"After all, no bank or bitcoin-emitter can be as public-minded as a government..." Ahem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_Zimbabwe http://en.wiki

"After all, no bank or bitcoin-emitter can be as public-minded as a government..." Ahem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_Zimbabwe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_Zimbabwe You can't slap a sticker saying "public-minded!" on a government, and expect it to therefore be public-minded, any more than you can slap an "environmentally friendly!" sticker on a coal power plant and expect it to stop polluting. "What kind of role, if any, should a government take in supervising a parent's choice of genes for their child? Could parents deliberately choose genes for schizophrenia? If enhancing a child's intelligence is expensive, should governments help ensure access, to prevent the emergence of a cognitive elite? You can propose various institutions to answer these policy questions—for example, that private charities should provide financial aid for intelligence enhancement—but the obvious next question is, "Will this institution be effective?" If we rely on product liability lawsuits to prevent corporations from building harmful nanotech, will that really work? I know someone whose answer to every one of these questions is "Liberal democracy!" That's it. That's his answer. If you ask the obvious question of "How well have liberal democracies performed, historically, on problems this tricky?" or "What if liberal democracy does something stupid?" then you're an autocrat, or libertopian, or otherwise a very very bad person. No one is allowed to question democracy. I once called this kind of thinking "the divine right of democracy". But it is more precise to say that "Democracy!" functioned for him as a semantic stopsign. If anyone had said to him "Turn it over to the Coca-Cola corporation!", he would have asked the obvious next questions: "Why? What will the Coca-Cola corporation do about it? Why should we trust them? Have they done well in the past on equally tricky problems?"" http://lesswrong.com/lw/it/semantic_stopsigns/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/it/semantic_stopsigns/