[sjwalter]

I dunno, I mostly agree with you, but I think lately, at least with my family and friends, the coronavirus political response has made many more people much more skeptical about centralized authority figures.

The narrative that is commonly recounted is that it's obvious that the people in authority are either incredibly incompetent or crazily power-hungry, and both are leading many of my family and friends to question everything. I mean total normies who are otherwise just typical taxpayers.

It's funny in a Kafka kinda way to witness the slow erosion of trust in institutions.

Don't get me wrong, I love institutions. Just seems to me and basically everyone I know that the people who should know the most about how trust is built, do everything possible to kill off that trust.

[BoxOfRain]

It's interesting how the pandemic has changed people's political views in various directions. Personally I've become more anti-authoritarian, on the political compass I've moved a few points further down and slightly to the left (based on the UK Overton window) while also adopting stronger views on constitutionalism and the seperation of powers. I've also become a lot more pessimistic about the power of institutions to act for the common good rather than for the benefit of the socio-economic elite. I'm very much now "I'm more than happy to pay taxes for better social services, but please keep the clumsy, oafish hands of the state out of my personal life before it does any more damage".

I've heard of people going in completely the opposite direction, taking on overtly authoritarian and "might-makes-right" kind of views too. I think the pandemic really gave the moral authoritarians and curtain-twitchers of this world a great big stick to hit everyone else with, which to be honest scares me more than the pandemic itself did.

[QuarterReptile]

>I'm very much now "I'm more than happy to pay taxes for better social services, but please keep the clumsy, oafish hands of the state out of my personal life before it does any more damage".

This is very much a stance of "oafish hands for thee, but none for me." The same institutional mass of "oafish hands" that interferes in your personal life does the same to everyone engaging with social services. And while , in many cases, you can opt out of those social services at some expense to yourself, the market equivalents/alternatives will, over time, be weakened or killed the same way as you would see with any other deep-pocketed firm selling a product for below-market prices, at a loss, to smoke out smaller competitors.

I can't speak for the UK, but in the US this has brought us such dire consequences as bulldozing of poor neighborhoods for de-humanizing, car-dependent housing projects; the near-dissolution of the institution of marriage for lower classes; and a healthcare system where buyer and seller have become so thoroughly de-coupled as to disarm the pricing mechanism completely and make it impossible to pay real prices for services outside of collective bargaining arrangements.

[salawat]

>the market equivalents/alternatives will, over time, be weakened or killed the same way as you would see with any other deep-pocketed firm selling a product for below-market prices, at a loss, to smoke out smaller competitors.

What market equivalents are you talking about exactly? The examples you mentioned are hardly the results of "oafish hands".

Marriage? The free market has run amok with building an entire industry and "chic" around large elaborate marriage ceremonies, replete with gratuitous mark ups on relatively everyday services. As far as the institution goes, marriage in the colloquial sense is fine. Couples form and union all the time. Legally speaking, you may have a point, but I've always held the State being involved with marriage in anything more than a record keeping capacity, and acting as a neutral arbiter of inheritance, dissolution, or adoption/parental status quo setting is a terrible idea. As an example, the practice of not getting on paper married for the benefit of welfare or food stamp eligibility is one such example.

>Bulldozing of poor neighborhoods for car dependent housing projects

Welcome to real estate as investment, and the tendency of all idle capital to seek forms that facilitate rent extraction. The lack of "public transit" has more to do with the fact that nobody wants to be burdened with actually giving up a piece of their pie for it, but expects everyone else to. The only "oafish hands" there are the councils who are continually courted by moneyed interests in the free market.

>Healthcare

Welcome to insurance in a nutshell. It completely destroys any semblance of coupling between producer and consumer of service; but is also the inevitable out one of a "captive" consumer population. The combination of service provider cartelry, consolidation of insurers, and perverse incentives created by the free market in terms of businesses becoming targets for Investment funds; it's really the market you should be blaming there.

[lavabiopsy]

I'm just curious: What exactly is seen as being new or remarkable about the failure of some leaders during this pandemic? I share the frustration about these failures, but are your friends/family too young to know about other spectacular failures like Watergate, or Iran-Contra, or the Iraq War, etc? (I could go on)

Edit: I just realized my second question is somewhat US-centric so if you aren't from the US then I apologize, please disregard that comment.

[mwint]

In my circles, this is often the first time legislation (often not even that - often executive action, sometimes by unelected folks!) has had such an immediate, clear impact on people’s lives.

Many of my friends and family have had their closest interaction with the government be taxes & vehicle registration at the DMV - inconveniences, but not much more.

What you list are indeed spectacular failures, but they happened “over there” or “to other people”.

Suddenly, the government is telling _them_ they can’t buy something, they they have to wear a mask, they have to inject something in their body, they can’t go to a concert. Many in my circle have never felt the hand of government so directly.

That’s what’s new and remarkable for a lot of people.

[lavabiopsy]

That's really interesting, I feel like I've experienced the opposite, most people I know have had some kind of interaction with the "hand of government" in some way, if not themselves then second hand. At least in the US with our incarceration rates, statistically it's still more likely that any given person knows someone who is in prison than knowing someone who has died from COVID-19. And COVID-19 has killed a lot of people.

Also maybe you might want to help by explaining to them: it's not the government that was doing those things, it's the virus that was making it so they can’t buy something, they they have to wear a mask, they have to inject something in their body, they can’t go to a concert, etc. The government can only enforce the will of the people, which in this case happens to be fear of an unprecedented attack by a deadly virus. It's totally understandable that this type of global pandemic would be new and remarkable for a lot of people.

[xfhgjxcfgh]

>it's not the government that was doing those things, it's the virus that was making it so they can’t buy something, they they have to wear a mask, they have to inject something in their body, they can’t go to a concert, etc.

The difference between my government's response to the virus and the Swedish government's response was not determined by covid's preferences. Humans made these policies.

>The government can only enforce the will of the people...

The government is enforcing the will of the medical establishment. We didn't get polled on "6' vs 8' social distancing" or "should cloth masks be required or is a bandana acceptable?".

[lavabiopsy]

>Humans made these policies.

Yes, but my point is that those policies were only made in response to the virus. They were not made for no reason, and of course different groups of people will respond to the virus in different ways.

>The government is enforcing the will of the medical establishment.

I don't understand what the difference here is supposed to be, anyone who seeks medical care in that country could be considered part of the medical establishment, or at least considered as having some kind of investment in the will of that medical establishment.

>We didn't get polled on "6' vs 8' social distancing" or "should cloth masks be required or is a bandana acceptable?".

I'm also confused by this complaint, how often do questions like these show up on a ballot? Usually ballot measures are not this specific.

[QuarterReptile]

>the will of the people

There is no unified 'will of the people.' I would agree that, in many cases, governments were criminalizing behavior which communities had already curtailed, so to that extent they were following wills of many people. In this case, why not let those same people who chose the actions take the blame or appreciation for their actions, rather than saying it was government?

I've moved about a decent amount in Covid times (after community spread was a fact of life in all those places). While moving throughout places within particular Covid-rule jurisdictions and looking across spans of time, the people I encounter are far stronger predictors of e.g. mask-wearing behavior than recent executive orders. Communities that want to wear masks continued to do so when civil authorities said they weren't necessary and cases were low, and communities that wanted to never wear masks stuck to their plans even when civil authorities ordered masks (with barely enough begrudging, targeted compliance to continue about their days) and cases were spiking.

[lavabiopsy]

>There is no unified 'will of the people.'

I don't think this is a useful thing to say, it seems to suggest that a given group of people can't reach consensus, when this is not really the case.

>Communities that want to wear masks continued to do so [...] and communities that wanted to never wear masks stuck to their plans

In my opinion that illustrates why I think any kind of reactions to this are a bit odd. It's very hard to enforce a mask mandate in every possible area in a jurisdiction. So the strategy has to be done by tackling big targets (enforcing the mandates only in densely populated areas, empowering private businesses/organizations to kick people out who endanger other people's safety, stopping people from mass spreading misinformation on social media, etc).

What I've seen is that people who were discreetly throwing parties and were being cautious about the virus didn't have any problems. But it's still risky and they still face penalties if they get get caught, because of course once someone causes a super-spreader event and people end up in the hospital, then it can easily be traced back there, and that's where I'd expect those people to be held liable. So in that sense, yeah you could say they could take blame for their actions after the fact, but that doesn't really help much either if it caused a large number of other people to get sick. We could very directly trace that back to deliberate actions taken by someone knowing full well that it could harm others.

[allturtles]

That doesn't make any sense. There are so many government laws and regulations that affect our day-to-day lives, it would be impossible to list them all. You have to get a driver's license to drive a car and wear a seat belt while you're driving it, you can't drive if you've been drinking alcohol, you can't buy alcohol unless you're 21 and you can't do it between the hours of 12am and 8am or on Sundays, you must vaccinate your children before they reach school age, you must put your children in a car seat until age 7, you can't download that song you found for free on the internet, you can't run your own poker table at your house, you have to get a permit before you can make alterations to your house...

This is even ignoring the massive set of additional laws and regulations you have to comply with you if you own a business.

[TeMPOraL]

Yes, but these are all regulations already established. Most people were born into the world where they were already in place, and over their lifes to date, there were only altered in a minor way - a speed limit change here, a new mandatory vaccine there. Some classes of people, like business owners, may have experienced more pronounced regulatory churn - but it still feels mostly like tweaking stuff here and there.

COVID was the first in most people's experience when their government just went and upended their lives. Starting next week schools are closed. Two weeks from now, you can't go do anything other than work and shop. Stay away from other people or else. That includes babysitters. Oh, and your workplace is ordered to close indefinitely for now.

Whether justified or not, this is an entirely different category from the usual mucking around regulations at the edges, or playing cat and mouse game with white-collar fraudsters (which causes many, if not most, of the business-related law changes).

And sure, this is an emergency. But the point is, most people alive - at least in the West - never experienced a national-level emergency before.

[nonameiguess]

Are most people born since 2005 or something? All of the new government regulations I can think of that have impacted me personally that didn't exist when I was born (1980):

* Seat belt laws

* Can't smoke in bars and restaurants

* Can't smoke within 50 feet of a door

* Unaccompanied children at a park being considered neglect

* Illegal to use a mobile phone while driving

* Mandatory emissions checks to register a car

* Legal mandates for chicken pox vaccine

* Taking your shoes off and going through a body scanner to get on an airplane

* Time of day/time of week restrictions on alcohol sale (existed when I was born, but not where I lived, so new to me when I moved to Texas)

* Restrictions on how much sudafed you can buy

* Restrictions on filling out of state prescriptions forcing me to pick up and mail medication to my wife when she was traveling

* Real ID laws forcing me to make an appointment 9 months in advance and show up with what felt like 18 different types of proof I lived where I said I did in order to be able to vote

* The State of Texas apparently just passed a law saying my block of 6 townhomes now needs to keep minutes and retain paper records and send all communications to each other via registered mail even though we live 20 feet from each other

* I guess it's now illegal to get an abortion here?

Granted, none of these ever happened all at once in response to an emergency. I guess your friends are just lucky to have never lived in a place that experienced an emergency before this? Living through the LA riots wasn't all that pleasant, either. Anyone who has ever lived through a hurricane has not only been told they have to close their business, but they have to abandon their homes completely and leave the city without any guarantee they'll ever be able to return.

Sure, a national level emergency hasn't happened since the 1940s, and almost nobody alive today experienced that, but it is weird to see the divergence in response. As far as I know, shared sacrifice and repurposing of private goods to public purposes in the 1940s had the exact opposite effect. Especially since the measures were far more drastic. We didn't confiscate property and force Chinese Americans into internment camps this time around.

[tjfl]

Maybe it depends on age? For a lot of these activities it feels like it's always been that way (maybe not true if you're older?), so even if excessive you've had your whole life to get used to it. All of this covid stuff is new. I agree with mwint, don't have a home, not remodeling, no kids, and no business.

[techbio]

Public school has its influence. The asymmetrical power to focus large resources on ideological targets is a part of modern warfare that most high-school graduates are not going to grasp intuitively.

[techbio]

Oh sure, not relevant because government doesn't literally raise most of the children and there aren't really any government regulations in schools. /s

[fighterpilot]

Watergate and Iran-Contra are about malicious intent but what I see is a rise of institutional incompetence and ineffectiveness which is rather different.

Consider the mistakes of the WHO. Failure to recommend and even decrying early border closures, failure to declare a pandemic until months after evident global spread, and saying masks positively do not work and then dragging their feet for months on the question.

Contrast that to how the WHO reacted to the first SARS, and we can observe a significant deterioration in competence. I could be mistaken, but it doesn't seem that it's just that we are hearing more about incompetence or have short memories.

I can only speculate on the reasons for this. Political polarization leading to affiliation over competence in hiring decisions, more corruption due to cronyism, diversity over competence in hiring decisions, or overly risk-averse decision making due to fear of social media mobs, are candidate explanations.

[raxxorrax]

Honestly Watergate was a joke compared to stuff more recent administrations did.

[Lamad123]

Kafka's hallucinations make a lot of sense in today's world!!

[slownews45]

Right - but how does this generate support for more GOVT regulation ie, Trump and Biden appointees running things vs confidence in companies (like Apple).

My concern, the HN crowd is yelling for more govt regulation, but the average person actually thinks Apple, not the govt, makes reasonable tradeoffs (security, privacy, CASM etc) and might actually trust folks like apple or google MORE than if for example the govt set up an email service.

[foerbert]

There's a huge difference between government regulation of email services and a government email service. I doubt many people calling for the former would use the later.

[jackstraw14]

I think post-Trump it's tougher for anyone in the US to believe totally in the institutions that got us here, despite the different reasons on each side of the aisle.