engage, our representatives are held accountable for delivering results in accordance with our values. Perhaps some inefficiency is acceptable, perhaps not... but the decision lies with those that engage in the system. It's up to the people to drive change.

---

That said, I agree there are merits to reducing the levels of government to their minimum responsibilities, but I just don't believe that fewer levels of governance helps with the issue of uninformed electorate. A Republic is just as vulnerable to apathy as any other form of governance.

[DickingAround]

I don't think we can ever expect that level of engagement. People don't engage because the ROI just isn't there. When America first became independent it was a much smaller body; their votes and conversations mattered. I did some calcs once and it would have been like voting along with 4 sq miles of Chicago. Now, voting with tens or hundreds of millions of others, there's just no incentive to be involved. It might be a democracy in name, but none of what it does has anything to do with my vote.

[losteric]

I used the term "debt" very intentionally. You're talking about return on investment... I'm saying we aren't invested, we're in debt. We must pay back the debt before we see any returns.

No one's going to wave a magic wand and fix America. It took decades of apathy to get here, it's going to take years of work to clean up this mess and regain control.

We have to start with this year's local elections, and next year's midterms.

[jdavis703]

What about at the local level? People barely know what their councils and mayors are up to.

[cookiecaper]

Most of these problems are related to the emergence of the federated mass media that seriously changed the way people received information and shared ideas.

The American Revolution was, in no small part, sparked by one man's widely circulated pamphlet. As radio and TV with extremely high production values became dominant and the accepted standard, the relative credibility of a pamphlet from some guy you've never heard of before plummeted. People could still self-publish and make small runs, but when contrasted with the professional output from a slick media company, there's no contest as to which report your average person would be more likely to accept.

Media has been in corporate control for the last 100 years or so. Why is the draconian extent of our intellectual property regime widely despised and mocked by those lucky enough to be clued in to its absurdity, yet almost never discussed in the news? Because the small handful of companies with a TV studio and an FCC license have a vested interest in keeping the curtain drawn on the Great and Powerful Oz. They don't risk attempting a propaganda backfire on the topics they're really worried about; they just refuse to discuss them, and for the last 100 years, that's been enough to make counter-corporate effectively silent.

As mass media and telecommunication via phones made it feasible to communicate with people across the country in a matter of minutes, people sort of stopped seeing why they needed to go to a local authority (who could easily be overruled by other competing local authorities) when they could go straight to the highest authority. Combine this with the fact that the highest production values and most recognizable faces were covering the national beats, and that local news outlets can't go more finite than the state and sometimes county level for practical reasons, and you have a recipe for a populace that knows nothing about their immediate political leaders.

The internet has democratized mass media and given a credible voice back to the little, non-corporate guy, after 100 years lost in the darkness. And that really makes the corporate propagandists mad.

A lot of problems today flow out from struggling with and trying to learn how to handle the closeness that has been afforded by things like instant telecommunications and fast, reliable interstate transportation across the sky and the nation's highways. One non-political example: neighborliness is going away (as is socialization in general).

In former times, people relied on their neighbors and neighborhood because they had to. You couldn't exist in a physical space without having a moral responsibility to it and the people around it. Now that everyone's friends and families live in their pockets, "neighborly" relations, in the classical sense, are disappearing. My family and I have lived in half-a-dozen different places over our marriage so far, and in each case, we've never had a nextdoor neighbor come introduce themselves or welcome us to the neighborhood. And to be fair, we've never done this as neighbors have moved in and out around us either.

tl;dr Mass media, shipping, and telephones made it so people only needed to care about federal level anymore.

[awfgylbcxhrey]

I'm fine with the government as large as it currently is, I just want more of the stuff I like (infrastructure development, education, regulation enforcement, healthcare) and less of what I don't (overzealous law enforcement and military action, banks of federal lawyers creating fourth branches of government).

[DickingAround]

I'm afraid that isn't one of our choices. Everyone seems to have different view of what is 'right'. So unless you want to be bulldozed when your view doesn't happen to be a majority.. it's a choice really between small or big.

[awfgylbcxhrey]

Well, everyone has a different view of what is big or small, so your position is just as invalid.

That said, I never said "right". I was quite clear about what facets of government I value (civil rights, transportation and social infrastructure) and what I don't like (war machine, fascist law enforcement). Oddly enough, there are political parties in line with that, so your unsubstantiated assertion that I don't get that choice is pretty ridiculous.

[anigbrowl]

Oh come on, that's a BS argument in the age of FB and Palantir. Get real instead of ignoring the fact of technology. I have radical ideas about governance but 'shrink the state' is about as sensible as 'force people to be good.'

[cookiecaper]

I'm not sure what FB and Palantir have to do with the size of the state. They're private companies. Yes, it's true that in light of new technology, "the state" or a reasonable facsimile thereof can wield a frightening amount of knowledge about not only your personal life, but the personal lives of all of your associates as well.

However, that's just more reason to aggressively ensure that free markets are functioning well, that state dependence is low, and that the government's functions are kept trim. The Founders left us a great system, but it needs adaptation that keeps its true principles enshrined and safeguarded in light of the unparalleled technological revolution that's occurred over the last +/- 180 years.

[anigbrowl]

I'm sorry for not expressing what I meant more clearly the first time. I'm saying that given the extensive and unprecedented reach of private actors like FB and so, shrinking the state is not by itself going to make people freer. Most of the state's activities consist of providing services of various kinds, most of which people want, and it is this that employs the bulk of federal workers, and it is by cutting services that politicos aim to achieve the shrinkage.

The notion that shrinking the state will make it too small to surveil the people just seems naive to me, in the light of private firms' ability to surveil the population for commercial ends. If the state is so small as not to be an effective political actor (qua the 'deep state' permanent bureaucracy), then what is to stop those private entities leveraging their existing knowledge to wield power unchecked? The courts function as arbiters within the private sector only insofar as their judgments are backed up by the power of the state; absent a capable state actor that can be politically delegated to the security of public goods, what restraints exist upon private actors to conduct themselves peaceably?

I'm not really up for a philosophical debate on the broader role of government today, but in general I feel that the belief that less government will bring about increased self-reliance and we'll return tot he ways of our forefathers is a mistaken one, and really suffers from the same faulty utopianism as the idea of an all-encompassing state. If there were some optimal public:private sector ratio, or some magic formula for defining the appropriate scope of government, wouldn't you expect to see societies that stumbled across it racing ahead of their less nimble competitors?

[pizza]

In some sense, the military is a state within a state - probably one of the only parts of government that follows a parallel legal system. But as it stands, it is still strongly coupled to our oligarchy. If the military - and police - were less of an instrument of the protection of political interests, and maybe more of an accelerator type program, even like YC, there could be a lot of benefit to society. The internet itself is an example of this, no?

Maybe there should be readings of the 2nd amendment more like "the ability to form militias/bear arms" ~ "the ability to create governments within government". Like less dystopic versions of burbclaves from Snow Crash, although that spells out some problems from the get-go, I guess.

edit: I mean, we could reconfigure the military to be a peace/engineer's/etc. corps type of merito/techno/plutocratic institution, by the people for the people, composed of ordinary people but with a true pledge for the protection of individuals' life and with an efficient structure for the innovation of ordinary life, outside of wasteful stockholder-politics/investor corporatism.

[krupan]

"Trust your neighbor a lot more and your government a lot less."

That is the salient piece of this message. If you don't trust your neighbors, why is putting them in powerful positions of government a good idea? If you do trust your neighbors, then we don't need a huge powerful government.

[CPLX]

> There is a group who have proposed a solution to this problem for decades: Shrink the state.

And what group is that exactly? It sure as hell isn't either of the two major US parties and their assorted enablers.

[zarriak]

Ron Paul has been arguing for this for his entire political career.

[CalChris]

As a Republican and now very comfortably retired Critter.

[rorykoehler]

Ron Paul's ideas are a laughable collection of zero and one step thinking examples.

[llukas]

Shrink the state = let rich & corporations get loose.

You want to replace kind of power that you got influence on and some expectations about public information access with totally "private" power that you got no control about.

That is special kind of stupid.

Thank you but no thank you.

[ams6110]

The state is bigger than it's ever been. Meanwhile wealth inequality has risen to historic highs. How's that again?

[drinkjuice]

That's the result of the state being used as a vehicle for the rich to get richer, not for the state existing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-TydNlj7d0

"The state" is the one thing people in a democracy at least own on paper. That's not to be trifled with.

Besides, just about anything is "bigger than it's ever been", one might as well say there have never been so many people working in non-profits for justice and whatnot, so that must be causing inequality.

Last but not least, "big" doesn't mean anything. It's like only looking at lines of code, and not content at all. Even reducing it to "bigger versus smaller government", regardless of where you fall on that, is nonsense.

[acdha]

Citation needed: it's definitely not more invasive than when we had e.g. actual royalty or state-enforced slavery, to say nothing of the various authoritarian regimes of the 20th century, in the U.S. at least taxes are generally lower than they were decades ago and federal employment has been flat to declining for at least half a century.

This is also a meaningless claim without looking at life for the average person: was it really better when the state let your house run a company town, pollute around your home, punish you for disagreeing in public, etc?

What you should be looking at is quality of life and personal freedom. Assuming the quality of government is fixed is a classic libertarian cognitive vice, and its prevalence does a lot to keep adherents marginalized.

[zanny]

This is somewhat where my politics have lead me.

The concentration of power, public or private, is the cause of evil and suffering in the world.

It can be micro, or macro. It could be a kidnapping victim, or someone stronger than you physically, or it could be corporate influence in legislature biasing the markets against competition, or it could be simple and just be a tyrant dictator demanding compliance in the behavior of the peasantry at threat of death, or the systemic enabling of international enslavement under globalization.

The answer is to shrink the state. There is no sustainable model where you have a top heavy powerful government and somehow preserve liberty. You made the state too strong, and that power will attract the worst of humanity and invite endless efforts to usurp it for personal lust of dominance. It will only be a matter of time until it happens, and it happens faster the larger the carrot.

But that is only an answer when you are also dissolving private power by correcting for millennia of violent power accumulation. By families, corporations, individuals, dynasties, societies, ethnic groups. You cannot reach that libertarian / anarchist utopia without starting everyone off without any violence and without any disadvantage, or else your system has failed before it begins and you just forfeited the only power the poor have ever accumulated, no matter how paltry or flawed, in their vote.

Which then becomes self contradicting. You can never actually dissolve the state and equalize power, because to wield the capability to reset the world economy to equality and absolve the history of suffering behind all wealth accumulated, you must wield absolute power, which means you will always be absolutely corrupt. All roads to that chair are paved with falsehoods about greater goods and coincidental personal benefit by crushing your rivals and billions of human lives in collateral.

That is probably why politics is always cyclic. There is actually no answer for anyone seeking to eliminate the suffering and maximize the liberty, while there are infinite answers for those seeking to create suffering to maximize their own influence at the sacrifice of others.

In the end, power is evil, or at least always eventually leads to it. The more of it, the faster and worse it gets. But it is impossible to consistently dissolve power - it takes extraordinary circumstances and people to ever reverse the centralization and exploitation of power, because by its nature altering power requires having it. There is no mathematical method to guaranteeing liberty - it just requires the right people in the right place at the right time with a ton of luck to reverse the status quo of more centralization of power and more suffering as a consequence of it, in all its forms.

[XorNot]

Imagine a world where your home owners association is the supreme power of your world. Does that sound functional? Or even pleasant?

[strken]

It's not clear that making the state smaller makes it any less powerful, or any less able to protect the poor. You could replace all the existing welfare programs with a redistributive tax on capital, and still technically have shrunk the state if there were fewer regulations and fewer government employees afterwards.

One of the most important insights that YC and friends have given me is that a massive heavyweight isn't necessarily better than a small and nimble competitor.

[wyager]

> Shrink the state = let rich & corporations get loose.

Ah, of course, 40% of GDP is a necessary expenditure to keep Scrooge McDuck from taking over. A penny less and we'd all be lifelong indentured servants.

[DictumExNihilo]

> let rich & corporations get loose

This belief only causes the state to grow. It inflates politicians to the point where they are worth buying, so they are bought. They then make laws that hurt their competition and help their corporation. They make laws that make it extremely difficult to ever start a business to compete to begin with. So the corporations get bigger, and have more to buy the politicians with. And the scope of what the politicians control grows, so it costs more to buy them. So access to your government shrinks to the point where only the most wealthy have any real say in it.

And what does that look like? That looks like what we have. Congratulations for being a part of the problem through the unwarranted fear of your fellow man.

Because so many of you only want to see simple cause and effect, not the multitudinous unintended consequences that every law and regulation creates. You are controlled by your fears. If the state fails to do something, grow it. If it succeeds at anything, grow it.

This is all I will say on this subject. I have spilled a lifetime of digital ink over this, as have countless others, but to no avail. When the civil war comes because everyone finally decides that everyone else is the enemy, don't ask me for help. I'll be looking after myself and mine. I want with all my heart for that not to happen, but you're going to start wanting it with all your heads first.

[dang]

HN is not a place for this sort of ideological rant, so please don't post like this here.

[xenadu02]

At least in the USA, people didn't wake up one day and say "Gee, bigger government would be awesome".

The growth of government is a direct response to constant abuses at the hands of smaller local government, corporations, and wealthy individuals.

I have never heard a proposal for "shrink the state" that manages to address that underlying truth. If there isn't an existing avenue to achieve power then power-hungry people will create one. We had the closest thing to a libertopia ever in the 1870-1929 USA. It was a disaster, resulting in multiple financial panics, thousands of deaths from tainted food, huge private interventions to seize control of entire countries, etc. Small towns were often run like a personal fiefdom with disregard for the law; if you were the target the sheriff would just lock you up and the judge might hand down a sentence with barely a show trial. In many ways the growth of the federal government has been a huge boon to cleaning up local politics and did-entangling wealthy influence.

Not to mention that scale matters. No pollution regulation only works when there are relatively few factories doing the polluting. Without the EPA we'd have the poisoned waters and dangerous air that China has.

[wyager]

> The growth of government is a direct response to constant abuses at the hands of smaller local government, corporations, and wealthy individuals.

Or maybe it's a direct response to the fact that the people who have the power to grow the government also work for the government and are therefore incentivized to grow the government.

Which idiot is going around saying "wow, this one level of government sucks, I'd better give more money and power to a slightly different level of government"?

I think you're also wrong that local governments are frequently committing abuses; the federal government seems to do that much more frequently (possibly by nature of its tremendous scope), and has an approval rating to match.

[ctrl_freak]

> I think you're also wrong that local governments are frequently committing abuses; the federal government seems to do that much more frequently

I think I read a study not too long ago that indicated state and local governments actually had much higher corruption than the federal government. I tried to find it now; the best I could come up with was an article from nymag [1]. It's an interesting read, and one of the interesting tidbits it notes is that state house elections track US house elections with a correlation of 0.96, in other words, much less accountability at that level. Perhaps one of the reasons why the federal government seems more abusive than local governments is that it gets more media attention.

[1] http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/09/ferguson-worst-...

[braveo]

I would agree with that, but I think a large reason for it is because people don't pay attention to local as much as federal anymore, so it slips under the radar a lot.

[azinman2]

So instead Koch brothers are just completely unchecked? No thanks. What we have is broken, but to remove the state is to allow the US to become a 3rd world country where the mega rich get richer, federal parks land is auctioned off, and pollution remains unchecked. We have enough examples of failed states world wide to understand that rivers turning pink is what happens when you don't have laws for the people.

[Trundle]

Are the Koch brothers abnormally strong or something? The state is what gives anyone the ability to control that ridiculous amount of wealth. The idea that them being unchecked without state backing is a problem is laughable.

[angersock]

> to remove the state is to allow the US to become a 3rd world country where the mega rich get richer, federal parks land is auctioned off, and pollution remains unchecked.

But that still happens anyways...?

[RA_Fisher]

I'm with ya, friend. For those curious to read more, I suggest the Mises Institute: https://www.mises.org/

[java_script]

Was curious indeed; did some googling. Libertarianism is hilarious: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Ludwig_von_Mises_Institute#Grea...

[WaxProlix]

I've seen quite a bit of mises institute being posted around here in brief, otherwise insubstantial comments. It's nice to have a single link to follow them up with, so that curious parties can get a view from other perspectives.

[hueving]

Most of those items are appeals to absurdity, lacking any particular rebuttals of the things they ridicule.

I think you will find that claiming something is obviously ridiculous to someone who actually needs convincing is one of the worst approaches possible.

[hueving]

>That is special kind of stupid.

Very thoughtful and well reasoned. Take that trash elsewhere.

[dang]

Please don't reply to a comment that breaks HN's guidelines by breaking the guidelines yourself. That only weakens them, and the community, further.

[hueving]

Good point. I'm getting so tired of the surge of emotion-driven responses since the election. The level of discourse is dropping down to a typical reddit-esque echo chamber. If we don't encourage people to think I think the tone of HN is going to change quickly.

[enraged_camel]

>>Shrink the state.

This simply means "get rid of the departments and programs I disagree with, while giving massive amounts of power to rich people and corporations."

[ycmbntrthrwaway]

> while giving massive amounts of power to rich people and corporations

Corporations have their power by means of the state.