3 ms·

> The government is largely the cause of the flaws in the existing system. The last thing we should do is expect the government to fix it. “The software develo

> The government is largely the cause of the flaws in the existing system. The last thing we should do is expect the government to fix it. “The software developers are largely the cause of the bugs in the existing software. The last thing we should do is expect the developers to fix it.” I mean, I do believe private businesses should be held responsible, but one way to make them do that is by regulating them through an agency with higher authority, which probably means government.

pdonis 9y ago
> The software developers are largely the cause of the bugs in the existing software. The last thing we should do is expect the developers to fix it. Flawed analogy. Software developers introduce bugs inadvertently, and they have both an incentive and the knowledge to fix them. (In cases where that is not true, bugs indeed do not get fixed, and we should not expect the developers to fix them. That is why open source software is important--so I can fix bugs in software I use that the developer can't or won't fix.) Government introduces bugs on purpose, to serve special interests, or out of ignorance, because government officials who make regulations are clueless about what they are regulating--but they don't get penalized for making clueless regulations and they don't get rewarded for fixing them. So government has neither an incentive nor the knowledge to fix bugs it introduces. (And the analogue to open source software in this case is libertarianism: if the government can't or won't fix bugs in regulations, it should not regulate in the first place.)