Comment by TeMPOraL
1 month ago
FWIW, laws aren't merely abstract tools of oppression, they're what binds groups larger than ~100 people into societies. And the true fabric laws are made of, is one of mutually-recursive belief, everyone's expectation that everyone else expects they're subject to them. Threaten that belief, the system stops working. The system stops working, everyone starves, or worse.
The way you're supposed to do that is by having laws that are actually reasonable and uniformly applied.
Having laws that tilt the playing field and then punishing anyone who admits the emperor has no clothes is just censorship. People still figure it out. Only then they get rewarded for knowing about it and not saying anything, which causes the corruption to spread instead of being opposed, until the rot reaches the foundation. And that's what causes "everyone starves, or worse."
> And that's what causes "everyone starves, or worse."
I disagree. What you've described is certainly bad for much of society, but it represents a change from full participatory democracy to narrower and ultimately aristocratic governance. Many nations moved away from aristocracy and embraced democracy, but the difference in failure mode between "good for the people" and "good for the nation" does nevertheless exist (even when you can avoid the other problem democracy has, that "good for the people" and "popular" are also sometimes different).
When nobody can even "get rewarded for knowing about it and not saying anything", then you get all the examples of groupthink failure. Usually even this is limited to lots of people, rather than everyone, starving, but given the human response to mass starvation is to leave the area, I think this should count as "everyone starves" even if it's not literally everyone.
When everyone knows the rules are optional, or when they think facts and opinions are indistinguishable, then things like speed limits, red lights, which side of the road you're supposed to be on, purchasing goods and services rather than stealing them, all these things become mere suggestions. This is found in anarchies, or a prelude to/consequence of a civil war. There can be colossal losses, large scale displacement of the population to avoid starvation, though I think it would be fair to categorise this as "everyone starves" even if not literally for the same reason as the previous case.
> it represents a change from full participatory democracy to narrower and ultimately aristocratic governance.
I don't think that's the relevant distinction. "Benevolent dictatorship" is still one of the most efficient forms of governance, if you actually have a benevolent dictator.
The real problem is perverse incentives. If you have a situation where 0.1% of people can get 100 times as many resources as the median person through some minimal-overhead transfer mechanism, that's maybe not ideal, but it's a lot better than the thing where 0.1% of people can get 100 times as many resources as the median person by imposing a 90% efficiency cost. In the first case you lost ~10% of your resources so someone else could have 100 times as much, but in the second case you lost >90% of your resources only so that someone else could have 10 times as much as they'd have had to begin with, because now the pie is only 1/10th as big.
But the latter is what happens when corruption is tolerated but not acknowledged, because then someone can't just come out and say "I'm taking this because I can get away with it and if you don't like it then change the law" and instead has to make fanciful excuses for inefficiently blocking off alternative paths in order to herd everyone through their toll booth, at which point they not only get away with it but destroy massive amounts of value in the process.