Comment by Guvante
2 days ago
Reductionist "if only the government didn't get involved" doesn't work unless you presume no government is beneficial (it is not since you just recreate all the bad parts of government anyway)
You can be critical of the policy of export controls and the meaning of them in modern day but saying it is a problem with the government in general is nonsensical.
The problem is not a presumption that government can't ever be good. The problem is that the team you personally think is "good" won't be in charge forever.
Everyone loves enabling broad government authority when people they like happen to be in charge.
Sooner or later, a government that is "bad" (for any possible definition of "bad" that you personally approve of) will someday be in charge. Then, suddenly, enabling all that broad government authority seems like not such a great idea.
Your analysis presumes that the government is controlled by a single group which hasn't historically been the case.
This weird hyper politicization is young in terms of the US.
And again you don't acknowledge that "government control" is too vague a metric to be useful.
The government has some form of control by virtue of existing so if you want to be critical of it you need to be more specific.
I don't think this hypocrisy is as common as you believe it to be. I think the current government is extraordinarily bad - I'm on record calling them fascists and murderers quite a lot - and nevertheless it must be allowed to have this authority. There's no better option.
> Reductionist "if only the government didn't get involved" doesn't work unless you presume no government is beneficial
One can believe a government shouldn't get involved in *some* things without subscribing to the belief that "no government is beneficial".
I agree and that was my criticism specifically.
Don't say "government involvement is bad" specify what exactly you mean.
>You can be critical of the policy of export controls and the meaning of them in modern day but saying it is a problem with the government in general is nonsensical.
Hardly non-sensical. You just have a different default.
Government has control by virtue of existing.
If you say government control is bad in general you are just saying there shouldn't be government.
This is impossible as the things the government does will happen it would just be under a different label.
That is all I meant by non-sensical, you need to be more specific to have a real point.
>This is impossible as the things the government does will happen it would just be under a different label.
Nope, we could just do 1/10th of the things "the government does".
Not all them are needed, and a lot of them are actively harmful.
You can reverse it. "If the government gets involved" doesn't work unless you presume government is beneficial (it is not since you just recreate all the bad parts of no government anyway).
> unless you presume government is beneficial
That's the constitutional bedrock of our societies. That doesn't mean it's always true but if you denounce that as a legitimate and achievable goal then you don't have a society anymore.
The alternative is worse. No government at all implies anarchy which is worse that all but the very worst governments, and from which IMO some form of government will emerge anyway.
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Is it? Don't know about other countries, but I am pretty sure the constitutional bedrock of the United States is to limit the federal government's ability to be malignant, even at the cost of some benefit. Whether that has been achieved is a separate question.
>That's the constitutional bedrock of our societies. That doesn't mean it's always true but if you denounce that as a legitimate and achievable goal then you don't have a society anymore.
Sure you do. You just don't have a society that looks like ours does. And that doesn't necessarily mean monarchy or fascism or chaos as the only alternative.
The society you do get, might still even have a government too! Thinking government is not beneficial doesn't mean you dispense altogether with one. It can mean you have very difference tolerance and guardrails for it, as opposed to when defaulting to "government is beneficial".
What's more "government is not beneficial" might not even mean "any and all government is not beneficial". It might mean government of the type that's the "constitutional bedrock of our societies", and the mockery they call "democratic rule" is not.
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The idea that government could _not_ be involved is nonsense. You simply don't perceive some government involvement as involvement because you take it for granted. The only question is where do you personally want to draw the line, and by what principles do we organise government involvement.
You probably don't want the government to stop being involved in securing your property or maintaining roads. None of the tech firms want the government to stop being involved in securing IP rights. Etc. etc. etc...