14 ms·

A thousand times this. I find the ultra-libertarian stance that our community sometimes takes to be counter to what web applications have been about. Are we emp

by benwerd 15y ago

A thousand times this. I find the ultra-libertarian stance that our community sometimes takes to be counter to what web applications have been about. Are we empowering people or aren't we? Libraries are hugely important knowledge transfer hubs (and, as the MeFi commenter rightly says, community centers). Furthermore, selfishly, for us as builders, they're the only place a lot of people will ever come into contact with the stuff we make. They can't be allowed to die. The entire California library system was given $12m in state funds in 2008. It's now down to zero. How can we, as a community, help?

xenophanes 15y ago
The libertarian stance is not "there should be no libraries" but more like "if there is a genuine need for libraries, and value in having them (quite plausible), then Government funding is not the best approach to creating them or running them efficiently". Just because something is good doesn't mean the tax payers should pay for it. There are other options. If they are a great idea, why not persuade people to voluntarily pay for them? Or if they are providing value, why don't they make money? Perhaps they could provide some services for free and charge for others. Or profitably provide some services very cheaply.
- pavs 15y ago
  > ust because something is good doesn't mean the tax payers should pay for it. There are other options. if you remove 'good' with 'useful', and it seems to me that this is exactly what tax payers should pay for. There are tons of useless shit tax money is used for, libraries is not one of them.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
    - intended 15y ago
      Wasting? How is it a waste in your opinion? Edit: You are getting downvoted, so at least you should have a chance to explain your position.
  - xenophanes 15y ago
    You seem to have no idea what the libertarian position is. So I'll try to help: Just because something is super good and super useful -- and uncontroversially worthwhile -- like groceries, cars, delivery of packages, the production of beds, health care, retirement savings, and so on ... absolutely does not imply that the Government should be paying for it with tax money. Libertarians believe that Government is kind of like a really big bureaucratic company, except even less efficient and poorly managed in most respects, and instead of pitching investors (say) it sometimes just takes their money against their will. If something is important and we want it run well and efficiently, all the more reason to keep Government away from it. The reason to involve Government in something is when Government's unique talents and position are helpful. Most good things can be provided without Government and therefore should be provided without Government. Government has a more legitimate role to play when we need: 1) massive scale. our Government is big which is, in a few cases, an advantage 2) when we're dealing with law (courts) or force (police, military, CIA) because it's very tricky to let non-Government people do a lot in these areas
    - clintjhill 15y ago
      For things that are super good, super useful but not profitable nor predisposition for voluntary support how does a community get those things? Especially those within the community whom might not afford otherwise? And especially when the lack for them causes cascading affect to the whole of the community? Seems to me an outbreak of disease by the poor surely effects the whole and that we all would do well to pay a "tax" to prevent that?
      - xenophanes 15y ago
        If you're arguing my list of Government specialties was incomplete, I agree, and contagious disease control is a great example.
    - neilk 15y ago
      Government is also useful for things which have massive positive externalities. Education is the paradigmatic example. Libraries are also an example of a good where maintaining the "option to buy" is potentially more important than any service you consume. In other words, having a big pile of books in a building, available for close to no cost, enables us all to act more freely -- knowing we can get more information when we need it.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
- benwerd 15y ago
  Without wanting to get into a political debate (although I'm happy to do that off-site), I see this as baseline infrastructure: part of the solid platform underlying a healthy economy. I do see it as government's job to provide that.
  - xenophanes 15y ago
    If you want to discuss offsite, please join us at: http://groups.google.com/group/rational-politics-list?hl=en http://groups.google.com/group/rational-politics-list?hl=en
- urbanjunkie 15y ago
  > If they are a great idea, why not persuade people to voluntarily pay for them? Because, in this specific case, the people who most need libraries can often barely afford to pay for food and shelter. Libraries are such an obvious public good that I will never understand why they're not treated (both in the US and in the UK, and perhaps in other countries), as a basic and absolute necessity. [edited to add not which I left out in my rush to get my point across]
  - intended 15y ago
    Libraries are good for the majority of people who can't afford them. People who have the money to support them, don't need them. By the time there are enough sufferers, and discontented others who create an externality where libraries are useful, the solution for those who can afford it is personal protection. So as a result, libraries wont get funded.
  - xenophanes 15y ago
    I meant persuade people with money to pay for them. You value them. Why don't you pay something voluntarily? And a thousand other yous? Why doesn't Bill Gates throw some money at it if it's a super efficient use of resources? He will, and many other non-poor people will, if they are persuaded it's a better use of their resources than Greenpeace, Oxfam, malaria medicine for Africa, clean water for Africa, and so on. If such people can't be persuaded of this -- that it's an efficient use of resources -- then that's no time to send the tax man to take their money for this purpose and divert it away from the purposes they judge to be more important.
    - urbanjunkie 15y ago
      @xenophanes - see philwelch's response below, which sums up why there's is a need for an agency to do things in the long term interests of society that individual or corporate entities probably (hah - definitely) wouldn't.
    - justincormack 15y ago
      Historically that was how most of the libraries around where I live (London) were created, funded by Carnegie and Passmore Edwards and others.
- clintjhill 15y ago
  Police, Emergency and Fire departments are all "good" and "provide value" however they are not profitable. Nor do people run out to voluntarily pay for them. And there are a few cases where counties/municipalities created subscription like fees for these to the effect of somebody losing a house to a fire while the fire fighters stood to watch. This is the core of the problem with "no taxes" - principally it's good on paper. In reality it's more complicated than that.
  - skymt 15y ago
    Early fire departments were run by insurance companies to fight fires on their customers' properties. Those who couldn't afford insurance would be left to burn. http://www.london-fire.gov.uk/FireMarksAndPayments.asp http://www.london-fire.gov.uk/FireMarksAndPayments.asp
    - clintjhill 15y ago
      I didn't know about this and it's quite interesting. But I wonder why it no longer exists this way? Is there a reason why a "for-profit" discontinued a service like this? EDIT: Seems I found a clue .... "In 1862 insurance companies told the government that they were unwilling to be responsible for London’s fire protection as the cost of compensation was becoming too high. The government decided that the Metropolitan Board of Works would take control."
      - jberryman 15y ago
        It's also worth remembering that fires spread. If the house two doors down is on fire you better hope they and the house next door have insurance (and remembered to pay the bill this month).
        politician 15y ago
        You hit the nail on the head which naive interpretations of libertarian isolationism often miss -- unchecked problems spread viz fire, pollution, garbage, disease outbreaks, crime and poverty. As one's liver combats the effects of pollution in your bloodstream by filtering it, so, as a society, we have developed certain organs to combat the degrading effects of similar sorts of problems.
- philwelch 15y ago
  Actually, the libertarian stance is closer to "I have an inherent human right not to pay taxes that outweighs the public good of having things like libraries." There's some handwaving about voluntary charity, but if voluntary charity worked, no one would have invented public services to begin with, and the typical libertarian doesn't really care anyway.
  - xenophanes 15y ago
    I was trying to present the good side of libertarianism. The argument you present for libertarians is bad and borderline shameful (and, I think, not representative of the majority of libertarians. but certainly something some of them would say). But there much better arguments with similar conclusions. The main reason it's an awful position, in my view, is that it's premised on conflicts of interest and compromise -- some things outweigh others, and there are losers which must lose while having legitimate points. It views life as a mixed bag, with inevitable suffering and sacrifice and loss. This is not the position of, for example, Ayn Rand who argued in Virtue of Selfishness chapter 4 for a very different worldview in which there are no conflicts of interest among rational men. Your claim that if voluntary charity worked, no one would have invented public services in the first place is incorrect. If voluntary charity didn't work in the context in which Government was first invented, that absolutely doesn't imply that a more sophisticated version of voluntary charity could not work today in a rather different world.
    - philwelch 15y ago
      This is exactly the position of Ayn Rand, especially the part about not really caring if poor people get to have things like libraries or housing or food. To Ayn Rand, a "rational" homeless person would rather stave to death on the streets than accept the first crumb of unearned bread or a single night's sleep under an unearned roof. The only reason there's no conflict for Rand is because Rand doesn't recognize a legitimate interest in public goods, but only private goods gained through mutually beneficial transactions. To Rand, there's no rational interest in having a public library, so there is no rational conflict between the wealthy taxpayer and the impoverished library patron. Randroidism is one of the most brutal and shameful forms of libertarianism.
- afterburner 15y ago
  They provide the most service to those unable to afford help. Also, they mostly provide the intangible service of raising peoples' education. That's why they don't make money. People only go to college because they think they're screwed if they don't, but almost nothing else education related has that amount of leverage in the peoples' decision-making.
  - xenophanes 15y ago
    Fundamentally they don't make money because they don't charge, and also don't sit around trying to think of ways to make money (while still remaining true to their core values and purpose). I don't think we should assume it's an insoluble problem. Once one has an audience and does something useful, monetizing can often be tricky, but is often possible. Just as one example, what if libraries had some ads somewhere? Then they could be provided for free to poor people but also gain some revenue. (And you offer premium membership with no adds for a yearly fee.) If that would work (I don't know), then the question would become: should we charge people taxes so that poor people don't have to deal with ads at libraries? And I think the answer to that would be "no" -- if you want to help poor people see fewer ads you could pay money for that yourself without the tax system (e.g. the libraries could directly accept money and the more they get paid the fewer ads they show according to a formula).
    - DanBC 15y ago
      > Just as one example, what if libraries had some ads somewhere? Then they could be provided for free to poor people but also gain some revenue. Perhaps when people borrow a book they are only given the first four chapters; they have to promote the library to get access to the next three chapters; and they have to pay to get access to the last four chapters? I doubt freemium models will translate well to libraries.
      - xenophanes 15y ago
        Doubt all you want, but we shouldn't give up and declare it impossible without actually trying.
- Retric 15y ago
  "if there is a genuine need for ____, and value in having them (quite plausible), then Government funding is not the best approach to creating them or running them efficiently". The problem with that argument is there is Nothing that get's past it. People talk about creating wealth like it exists in a vacuum but without the knowledge and resources that comes from living in society You can't create such things. Bill gates would have been completely incapable of creating 99.99999% of his wealth if he had been born a mere 10,000 years ago. That's not to suggest society should the vast majority of your output but giving up 1/3 of your income to keep things running smoothly is in no way unfair. If you really think you would be better off fending for your self without tools or knowledge then feel free to get a lobotomy and move to an island somewhere otherwise you do owe society a great deal.
  - xenophanes 15y ago
    The "get rid of society" mentality of some libertarians/anarchists is one of the reasons I do not call myself a libertarian. However it's no reason to reject all libertarian or classical liberal type ideas. Just because society brings value, and Steve Jobs made his fortune in context, does not mean taxes should pay for all sorts of stuff or that it's necessary to either give up a third of my income or find for myself without tools or knowledge. That's a false dichotomy. It'd be possible to have a functional society, with knowledge and tools and so on, with a lot less being provided by taxes and more being provided by non-Government entities.
    - Retric 15y ago
      Yea, I don't mean to suggest that's the only choice, just that there is valid justification for society taxing someones output. In general terms government consists of 3 choices. What do we prohibit(1), promote(2), and how much do we forfeit(3). The libertarian view is to focus on minimize 1 and 2 with the assumption that it minimizes 3. But, as soon as you pick a sacred cow like defense and say this is governments job there is no clear limits, should we build 10,000 nukes? how about 100,000? In my view if you instead pick how many resources government has to work with and focus on maximizing benefit you naturally start to balance collage scholarships and attack subs. You also tend to avoid budget deficits because if you assume you only have a given budget to work with you don't do the I need do do all these things and taxes must be below _ so I guess we need to barrow a little bit more. Basically, stepping from what can the government do, to how well can the government afford to do X,Y and Z. Which fit's with the reality of diminishing returns while your 10th nuke is worth more than an extra math scholarship your 100,010th is not. As well as differing option on just how important various things are. PS: As to why 1/3, well at best I might get to keep 50% more money, but government is going to take something so it's just a classic compromise. Also, while it's probably not the top of the laughter curve it's closer to the top than 20% so lowering it is not going to provide more income for the government.
- ltiaf 15y ago
  I see the Libertarian stance essentially as a claim that people who are born into difficult circumstances deserve it wholly; and people who are born into good circumstances deserve it wholly. Thus, we see heavy support for this philosophy from people who are fortunate enough to be born into a class of people who haven't spent much of their lives figuring out where they'll get their next meal, how they'll travel to work or school, or where they'll sleep that night. We see support for this philosophy from people whose skills happen to mesh strongly with the skills that are rewarded by our economy at this point in history. Not everything that creates value makes money. In business we can often point to examples where excellent customer service increases the lifetime value of the customer, but if you attempted to charge the customer directly for that customer service, they'd revolt. Libraries have a similar function in that they create lifetime value for their customers, but because much of the value takes years to accumulate, many of the customers simply can't afford to pay it up-front. While your arguments are straight out of the Libertarian playbook, that's their great problem. You want an every man for himself anarchy, but many of us prefer a society in which many large, useful things are handled out of the box for a nominal fee; and those of us who support that find it quite annoying that you want to make our lives harder and call it freedom, that you want to take away protection against circumstance and call it liberty.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
  - skymt 15y ago
    Now you have a situation where a large part of the population is forced to pay a private middleman for the privilege of interacting with their government. That's not an improvement.
    - marshray 15y ago
      I'm not saying this is a good thing by any stretch, but clearly most people are paying middlemen already for "the privilege of interacting with their government". E.g., Intuit or private accountants just to pay their taxes, lawyers, and so on.
- rayiner 15y ago
  > Or if they are providing value, why don't they make money? This question is nonsensical in the context of economic theory.
ultimatewarrior 15y ago
In Compton, people could give two shits about a web app, but everyone knows that the library is down the street.
tptacek 15y ago
It's funny how you can look at one mostly-benign comment that just happens to bring up politics (and mostly as a tangent to the point it wants to make) and see how it drives the whole thread off the rails. Just eyeball the torrent of BS political posturing this set off. I'm not blaming the author or anything; it just seems like a miniaturized version of a problem that hurts the whole site.
- moultano 15y ago
  s/whole site/whole world/ For whatever reason, all politics is now identity politics. Less important than the effectiveness of a policy is whether that policy is threatening to the ideology that accompanies a person's group identity. It makes me wish we didn't have names for these things for people to rally around. If you replace "I'm a libertarian" with "I'm skeptical of government solutions without sufficient supporting evidence" notice how the lack of abstraction makes it impossible to avoid focusing on the issue at hand.
  - tptacek 15y ago
    I have learned to try not to let my politics get too much in the way of what I talk about here, enough so that I am routinely criticized for being a libertarian (heh) or even sometimes a security-state conservative. I'll every once in awhile throw a jab towards "libnerdtariasm", because while I do try to keep politics out of things as much as possible, I am still easily baited by nerd tropes.
    - benwerd 15y ago
      Yeah, this is what happened here. It's an issue that makes me angry and I said something I shouldn't have. Do I get an "I derailed a thread on Hacker News" t-shirt? Definitely something I'll try not to do again.
  - dgordon 15y ago
    "It makes me wish we didn't have names for these things for people to rally around. If you replace "I'm a libertarian" with "I'm skeptical of government solutions without sufficient supporting evidence" notice how the lack of abstraction makes it impossible to avoid focusing on the issue at hand." This is a good point. I'll keep it in mind for the future. On less civil sites, it also at least makes someone work to invoke a string of identity-politics nonsense like "LOL LIBERTARIAN MOAR LIKE STRAIGHT RICH WHITE MAN AMIRITE?"
jacoblyles 15y ago
I'm an ultra-libertarian because I'm fairly certain that giving more revenue to the CA general fund will result in more money given to pensions of 55-year old state employee retirees, and not useful public services like libraries. The large bureaucracies in this country (CA, NY, and national governments) are incredibly dysfunctional and captured by special interest.

by benwerd 15y ago

xenophanes 15y ago

The libertarian stance is not "there should be no libraries" but more like "if there is a genuine need for libraries, and value in having them (quite plausible), then Government funding is not the best approach to creating them or running them efficiently". Just because something is good doesn't mean the tax payers should pay for it. There are other options. If they are a great idea, why not persuade people to voluntarily pay for them? Or if they are providing value, why don't they make money? Perhaps they could provide some services for free and charge for others. Or profitably provide some services very cheaply.

pavs 15y ago
> ust because something is good doesn't mean the tax payers should pay for it. There are other options. if you remove 'good' with 'useful', and it seems to me that this is exactly what tax payers should pay for. There are tons of useless shit tax money is used for, libraries is not one of them.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
  - intended 15y ago
    Wasting? How is it a waste in your opinion? Edit: You are getting downvoted, so at least you should have a chance to explain your position.
- xenophanes 15y ago
  You seem to have no idea what the libertarian position is. So I'll try to help: Just because something is super good and super useful -- and uncontroversially worthwhile -- like groceries, cars, delivery of packages, the production of beds, health care, retirement savings, and so on ... absolutely does not imply that the Government should be paying for it with tax money. Libertarians believe that Government is kind of like a really big bureaucratic company, except even less efficient and poorly managed in most respects, and instead of pitching investors (say) it sometimes just takes their money against their will. If something is important and we want it run well and efficiently, all the more reason to keep Government away from it. The reason to involve Government in something is when Government's unique talents and position are helpful. Most good things can be provided without Government and therefore should be provided without Government. Government has a more legitimate role to play when we need: 1) massive scale. our Government is big which is, in a few cases, an advantage 2) when we're dealing with law (courts) or force (police, military, CIA) because it's very tricky to let non-Government people do a lot in these areas
  - clintjhill 15y ago
    For things that are super good, super useful but not profitable nor predisposition for voluntary support how does a community get those things? Especially those within the community whom might not afford otherwise? And especially when the lack for them causes cascading affect to the whole of the community? Seems to me an outbreak of disease by the poor surely effects the whole and that we all would do well to pay a "tax" to prevent that?
    - xenophanes 15y ago
      If you're arguing my list of Government specialties was incomplete, I agree, and contagious disease control is a great example.
  - neilk 15y ago
    Government is also useful for things which have massive positive externalities. Education is the paradigmatic example. Libraries are also an example of a good where maintaining the "option to buy" is potentially more important than any service you consume. In other words, having a big pile of books in a building, available for close to no cost, enables us all to act more freely -- knowing we can get more information when we need it.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
benwerd 15y ago
Without wanting to get into a political debate (although I'm happy to do that off-site), I see this as baseline infrastructure: part of the solid platform underlying a healthy economy. I do see it as government's job to provide that.
- xenophanes 15y ago
  If you want to discuss offsite, please join us at: http://groups.google.com/group/rational-politics-list?hl=en http://groups.google.com/group/rational-politics-list?hl=en
urbanjunkie 15y ago
> If they are a great idea, why not persuade people to voluntarily pay for them? Because, in this specific case, the people who most need libraries can often barely afford to pay for food and shelter. Libraries are such an obvious public good that I will never understand why they're not treated (both in the US and in the UK, and perhaps in other countries), as a basic and absolute necessity. [edited to add not which I left out in my rush to get my point across]
- intended 15y ago
  Libraries are good for the majority of people who can't afford them. People who have the money to support them, don't need them. By the time there are enough sufferers, and discontented others who create an externality where libraries are useful, the solution for those who can afford it is personal protection. So as a result, libraries wont get funded.
- xenophanes 15y ago
  I meant persuade people with money to pay for them. You value them. Why don't you pay something voluntarily? And a thousand other yous? Why doesn't Bill Gates throw some money at it if it's a super efficient use of resources? He will, and many other non-poor people will, if they are persuaded it's a better use of their resources than Greenpeace, Oxfam, malaria medicine for Africa, clean water for Africa, and so on. If such people can't be persuaded of this -- that it's an efficient use of resources -- then that's no time to send the tax man to take their money for this purpose and divert it away from the purposes they judge to be more important.
  - urbanjunkie 15y ago
    @xenophanes - see philwelch's response below, which sums up why there's is a need for an agency to do things in the long term interests of society that individual or corporate entities probably (hah - definitely) wouldn't.
  - justincormack 15y ago
    Historically that was how most of the libraries around where I live (London) were created, funded by Carnegie and Passmore Edwards and others.
clintjhill 15y ago
Police, Emergency and Fire departments are all "good" and "provide value" however they are not profitable. Nor do people run out to voluntarily pay for them. And there are a few cases where counties/municipalities created subscription like fees for these to the effect of somebody losing a house to a fire while the fire fighters stood to watch. This is the core of the problem with "no taxes" - principally it's good on paper. In reality it's more complicated than that.
- skymt 15y ago
  Early fire departments were run by insurance companies to fight fires on their customers' properties. Those who couldn't afford insurance would be left to burn. http://www.london-fire.gov.uk/FireMarksAndPayments.asp http://www.london-fire.gov.uk/FireMarksAndPayments.asp
  - clintjhill 15y ago
    I didn't know about this and it's quite interesting. But I wonder why it no longer exists this way? Is there a reason why a "for-profit" discontinued a service like this? EDIT: Seems I found a clue .... "In 1862 insurance companies told the government that they were unwilling to be responsible for London’s fire protection as the cost of compensation was becoming too high. The government decided that the Metropolitan Board of Works would take control."
    - jberryman 15y ago
      It's also worth remembering that fires spread. If the house two doors down is on fire you better hope they and the house next door have insurance (and remembered to pay the bill this month).
      - politician 15y ago
        You hit the nail on the head which naive interpretations of libertarian isolationism often miss -- unchecked problems spread viz fire, pollution, garbage, disease outbreaks, crime and poverty. As one's liver combats the effects of pollution in your bloodstream by filtering it, so, as a society, we have developed certain organs to combat the degrading effects of similar sorts of problems.
philwelch 15y ago
Actually, the libertarian stance is closer to "I have an inherent human right not to pay taxes that outweighs the public good of having things like libraries." There's some handwaving about voluntary charity, but if voluntary charity worked, no one would have invented public services to begin with, and the typical libertarian doesn't really care anyway.
- xenophanes 15y ago
  I was trying to present the good side of libertarianism. The argument you present for libertarians is bad and borderline shameful (and, I think, not representative of the majority of libertarians. but certainly something some of them would say). But there much better arguments with similar conclusions. The main reason it's an awful position, in my view, is that it's premised on conflicts of interest and compromise -- some things outweigh others, and there are losers which must lose while having legitimate points. It views life as a mixed bag, with inevitable suffering and sacrifice and loss. This is not the position of, for example, Ayn Rand who argued in Virtue of Selfishness chapter 4 for a very different worldview in which there are no conflicts of interest among rational men. Your claim that if voluntary charity worked, no one would have invented public services in the first place is incorrect. If voluntary charity didn't work in the context in which Government was first invented, that absolutely doesn't imply that a more sophisticated version of voluntary charity could not work today in a rather different world.
  - philwelch 15y ago
    This is exactly the position of Ayn Rand, especially the part about not really caring if poor people get to have things like libraries or housing or food. To Ayn Rand, a "rational" homeless person would rather stave to death on the streets than accept the first crumb of unearned bread or a single night's sleep under an unearned roof. The only reason there's no conflict for Rand is because Rand doesn't recognize a legitimate interest in public goods, but only private goods gained through mutually beneficial transactions. To Rand, there's no rational interest in having a public library, so there is no rational conflict between the wealthy taxpayer and the impoverished library patron. Randroidism is one of the most brutal and shameful forms of libertarianism.
afterburner 15y ago
They provide the most service to those unable to afford help. Also, they mostly provide the intangible service of raising peoples' education. That's why they don't make money. People only go to college because they think they're screwed if they don't, but almost nothing else education related has that amount of leverage in the peoples' decision-making.
- xenophanes 15y ago
  Fundamentally they don't make money because they don't charge, and also don't sit around trying to think of ways to make money (while still remaining true to their core values and purpose). I don't think we should assume it's an insoluble problem. Once one has an audience and does something useful, monetizing can often be tricky, but is often possible. Just as one example, what if libraries had some ads somewhere? Then they could be provided for free to poor people but also gain some revenue. (And you offer premium membership with no adds for a yearly fee.) If that would work (I don't know), then the question would become: should we charge people taxes so that poor people don't have to deal with ads at libraries? And I think the answer to that would be "no" -- if you want to help poor people see fewer ads you could pay money for that yourself without the tax system (e.g. the libraries could directly accept money and the more they get paid the fewer ads they show according to a formula).
  - DanBC 15y ago
    > Just as one example, what if libraries had some ads somewhere? Then they could be provided for free to poor people but also gain some revenue. Perhaps when people borrow a book they are only given the first four chapters; they have to promote the library to get access to the next three chapters; and they have to pay to get access to the last four chapters? I doubt freemium models will translate well to libraries.
    - xenophanes 15y ago
      Doubt all you want, but we shouldn't give up and declare it impossible without actually trying.
Retric 15y ago
"if there is a genuine need for ____, and value in having them (quite plausible), then Government funding is not the best approach to creating them or running them efficiently". The problem with that argument is there is Nothing that get's past it. People talk about creating wealth like it exists in a vacuum but without the knowledge and resources that comes from living in society You can't create such things. Bill gates would have been completely incapable of creating 99.99999% of his wealth if he had been born a mere 10,000 years ago. That's not to suggest society should the vast majority of your output but giving up 1/3 of your income to keep things running smoothly is in no way unfair. If you really think you would be better off fending for your self without tools or knowledge then feel free to get a lobotomy and move to an island somewhere otherwise you do owe society a great deal.
- xenophanes 15y ago
  The "get rid of society" mentality of some libertarians/anarchists is one of the reasons I do not call myself a libertarian. However it's no reason to reject all libertarian or classical liberal type ideas. Just because society brings value, and Steve Jobs made his fortune in context, does not mean taxes should pay for all sorts of stuff or that it's necessary to either give up a third of my income or find for myself without tools or knowledge. That's a false dichotomy. It'd be possible to have a functional society, with knowledge and tools and so on, with a lot less being provided by taxes and more being provided by non-Government entities.
  - Retric 15y ago
    Yea, I don't mean to suggest that's the only choice, just that there is valid justification for society taxing someones output. In general terms government consists of 3 choices. What do we prohibit(1), promote(2), and how much do we forfeit(3). The libertarian view is to focus on minimize 1 and 2 with the assumption that it minimizes 3. But, as soon as you pick a sacred cow like defense and say this is governments job there is no clear limits, should we build 10,000 nukes? how about 100,000? In my view if you instead pick how many resources government has to work with and focus on maximizing benefit you naturally start to balance collage scholarships and attack subs. You also tend to avoid budget deficits because if you assume you only have a given budget to work with you don't do the I need do do all these things and taxes must be below _ so I guess we need to barrow a little bit more. Basically, stepping from what can the government do, to how well can the government afford to do X,Y and Z. Which fit's with the reality of diminishing returns while your 10th nuke is worth more than an extra math scholarship your 100,010th is not. As well as differing option on just how important various things are. PS: As to why 1/3, well at best I might get to keep 50% more money, but government is going to take something so it's just a classic compromise. Also, while it's probably not the top of the laughter curve it's closer to the top than 20% so lowering it is not going to provide more income for the government.
ltiaf 15y ago
I see the Libertarian stance essentially as a claim that people who are born into difficult circumstances deserve it wholly; and people who are born into good circumstances deserve it wholly. Thus, we see heavy support for this philosophy from people who are fortunate enough to be born into a class of people who haven't spent much of their lives figuring out where they'll get their next meal, how they'll travel to work or school, or where they'll sleep that night. We see support for this philosophy from people whose skills happen to mesh strongly with the skills that are rewarded by our economy at this point in history. Not everything that creates value makes money. In business we can often point to examples where excellent customer service increases the lifetime value of the customer, but if you attempted to charge the customer directly for that customer service, they'd revolt. Libraries have a similar function in that they create lifetime value for their customers, but because much of the value takes years to accumulate, many of the customers simply can't afford to pay it up-front. While your arguments are straight out of the Libertarian playbook, that's their great problem. You want an every man for himself anarchy, but many of us prefer a society in which many large, useful things are handled out of the box for a nominal fee; and those of us who support that find it quite annoying that you want to make our lives harder and call it freedom, that you want to take away protection against circumstance and call it liberty.
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- skymt 15y ago
  Now you have a situation where a large part of the population is forced to pay a private middleman for the privilege of interacting with their government. That's not an improvement.
  - marshray 15y ago
    I'm not saying this is a good thing by any stretch, but clearly most people are paying middlemen already for "the privilege of interacting with their government". E.g., Intuit or private accountants just to pay their taxes, lawyers, and so on.
rayiner 15y ago
> Or if they are providing value, why don't they make money? This question is nonsensical in the context of economic theory.

ultimatewarrior 15y ago

In Compton, people could give two shits about a web app, but everyone knows that the library is down the street.

tptacek 15y ago

It's funny how you can look at one mostly-benign comment that just happens to bring up politics (and mostly as a tangent to the point it wants to make) and see how it drives the whole thread off the rails. Just eyeball the torrent of BS political posturing this set off. I'm not blaming the author or anything; it just seems like a miniaturized version of a problem that hurts the whole site.

moultano 15y ago
s/whole site/whole world/ For whatever reason, all politics is now identity politics. Less important than the effectiveness of a policy is whether that policy is threatening to the ideology that accompanies a person's group identity. It makes me wish we didn't have names for these things for people to rally around. If you replace "I'm a libertarian" with "I'm skeptical of government solutions without sufficient supporting evidence" notice how the lack of abstraction makes it impossible to avoid focusing on the issue at hand.
- tptacek 15y ago
  I have learned to try not to let my politics get too much in the way of what I talk about here, enough so that I am routinely criticized for being a libertarian (heh) or even sometimes a security-state conservative. I'll every once in awhile throw a jab towards "libnerdtariasm", because while I do try to keep politics out of things as much as possible, I am still easily baited by nerd tropes.
  - benwerd 15y ago
    Yeah, this is what happened here. It's an issue that makes me angry and I said something I shouldn't have. Do I get an "I derailed a thread on Hacker News" t-shirt? Definitely something I'll try not to do again.
- dgordon 15y ago
  "It makes me wish we didn't have names for these things for people to rally around. If you replace "I'm a libertarian" with "I'm skeptical of government solutions without sufficient supporting evidence" notice how the lack of abstraction makes it impossible to avoid focusing on the issue at hand." This is a good point. I'll keep it in mind for the future. On less civil sites, it also at least makes someone work to invoke a string of identity-politics nonsense like "LOL LIBERTARIAN MOAR LIKE STRAIGHT RICH WHITE MAN AMIRITE?"

jacoblyles 15y ago

I'm an ultra-libertarian because I'm fairly certain that giving more revenue to the CA general fund will result in more money given to pensions of 55-year old state employee retirees, and not useful public services like libraries. The large bureaucracies in this country (CA, NY, and national governments) are incredibly dysfunctional and captured by special interest.