7 ms·

Actual translation: because of the behavior of U.S. government, E.U. government(s) will make it hard for E.U. citizens to trade with U.S. citizens. So normal p

Actual translation: because of the behavior of U.S. government, E.U. government(s) will make it hard for E.U. citizens to trade with U.S. citizens. So normal people get spied on and bullied by one government, then because of that their life is made even more complicated by some other government. Great outcome! When people will realize that the problem is always in the governments themselves as a concept, not in any particular issues? It's totally okay to be an atheist today, but we need just one extra little step to be anarchists and it's so, so, so complicated. While belief in a magical all-powerful and caring government is no different than a belief in deity.

rorrr2 13y ago
It deeply saddens me that a tiny tiny percentage of the population can really fuck up the lives of everyone - financially, socially, politically, religiously. The real problem is in how we set up the governments. We give to much power to a few people. What we really need to do is let people vote on individual issues. Want to go to war that will affect everyone and will cost trillions? Let's have a vote.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- w_t_payne 13y ago
  Our democratic systems are not really as democratic as they claim to be. Indeed, it could be argued that the democracy that we have is a thin veneer that hides the autocracy instead. Certainly, in the UK, the unelected civil service wields a huge amount of power, and whilst they do answer to elected officials, and do have to implement the policies of the ruling party, in reality they have a huge amount of freedom on those matters not explicitly laid out in policy, and can lobby ministers very effectively to get what they want. If a minister is weak, he will end up acting (unknowingly) as the de-facto press officer for the department. In any case, we end up electing representatives, not delegates. Our power to influence policy starts and stops at the ballot box (actually, we have rather more power than that through MP's letters & party policy groups - but for the sake of argument we will ignore these). Indeed, even in systems with impeccable democratic credentials, decisions end up being made by relatively small numbers of individuals; individuals that can be effectively lobbied, influenced or coerced into making decisions that are not in the best interests of the nation, or of the people. We need a technological solution that will help facilitate a general broadening of participation in the legislature. Universality is unrealistic, but open and broad participation is both achievable and realistic - Why should we limit government to a small fixed number of permanently employed elected representatives? Why not a larger, more flexible group of part-time specialists, each participating in only one or two issues?
  - embolism 13y ago
    Who other than Google could set such a thing up?
- _k 13y ago
  I understand what you're saying but letting people vote on individual issues isn't always good. Here's an example : I live in Belgium, a country where 3 million people are paying for 8 million others. Those 8 million include kids, people without a job and people in retirement or who got sick. And we should help them. But it also includes 1.3 million government employees (hundreds of thousands more than The Netherlands where they got 6 million more citizens), people who aren't really sick, people who aren't willing to work, people who retired at an age way below the average European retirement age. So they want the system to continue even though it's unsustainable. When asked, they aren't going to vote against a system they are taking advantage of.
  - csense 13y ago
    This is the fundamental problem with communist/socialist style systems where the government is supposed to take care of everyone: Productive work is no longer incentivized enough to support the society, and rollback is politically impossible, so they keep right on following an unsustainable course until there's a complete collapse. Unfortunately, people who are in favor of things like universal healthcare, minimum income, etc., fail to appreciate that good intentions don't always lead to good outcomes. (I'm speaking about typical HN readers who support these things who won't personally immediately be getting a piece of the pie.) As you say, the fact that people will vote for things that are in their self-interest at the expense of the society as a whole is a problem with democracy. In the US this has traditionally been avoided by a strong sense of patriotism / nationalism and an ideology of individual responsibility, but these barriers are eroding with cultural changes, increases in minorities with different values, a dysfunctional education system, and various economic disruptions.
  - cheald 13y ago
    To simplify: When 51% of the people discover that they can vote themselves the wealth of the other 49%, they will.
- asperous 13y ago
  Actually this is interesting because America's representative democracy was set up because taking votes on things such as war was too expensive and slow. But today we have the technology to take a nationwide vote within a day so it is within the realm of possibility.
- snitko 13y ago
  So why don't you skip the government and vote with your own money for the things you support? If enough of people buy the product, then the company makes profit and the product deserves to exist on the market. Be it protection, war or helping the poor. Your choice.
oellegaard 13y ago
This is more a implementation issue of democracy in some countries. Look at the Danish democracy, we have many parties and both currently and historically we rarely have one party governments. It is not uncommon that three or more parties are forming governments. This helps make sure that there is never one entity that decides or hides things from the public.
- thangalin 13y ago
  Duverger's law states that first-past-the-post electoral systems result in two-party governance. I am fairly certain Denmark uses either a double ballot majority system or proportional representation, which is why Danish democracy both excels and has multi-party governments.
  - csense 13y ago
    This is an incredibly interesting and thought-provoking hypothesis. The Wikipedia entry says that exceptions are due to regional differences. I've often wondered if the increased communication and travel between people in different regions as a result of technology (tech as old as trains/telegraph or as recent as email/Facebook) will lead to local cultural differences gradually disappearing as everyone mixes together into one population. Maybe this is going to make it harder for multiple parties to exist. Then again, AFAIK the US has usually had only two major parties for most of its history (with occasional replacement of one party by another...anyone remember the Whigs?)
justin66 13y ago
> When people will realize that the problem is always in the governments themselves as a concept, not in any particular issues? It's totally okay to be an atheist today, but we need just one extra little step to be anarchists and it's so, so, so complicated. While belief in a magical all-powerful and caring government is no different than a belief in deity. People "believe in" government not because they love it or think it is perfect, they do it because they believe the alternative is something like the Hobbsian state of nature. Given the way anarchists tend to describe an end goal that either looks like government by a different name (boring!) or something completely out of keeping with human nature, people won't "realize" what you want them to anytime soon. Or maybe they will! Write a good, convincing anarchist manifesto. When it doesn't convince anybody, talk yourself into believing it's humanity that is flawed, not your manifesto.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- waps 13y ago
  Of course what people don't really understand is that religion today is government of yesterday (give or take a millenium ... well probably give). Some religions, one in particular, still sees it that way.
  - csense 13y ago
    While it's true that religion generally had a lot more influence over politics and policy in the past (the recent past moreso than the present, and the distant past moreso than the recent past, at least in the USA), saying that "once upon a time, religion and government were one and the same" ranges between, at best, a gross oversimplification of complex sociopolitical circumstances, and at worst, a factually incorrect misrepresentation. Exactly where your statement falls on that scale depends on the exact places and times you're talking about. Disclaimer: Everything I know about medieval European history, I learned from Crusader Kings 2.
    - akiselev 13y ago
lukifer 13y ago
> When people will realize that the problem is always in the governments themselves Though I agree with your broader thrust, I'm deeply suspicious of any use of "never" or "always" in the context of complex systems. > While belief in a magical all-powerful and caring government is no different than a belief in deity. Belief, for better or worse, is a fundamental component of human social behavior. For instance, I challenge you to construct a monetary system that does not at least partially involve belief. (See also: http://www.meltingasphalt.com/religion-is-not-about-beliefs/ http://www.meltingasphalt.com/religion-is-not-about-beliefs/ ) Rather than tilting at the windmill of belief, I'd rather we started believing in better things: naturalism over spiritualism, human rights over state power, decentralized currencies over fiat currencies, etc.
consonants 13y ago
Government is the one institution that pays lip service to and can be influenced directly by the populace it's supposed to be accountable to. Obviously, in practice it serves the will of those already in power. As someone who doesn't want to jump ship from the system we have now to anarchy immediately, I believe that even more corrupt power structures would take governments place without first eradicating the existing power structures and influence of the accumulation of capital has on global society. To transition now, where the power and resources are in the hands of a slim margin of people, would usher in an era of neo-feudalism. Some would argue we are already at that point, so why destabilise the only organisation with power that exists, in theory, for the people?
asperous 13y ago
There is an in-between between no government and an all-powerful one: a government that solely exists to secure the rights of its citizens. "to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it,..." It is of my opinion that power corrupts, and that's why you shouldn't trade your rights away in return for a promise of fixing problems, but there is some disagreement on this point.
- rayiner 13y ago
  > a government that solely exists to secure the rights of its citizens. The problem with such governments is that they cannot be truly democratic, and I think that poses a moral problem. In instituting government, we ask the people, every person, to give up the most fundamental freedom of action they possess in the state of nature: the use of violence. In sacrificing freedom of action, the people should be able to vote themselves the sort of government they collectively want, not the kind of minimal government, protecting some arbitrary set of "rights," some philosopher king believes they should have. It should be noted that all of the talk of "limited government" among the founders was directed at the nature of the federal government, which was to exist in addition to state governments which were not limited.
  - asperous 13y ago
    We are not giving up the right to violence, the point of a government securing your rights is that someone else can't take them away (through violence or other means). It's true people can vote themselves into any government they wanted, but I wager that if you don't want a government running away with your rights, it's best to stick with a limited one. It's much easier to control smaller gonvernments than super governments. It's doubtful that any 1 individual state (save california or ny maybe) could've created prisim.
    - rayiner 13y ago
      > We are not giving up the right to violence, You are. You're agreeing to act "civilized" instead of all the other things you can do in the state of nature. Animals are not obligated to respect each others' "rights." We collectively give up our natural ability to do that, in the hopes that "civilization" is better for us than a free for all. I'm not arguing that bigger governments or smaller governments are better. I'm talking about the process by which we choose a government to govern us. My point is that a government that is small, where people can't vote to make it bigger, is immoral. If people collectively give up their natural ability to use violence on other people, they should get to collectively determine what system they want to put in place to replace the state of nature. Self determination, that's the most fundamental thing, and it's not worth compromising self determination to guarantee limited government.
atirip 13y ago
"because of the behavior of U.S. government, E.U. government(s) will make it hard for E.U. citizens to trade with U.S. citizens." Yes, thats correct - you should not trade with enemies, with somebody who is in war with you. US citizens have elected their government who had declared EU to be US enemy.
- oleganza 13y ago
  U.S. citizens did not freely elect that military machine and millions of suits around it. They only could vote for a person to extract taxes. All citizens are victims of their ruling mafia.
njr123 13y ago
> When people will realize that the problem is always in the governments themselves as a concept, not in any particular issues? Maybe because most people can see, that while governments are not perfect, they are a net benefit? I pay some sum of money into a pot, and in return someone comes and takes away my rubbish every week, and gets rid of it some correct way that I don't have to worry about (and that is incidentally also not the cheapest way). When I go to the shop to buy milk, I don't have to worry that its been watered down, or that its not really the same brand as on the label, because some authority has taken care of that for me already. There must be dozens of more examples of things that are beneficial for everyone, and are just never ever going to get accomplished any other way, apart from some central authority using money from a common fund.
wybo 13y ago
Free trade agreements bring more than just benefits. A nation/country is a bit like an ecosystem or a company, with its own interests, internal culture, customs, and market. Opening that market up to another country requires trust. If that trust is violated because one party is spying on the others internal negotiations, it makes sense to delay or cancel trade agreements. You would not want everything you say in boardmeetings to be immediately passed on to competing startups/companies... Also, trade-agreements do more than bring universal benefits. They also kill off companies due to increased competition. And given that Europe has quite different (labour) regulations, can even lead to unfair competition. So please stop that anarchist BS about governments being bad, and them ONLY making peoples lives more complicated. Yes I know there are bad governments, but please speak for yourself instead of generalizing. In Western-Europe most people are pretty happy with their governments, because - quess why - these governments do a pretty good job most of the time...

rorrr2 13y ago

It deeply saddens me that a tiny tiny percentage of the population can really fuck up the lives of everyone - financially, socially, politically, religiously. The real problem is in how we set up the governments. We give to much power to a few people. What we really need to do is let people vote on individual issues. Want to go to war that will affect everyone and will cost trillions? Let's have a vote.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
w_t_payne 13y ago
Our democratic systems are not really as democratic as they claim to be. Indeed, it could be argued that the democracy that we have is a thin veneer that hides the autocracy instead. Certainly, in the UK, the unelected civil service wields a huge amount of power, and whilst they do answer to elected officials, and do have to implement the policies of the ruling party, in reality they have a huge amount of freedom on those matters not explicitly laid out in policy, and can lobby ministers very effectively to get what they want. If a minister is weak, he will end up acting (unknowingly) as the de-facto press officer for the department. In any case, we end up electing representatives, not delegates. Our power to influence policy starts and stops at the ballot box (actually, we have rather more power than that through MP's letters & party policy groups - but for the sake of argument we will ignore these). Indeed, even in systems with impeccable democratic credentials, decisions end up being made by relatively small numbers of individuals; individuals that can be effectively lobbied, influenced or coerced into making decisions that are not in the best interests of the nation, or of the people. We need a technological solution that will help facilitate a general broadening of participation in the legislature. Universality is unrealistic, but open and broad participation is both achievable and realistic - Why should we limit government to a small fixed number of permanently employed elected representatives? Why not a larger, more flexible group of part-time specialists, each participating in only one or two issues?
- embolism 13y ago
  Who other than Google could set such a thing up?
_k 13y ago
I understand what you're saying but letting people vote on individual issues isn't always good. Here's an example : I live in Belgium, a country where 3 million people are paying for 8 million others. Those 8 million include kids, people without a job and people in retirement or who got sick. And we should help them. But it also includes 1.3 million government employees (hundreds of thousands more than The Netherlands where they got 6 million more citizens), people who aren't really sick, people who aren't willing to work, people who retired at an age way below the average European retirement age. So they want the system to continue even though it's unsustainable. When asked, they aren't going to vote against a system they are taking advantage of.
- csense 13y ago
  This is the fundamental problem with communist/socialist style systems where the government is supposed to take care of everyone: Productive work is no longer incentivized enough to support the society, and rollback is politically impossible, so they keep right on following an unsustainable course until there's a complete collapse. Unfortunately, people who are in favor of things like universal healthcare, minimum income, etc., fail to appreciate that good intentions don't always lead to good outcomes. (I'm speaking about typical HN readers who support these things who won't personally immediately be getting a piece of the pie.) As you say, the fact that people will vote for things that are in their self-interest at the expense of the society as a whole is a problem with democracy. In the US this has traditionally been avoided by a strong sense of patriotism / nationalism and an ideology of individual responsibility, but these barriers are eroding with cultural changes, increases in minorities with different values, a dysfunctional education system, and various economic disruptions.
- cheald 13y ago
  To simplify: When 51% of the people discover that they can vote themselves the wealth of the other 49%, they will.
asperous 13y ago
Actually this is interesting because America's representative democracy was set up because taking votes on things such as war was too expensive and slow. But today we have the technology to take a nationwide vote within a day so it is within the realm of possibility.
snitko 13y ago
So why don't you skip the government and vote with your own money for the things you support? If enough of people buy the product, then the company makes profit and the product deserves to exist on the market. Be it protection, war or helping the poor. Your choice.

oellegaard 13y ago

This is more a implementation issue of democracy in some countries. Look at the Danish democracy, we have many parties and both currently and historically we rarely have one party governments. It is not uncommon that three or more parties are forming governments. This helps make sure that there is never one entity that decides or hides things from the public.

thangalin 13y ago
Duverger's law states that first-past-the-post electoral systems result in two-party governance. I am fairly certain Denmark uses either a double ballot majority system or proportional representation, which is why Danish democracy both excels and has multi-party governments.
- csense 13y ago
  This is an incredibly interesting and thought-provoking hypothesis. The Wikipedia entry says that exceptions are due to regional differences. I've often wondered if the increased communication and travel between people in different regions as a result of technology (tech as old as trains/telegraph or as recent as email/Facebook) will lead to local cultural differences gradually disappearing as everyone mixes together into one population. Maybe this is going to make it harder for multiple parties to exist. Then again, AFAIK the US has usually had only two major parties for most of its history (with occasional replacement of one party by another...anyone remember the Whigs?)

justin66 13y ago

> When people will realize that the problem is always in the governments themselves as a concept, not in any particular issues? It's totally okay to be an atheist today, but we need just one extra little step to be anarchists and it's so, so, so complicated. While belief in a magical all-powerful and caring government is no different than a belief in deity. People "believe in" government not because they love it or think it is perfect, they do it because they believe the alternative is something like the Hobbsian state of nature. Given the way anarchists tend to describe an end goal that either looks like government by a different name (boring!) or something completely out of keeping with human nature, people won't "realize" what you want them to anytime soon. Or maybe they will! Write a good, convincing anarchist manifesto. When it doesn't convince anybody, talk yourself into believing it's humanity that is flawed, not your manifesto.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
waps 13y ago
Of course what people don't really understand is that religion today is government of yesterday (give or take a millenium ... well probably give). Some religions, one in particular, still sees it that way.
- csense 13y ago
  While it's true that religion generally had a lot more influence over politics and policy in the past (the recent past moreso than the present, and the distant past moreso than the recent past, at least in the USA), saying that "once upon a time, religion and government were one and the same" ranges between, at best, a gross oversimplification of complex sociopolitical circumstances, and at worst, a factually incorrect misrepresentation. Exactly where your statement falls on that scale depends on the exact places and times you're talking about. Disclaimer: Everything I know about medieval European history, I learned from Crusader Kings 2.
  - akiselev 13y ago

lukifer 13y ago

> When people will realize that the problem is always in the governments themselves Though I agree with your broader thrust, I'm deeply suspicious of any use of "never" or "always" in the context of complex systems. > While belief in a magical all-powerful and caring government is no different than a belief in deity. Belief, for better or worse, is a fundamental component of human social behavior. For instance, I challenge you to construct a monetary system that does not at least partially involve belief. (See also: http://www.meltingasphalt.com/religion-is-not-about-beliefs/ http://www.meltingasphalt.com/religion-is-not-about-beliefs/ ) Rather than tilting at the windmill of belief, I'd rather we started believing in better things: naturalism over spiritualism, human rights over state power, decentralized currencies over fiat currencies, etc.

consonants 13y ago

Government is the one institution that pays lip service to and can be influenced directly by the populace it's supposed to be accountable to. Obviously, in practice it serves the will of those already in power. As someone who doesn't want to jump ship from the system we have now to anarchy immediately, I believe that even more corrupt power structures would take governments place without first eradicating the existing power structures and influence of the accumulation of capital has on global society. To transition now, where the power and resources are in the hands of a slim margin of people, would usher in an era of neo-feudalism. Some would argue we are already at that point, so why destabilise the only organisation with power that exists, in theory, for the people?

asperous 13y ago

There is an in-between between no government and an all-powerful one: a government that solely exists to secure the rights of its citizens. "to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it,..." It is of my opinion that power corrupts, and that's why you shouldn't trade your rights away in return for a promise of fixing problems, but there is some disagreement on this point.

rayiner 13y ago
> a government that solely exists to secure the rights of its citizens. The problem with such governments is that they cannot be truly democratic, and I think that poses a moral problem. In instituting government, we ask the people, every person, to give up the most fundamental freedom of action they possess in the state of nature: the use of violence. In sacrificing freedom of action, the people should be able to vote themselves the sort of government they collectively want, not the kind of minimal government, protecting some arbitrary set of "rights," some philosopher king believes they should have. It should be noted that all of the talk of "limited government" among the founders was directed at the nature of the federal government, which was to exist in addition to state governments which were not limited.
- asperous 13y ago
  We are not giving up the right to violence, the point of a government securing your rights is that someone else can't take them away (through violence or other means). It's true people can vote themselves into any government they wanted, but I wager that if you don't want a government running away with your rights, it's best to stick with a limited one. It's much easier to control smaller gonvernments than super governments. It's doubtful that any 1 individual state (save california or ny maybe) could've created prisim.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    > We are not giving up the right to violence, You are. You're agreeing to act "civilized" instead of all the other things you can do in the state of nature. Animals are not obligated to respect each others' "rights." We collectively give up our natural ability to do that, in the hopes that "civilization" is better for us than a free for all. I'm not arguing that bigger governments or smaller governments are better. I'm talking about the process by which we choose a government to govern us. My point is that a government that is small, where people can't vote to make it bigger, is immoral. If people collectively give up their natural ability to use violence on other people, they should get to collectively determine what system they want to put in place to replace the state of nature. Self determination, that's the most fundamental thing, and it's not worth compromising self determination to guarantee limited government.

atirip 13y ago

"because of the behavior of U.S. government, E.U. government(s) will make it hard for E.U. citizens to trade with U.S. citizens." Yes, thats correct - you should not trade with enemies, with somebody who is in war with you. US citizens have elected their government who had declared EU to be US enemy.

oleganza 13y ago
U.S. citizens did not freely elect that military machine and millions of suits around it. They only could vote for a person to extract taxes. All citizens are victims of their ruling mafia.

njr123 13y ago

> When people will realize that the problem is always in the governments themselves as a concept, not in any particular issues? Maybe because most people can see, that while governments are not perfect, they are a net benefit? I pay some sum of money into a pot, and in return someone comes and takes away my rubbish every week, and gets rid of it some correct way that I don't have to worry about (and that is incidentally also not the cheapest way). When I go to the shop to buy milk, I don't have to worry that its been watered down, or that its not really the same brand as on the label, because some authority has taken care of that for me already. There must be dozens of more examples of things that are beneficial for everyone, and are just never ever going to get accomplished any other way, apart from some central authority using money from a common fund.

wybo 13y ago

Free trade agreements bring more than just benefits. A nation/country is a bit like an ecosystem or a company, with its own interests, internal culture, customs, and market. Opening that market up to another country requires trust. If that trust is violated because one party is spying on the others internal negotiations, it makes sense to delay or cancel trade agreements. You would not want everything you say in boardmeetings to be immediately passed on to competing startups/companies... Also, trade-agreements do more than bring universal benefits. They also kill off companies due to increased competition. And given that Europe has quite different (labour) regulations, can even lead to unfair competition. So please stop that anarchist BS about governments being bad, and them ONLY making peoples lives more complicated. Yes I know there are bad governments, but please speak for yourself instead of generalizing. In Western-Europe most people are pretty happy with their governments, because - quess why - these governments do a pretty good job most of the time...