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Interestingly enough, my own small-l libertarianism has nothing to do with the innate properties of people. It's about how those properties come together into g

Interestingly enough, my own small-l libertarianism has nothing to do with the innate properties of people. It's about how those properties come together into groups. I have found, again and again, that when people organize into large groups and form systems of getting along it never works. The larger the group, the more complex the system, the longer the system has been in place, the worst the results are. I don't think there is any intervention, nature or nurture, that would change this. To feel otherwise, to me, would be to say that there is a perfect person. That seems more than a little scary. I find our defects, when working together, give us adaptability. Counter-intuitively, I believe that the properties most of us would desire in a population are probably reverse-correlated to growth and evolution. [insert long explanation about the value of variance across multiple dimensions here] Representative democracies are kind of a hack to this law. You try to pick somebody to represent you and make decisions, you split up powers among various competing branches of government, etc. What is happening in the west, though, is the idea of a "restart" is mostly gone. It's just the same guys wearing different hats that take turns ruling. But to me these are properties of how systems of people operate. The word "government" has little to do with it. The reason to fight as hard as possible for individual freedom has nothing to do with selfishness: the more freedom the individual retains, the less the stakes are, and the slower the process of system corruption becomes. My ultimate rejection would be a demonstration of a stable, creative, dynamic, adaptive, and productively chaotic society of non-trivial size that had been in existence for more than a century or so. Hate to set the bar that high. Need to think about that some more to see if I could make my position more logically approachable.

josephg 15y ago
I totally agree with your premise. I used to work at google, and every time I go back there / talk to my old friends it breaks my heart a little. That said, you've made two claims in your post: 1. All groups will get worse over time 2. Therefore, we should keep government as small as possible The refutation to the argument is that many other modern democracies have (proportionally) bigger governments than the US. These countries certainly get advantages from big governments (like social welfare, decent education systems, state sponsored medical attention, etc) but don't seem to pay much of a cost for it. As an Australian citizen, I will get paid a dole if I can't find work, all my important medical expenses are covered or heavily subsidised, our schools are decent everywhere, and so on. My taxes are a bit higher than yours, but not unreasonably so. I suspect the important difference might just be scale - Australia has just 20M people. Most European countries have similar sizes. Maybe if the US were lots of small countries instead it would work better? Its hard to tell...
- lukeschlather 15y ago
  >Maybe if the US were lots of small countries instead it would work better? Its hard to tell... I'd just like to point out that we don't have a proper social welfare system here in the US, so it doesn't make sense to say that it might work better if we were a smaller country. The US has to actually enact a European-style social welfare system before anyone can empirically claim that social welfare doesn't work in the US.
- DanielBMarkham 15y ago
  It's funny. I almost mentioned Google -- both as a good example and a bad one. Just compare and contrast the organization over time. From the systems standpoint, Google is great. People continue to think that if we just got the right people -- smart, college-educated, libertarians, whatever -- that systems wouldn't ossify. But until you've seen a group of brilliant people self-create themselves a living hell, and realize that each person was acting in a reasonable, intelligent fashion, it's tough to really grok that. We naturally want to assign blame. It prevents us from doing the meta thinking necessary. One of the reasons democracies work so well is that we can easily assign personal blame to a politician, then peacefully get rid of him and bring somebody else in. There's a tremendously useful social mechanism at work. I think there's a separate discussion about what you want government to do for you. I've gotten to the point where after listening to so many idealists on both the left and right I just gave up: whatever your social goals, that's fine. I just want an acknowledgement that you are aware of he trade-offs you are creating. I prefer lots of little, agile, self-optimizing systems. I think over time people could probably reach many of the social goals they have. But to do so you need to have the right tools. You'll never get from point A to point B trying to use a screwdriver as a hammer. As an example a lot of us can relate to, there are a lot of technology teams with a huge amount of personal freedom that have all sorts of benefits and create vast amounts of value. We got that way by millions of little failures from which we harvest some generic best practices that then we pick up, try, and adapt one bit at a time for that particular situation. But there are even more folks, hundreds of thousands of people, living a death march because they tried to create huge systems with lots of little rules and processes. These huge systems never spring forth fully-formed from the head of Zeus. When you really start looking at them, it's a story of incrementalism and tough trade-offs. Everybody has a little architecture astronaut inside of them. Maybe not a lot, but enough to cumulatively screw things up given enough scale and time. If anything, smart people are the worst at this. They can even understand my points and try as hard as they can not to do it -- and still do it. Hominids are funny creatures.
zdw 15y ago
The Greeks had it right - "democracy" to greeks was competent people drawing lots for the jobs to perform in government. No politics involved. You did your job right because it was your responsibility, and you'd hate to see the job done improperly. Randomness creates self enforcing systems, like the "I break it in half, then you pick" method of splitting a candy bar.
- telemachos 15y ago
  >> The Greeks had it right - "democracy" to greeks was competent people drawing lots for the jobs to perform in government. No politics involved. You did your job right because it was your responsibility, and you'd hate to see the job done improperly. First, there is no "the Greeks" here. You seem to be talking about ancient Athens. (Sorry if that's overly pedantic, but ancient Greece was not at all monolithic.) Second, parts of Athenian democracy involved lots, but by no means all of it. In particular, the ten annual generals were elected precisely because they were supposed to be experts. Third, there wasn't really any competency criterion for the positions held by lot. (This is one reason Plato disliked democracy so much - that theoretically unqualified people could speak in the assembly and hold office.) Fourth, the jobs of the people who were chosen by lot were mostly bureaucratic. As Wikipedia puts it "The powers of officials were precisely defined and their capacity for initiative limited. They administered rather than governed."[1] Finally, politics and petty personal infighting was a huge problem in ancient Athens (ostracism?[2]). The whole "You did your job right because it was your responsibility, and you'd hate to see the job done improperly." is nostalgia for a world that never was. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athenian_democracy#Selection_by_lot_.28Allotment.29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athenian_democracy#Selection_by... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostracism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostracism
grandalf 15y ago
Well, isn't power always corrupting? Consider the sex that would occur in a marriage where the wife has no skills or earning potential (so she must submit to the husband's will or become effectively homeless if he divorces her). Entrenched power in a group of >2 people works the same way. In the case of the US Government, most Americans don't seriously consider any other country of residence, so our leaders get away with all sorts of disgraceful acts. Without competition there will always be corruption. Due to a fluke of the geography and history of the US, it has been difficult for the central government to get all that strong. In the past it had to do things like build out cities over marsh land (New Orleans) or provide useful services (like the post office, railways). But now that it has a hold on power, our entitlement system is broken and most of the tax dollars flow to special interests (the military, oil industry, healthcare, finance). So I think your observation is true, but due to a more general principle... which is the innate brutality of all humans when granted power over others.
- jergason 15y ago
  I have zero evidence to support this hypothesis, but it seems like power corrupts most the people who seek it the most. Some people do better with power than others. Also, I am not sure what you are trying to say about sex in marriage. It sounds like you are trying to say that men are held back from mistreating spouses only because they can't get away with it. Is that true? I have witnessed first hand that that can happen, but it was in a very poor society. Do you think that is common in marriages in prosperous countries?
aamar 15y ago
> The larger the group, the more complex the system, the longer the system has been in place, the worst the results are. It seems to me that these are not monotonically true. If I have a handful of competent allies in the wilderness or in hostile territory, I'm better off. Language is a complex system and an infrastructure; more complex language has costs vs. an exceedingly simple language, but increased complexity is very frequently a big net positive. You might argue that size, age, and complexity of systems are correlated with poor results, but you can not use that to exclude the possibility that maximum results can be obtained by some large, complex (undiscovered) system. It's reasonable to argue that the direction some country should move in today is towards libertarianism; maybe that is the direction to a useful local maximum. But you're arguing for a very strong and simple heuristic that would allow you to dismiss without evaluation any large, complex system; that seems to me to be a critical error.
- vrotaru 15y ago
  > Language is a complex system and an infrastructure; Notoriously lacking a central authority. Small l, or Big L? Internet?

josephg 15y ago

I totally agree with your premise. I used to work at google, and every time I go back there / talk to my old friends it breaks my heart a little. That said, you've made two claims in your post: 1. All groups will get worse over time 2. Therefore, we should keep government as small as possible The refutation to the argument is that many other modern democracies have (proportionally) bigger governments than the US. These countries certainly get advantages from big governments (like social welfare, decent education systems, state sponsored medical attention, etc) but don't seem to pay much of a cost for it. As an Australian citizen, I will get paid a dole if I can't find work, all my important medical expenses are covered or heavily subsidised, our schools are decent everywhere, and so on. My taxes are a bit higher than yours, but not unreasonably so. I suspect the important difference might just be scale - Australia has just 20M people. Most European countries have similar sizes. Maybe if the US were lots of small countries instead it would work better? Its hard to tell...

lukeschlather 15y ago
>Maybe if the US were lots of small countries instead it would work better? Its hard to tell... I'd just like to point out that we don't have a proper social welfare system here in the US, so it doesn't make sense to say that it might work better if we were a smaller country. The US has to actually enact a European-style social welfare system before anyone can empirically claim that social welfare doesn't work in the US.
DanielBMarkham 15y ago
It's funny. I almost mentioned Google -- both as a good example and a bad one. Just compare and contrast the organization over time. From the systems standpoint, Google is great. People continue to think that if we just got the right people -- smart, college-educated, libertarians, whatever -- that systems wouldn't ossify. But until you've seen a group of brilliant people self-create themselves a living hell, and realize that each person was acting in a reasonable, intelligent fashion, it's tough to really grok that. We naturally want to assign blame. It prevents us from doing the meta thinking necessary. One of the reasons democracies work so well is that we can easily assign personal blame to a politician, then peacefully get rid of him and bring somebody else in. There's a tremendously useful social mechanism at work. I think there's a separate discussion about what you want government to do for you. I've gotten to the point where after listening to so many idealists on both the left and right I just gave up: whatever your social goals, that's fine. I just want an acknowledgement that you are aware of he trade-offs you are creating. I prefer lots of little, agile, self-optimizing systems. I think over time people could probably reach many of the social goals they have. But to do so you need to have the right tools. You'll never get from point A to point B trying to use a screwdriver as a hammer. As an example a lot of us can relate to, there are a lot of technology teams with a huge amount of personal freedom that have all sorts of benefits and create vast amounts of value. We got that way by millions of little failures from which we harvest some generic best practices that then we pick up, try, and adapt one bit at a time for that particular situation. But there are even more folks, hundreds of thousands of people, living a death march because they tried to create huge systems with lots of little rules and processes. These huge systems never spring forth fully-formed from the head of Zeus. When you really start looking at them, it's a story of incrementalism and tough trade-offs. Everybody has a little architecture astronaut inside of them. Maybe not a lot, but enough to cumulatively screw things up given enough scale and time. If anything, smart people are the worst at this. They can even understand my points and try as hard as they can not to do it -- and still do it. Hominids are funny creatures.

zdw 15y ago

The Greeks had it right - "democracy" to greeks was competent people drawing lots for the jobs to perform in government. No politics involved. You did your job right because it was your responsibility, and you'd hate to see the job done improperly. Randomness creates self enforcing systems, like the "I break it in half, then you pick" method of splitting a candy bar.

telemachos 15y ago
>> The Greeks had it right - "democracy" to greeks was competent people drawing lots for the jobs to perform in government. No politics involved. You did your job right because it was your responsibility, and you'd hate to see the job done improperly. First, there is no "the Greeks" here. You seem to be talking about ancient Athens. (Sorry if that's overly pedantic, but ancient Greece was not at all monolithic.) Second, parts of Athenian democracy involved lots, but by no means all of it. In particular, the ten annual generals were elected precisely because they were supposed to be experts. Third, there wasn't really any competency criterion for the positions held by lot. (This is one reason Plato disliked democracy so much - that theoretically unqualified people could speak in the assembly and hold office.) Fourth, the jobs of the people who were chosen by lot were mostly bureaucratic. As Wikipedia puts it "The powers of officials were precisely defined and their capacity for initiative limited. They administered rather than governed."[1] Finally, politics and petty personal infighting was a huge problem in ancient Athens (ostracism?[2]). The whole "You did your job right because it was your responsibility, and you'd hate to see the job done improperly." is nostalgia for a world that never was. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athenian_democracy#Selection_by_lot_.28Allotment.29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athenian_democracy#Selection_by... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostracism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostracism

grandalf 15y ago

Well, isn't power always corrupting? Consider the sex that would occur in a marriage where the wife has no skills or earning potential (so she must submit to the husband's will or become effectively homeless if he divorces her). Entrenched power in a group of >2 people works the same way. In the case of the US Government, most Americans don't seriously consider any other country of residence, so our leaders get away with all sorts of disgraceful acts. Without competition there will always be corruption. Due to a fluke of the geography and history of the US, it has been difficult for the central government to get all that strong. In the past it had to do things like build out cities over marsh land (New Orleans) or provide useful services (like the post office, railways). But now that it has a hold on power, our entitlement system is broken and most of the tax dollars flow to special interests (the military, oil industry, healthcare, finance). So I think your observation is true, but due to a more general principle... which is the innate brutality of all humans when granted power over others.

jergason 15y ago
I have zero evidence to support this hypothesis, but it seems like power corrupts most the people who seek it the most. Some people do better with power than others. Also, I am not sure what you are trying to say about sex in marriage. It sounds like you are trying to say that men are held back from mistreating spouses only because they can't get away with it. Is that true? I have witnessed first hand that that can happen, but it was in a very poor society. Do you think that is common in marriages in prosperous countries?

aamar 15y ago

> The larger the group, the more complex the system, the longer the system has been in place, the worst the results are. It seems to me that these are not monotonically true. If I have a handful of competent allies in the wilderness or in hostile territory, I'm better off. Language is a complex system and an infrastructure; more complex language has costs vs. an exceedingly simple language, but increased complexity is very frequently a big net positive. You might argue that size, age, and complexity of systems are correlated with poor results, but you can not use that to exclude the possibility that maximum results can be obtained by some large, complex (undiscovered) system. It's reasonable to argue that the direction some country should move in today is towards libertarianism; maybe that is the direction to a useful local maximum. But you're arguing for a very strong and simple heuristic that would allow you to dismiss without evaluation any large, complex system; that seems to me to be a critical error.

vrotaru 15y ago
> Language is a complex system and an infrastructure; Notoriously lacking a central authority. Small l, or Big L? Internet?