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by objetovoador
1263 days ago
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I never said we need to burn down government. That's a very large strawman you just argued. I'm saying that successful government is limited in nature. And that overgrown government usually not only fails to achieve its goals, it does more harm than were they absent. Look at the past 20 years of military intervention, for example. > Of course when you do that, you're usually just transferring power from an entity that the public has some limited control over, to an entity that the public has no control over. This isn't even remotely true. All if not most of our regulatory bodies & bureaucracies are beholden to lobbyists and special interests, so how exactly is that entrenched and unimpeachable corruption more accountable than private interests that are at least subject to competition? Say what you will, but the monopoly power of government is far greater than any private business in my opinion. One has a world-dominating military. |
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> any sufficiently powerful political organization will be corrupted and abused
> There is no force worse than corrupted political power
These are your words:
ANY powerful political organization will become corrupted. Every single one, every single time, no matter what.
Corrupted political power is THE WORST force in the universe. It is IMPOSSIBLE to IMAGINE a worse force than corrupted political power. Therefore it's worse than Boko Haram warbands roving around raping villages and forcing children to become their soldiers. That's awful, sure, but it's not as bad as BIG GOVERNMENT! This is a direct and obvious consequence of the words that you wrote; it is not a strawman. Unless you include Boko Haram as "corrupted political power", in which case everything that's bad is defined as corrupted political power and your actual statement is "bad things are bad".
This is a favorite of libertarians. They'll say things like "Truly wise and smart and good-looking people all know that Thing X obviously always definitely happens as a result of Thing Y. Therefore I shouldn't have to pay taxes." Then they vaguely hand-wave at cherry-picked pseudo-evidence like "the last 20 years of military intervention", relying on the reader's brain to conjure up a couple of salient instances like Iraq and Afghanistan and ignoring everything else that's happened in the entire world and outside of their cherry-picked window (Kuwait would like a word about whether U.S. military intervention is always bad).
> That's a very large strawman you just argued
I'm arguing against generic libertarianism, because the hallmark of generic libertarianism is the extreme absolutist statements exactly like the ones you made. If you'd like me to argue against a more nuanced point, you should make that point instead.
> All if not most of our regulatory bodies & bureaucracies are beholden to lobbyists and special interests
This is such a lazy take. There is an enormous number of different government agencies in the U.S. and in the world, and they all have their own, different issues, to different degrees. The world is complicated. Advocating the dissolution of regulatory agencies because "I'm sure they're all corrupt; I mean, just look at 'em!" is lazy and reactionary. It's like saying "All politicians are liars". You're helping the agencies that are most corrupted by lumping them in with the ones that are actually doing a good job. Again: the dissolution of these agencies is the desired outcome of extreme corruption, not the solution to it.
Stop being such a lazy thinker. The world is complicated.