[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.