[DictumExNihilo]

There is a group who have proposed a solution to this problem for decades:

Shrink the state.

Until people stop believing that any effort to do so will result in everyone literally dying in the street, the state will grow. Until people's first impulse towards someone doing something they don't like ceases to be "there ought to be a law", the state will grow. Until people stop demanding that laws must affect the entirety of the country instead of just their state, the state will grow.

What sort of government did we start with? "A republic, if you can keep it." according to Ben Franklin.

We didn't keep it.

Keep it small, keep it close, and recognize that there are limits to the problems a bureaucracy can solve. Be suspicious of all power. Be suspicious of all taxation. A massive government can, and does, wield incredible fortune like a weapon against the population.

Shrink the state until politicians are no longer worth buying and it barely matters who holds the reins. Trust your neighbor a lot more and your government a lot less.

Or do none of this, but don't ask why nobody told you this could happen. Because we did, and you laughed at us and told us we were juvenile, loathsome, heartless people.

[dang]

Please don't take threads here on generic ideological tangents. Those are predictable and therefore uninteresting by the standard we're trying for here.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13570278 and marked it off-topic.

[DictumExNihilo]

Call your ideological adversaries "fascists" and "brownshirts." Just fine by Dang. So much for "light touches." The mask slips, sir.

[kalkin]

Getting rid of social security or making our healthcare system even worse won't do anything to shrink the FBI. A stronger welfare state is compatible with considerably less out-of-control police than we have in the United States; witness anywhere in northern Europe.

If you don't want people to laugh at your principles, maybe don't immediately turn a conversation about the security state to an argument that you should pay less taxes.

[ChefDenominator]

For the life of me, I can't find any mention of social security, health care, or taxes in GP's comment.

[DickingAround]

Good, let's start with the FBI, CIA, NSA, and Military. But don't think for a second that any penny you give to the feds won't accidentally find it's way over there. Social security was originally intended to be separate. And yet now here we are, those funds being drained into the general coffers that go in large measure for war. We say it should be smaller overall because unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a way to separate the wheat from the chaff on this one. So unless you want this too-big-to-fail system to actually fail one day in a bad way, we just need to make it overall smaller.

[hueving]

>stronger welfare state is compatible with considerably less out-of-control police than we have in the United States; witness anywhere in northern Europe.

Or Cuba or Venezuela?

[BurningFrog]

Sweden actually has a much smaller state than the US.

Mostly because it's 10 million people vs 320 million for the US.

Letting the US states handle everything the federal government doesn't have to manage would leave all Americans in a much shrunken state, with just as generous social security, healthcare etc as now.

[losteric]

What about option C: none of the above.

I think it ultimately boils down to civic engagement, or lack thereof. Democracy is not a state of being, it is a system that requires perpetual participation to maintain.

Casting a vote every 4, 2, or even every year is not engagement. Participating in the primaries is minimum engagement.

Yet for the past 20 years American voter turnout for Presidential elections has held steady at roughly 50%. Dismal. The primary participation numbers are much worse.

America struggles with a massive burden of "civic debt" - disengaged citizens that are not actively participating in the democratic system. People that don't read current events, don't follow the news, don't talk to their representatives, and ultimately embody the polar opposite of an "informed electorate"... these people contribute taxes and tacitly grant the system power, but they do not hold it accountable for improving their lives.

When people engage, our representatives are held accountable for delivering results in accordance with our values. Perhaps some inefficiency is acceptable, perhaps not... but the decision lies with those that engage in the system. It's up to the people to drive change.

---

That said, I agree there are merits to reducing the levels of government to their minimum responsibilities, but I just don't believe that fewer levels of governance helps with the issue of uninformed electorate. A Republic is just as vulnerable to apathy as any other form of governance.

[DickingAround]

I don't think we can ever expect that level of engagement. People don't engage because the ROI just isn't there. When America first became independent it was a much smaller body; their votes and conversations mattered. I did some calcs once and it would have been like voting along with 4 sq miles of Chicago. Now, voting with tens or hundreds of millions of others, there's just no incentive to be involved. It might be a democracy in name, but none of what it does has anything to do with my vote.

[awfgylbcxhrey]

I'm fine with the government as large as it currently is, I just want more of the stuff I like (infrastructure development, education, regulation enforcement, healthcare) and less of what I don't (overzealous law enforcement and military action, banks of federal lawyers creating fourth branches of government).

[DickingAround]

I'm afraid that isn't one of our choices. Everyone seems to have different view of what is 'right'. So unless you want to be bulldozed when your view doesn't happen to be a majority.. it's a choice really between small or big.

[anigbrowl]

Oh come on, that's a BS argument in the age of FB and Palantir. Get real instead of ignoring the fact of technology. I have radical ideas about governance but 'shrink the state' is about as sensible as 'force people to be good.'

[cookiecaper]

I'm not sure what FB and Palantir have to do with the size of the state. They're private companies. Yes, it's true that in light of new technology, "the state" or a reasonable facsimile thereof can wield a frightening amount of knowledge about not only your personal life, but the personal lives of all of your associates as well.

However, that's just more reason to aggressively ensure that free markets are functioning well, that state dependence is low, and that the government's functions are kept trim. The Founders left us a great system, but it needs adaptation that keeps its true principles enshrined and safeguarded in light of the unparalleled technological revolution that's occurred over the last +/- 180 years.

[pizza]

In some sense, the military is a state within a state - probably one of the only parts of government that follows a parallel legal system. But as it stands, it is still strongly coupled to our oligarchy. If the military - and police - were less of an instrument of the protection of political interests, and maybe more of an accelerator type program, even like YC, there could be a lot of benefit to society. The internet itself is an example of this, no?

Maybe there should be readings of the 2nd amendment more like "the ability to form militias/bear arms" ~ "the ability to create governments within government". Like less dystopic versions of burbclaves from Snow Crash, although that spells out some problems from the get-go, I guess.

edit: I mean, we could reconfigure the military to be a peace/engineer's/etc. corps type of merito/techno/plutocratic institution, by the people for the people, composed of ordinary people but with a true pledge for the protection of individuals' life and with an efficient structure for the innovation of ordinary life, outside of wasteful stockholder-politics/investor corporatism.

[krupan]

"Trust your neighbor a lot more and your government a lot less."

That is the salient piece of this message. If you don't trust your neighbors, why is putting them in powerful positions of government a good idea? If you do trust your neighbors, then we don't need a huge powerful government.

[CPLX]

> There is a group who have proposed a solution to this problem for decades: Shrink the state.

And what group is that exactly? It sure as hell isn't either of the two major US parties and their assorted enablers.

[zarriak]

Ron Paul has been arguing for this for his entire political career.

[llukas]

Shrink the state = let rich & corporations get loose.

You want to replace kind of power that you got influence on and some expectations about public information access with totally "private" power that you got no control about.

That is special kind of stupid.

Thank you but no thank you.

[ams6110]

The state is bigger than it's ever been. Meanwhile wealth inequality has risen to historic highs. How's that again?

[zanny]

This is somewhat where my politics have lead me.

The concentration of power, public or private, is the cause of evil and suffering in the world.

It can be micro, or macro. It could be a kidnapping victim, or someone stronger than you physically, or it could be corporate influence in legislature biasing the markets against competition, or it could be simple and just be a tyrant dictator demanding compliance in the behavior of the peasantry at threat of death, or the systemic enabling of international enslavement under globalization.

The answer is to shrink the state. There is no sustainable model where you have a top heavy powerful government and somehow preserve liberty. You made the state too strong, and that power will attract the worst of humanity and invite endless efforts to usurp it for personal lust of dominance. It will only be a matter of time until it happens, and it happens faster the larger the carrot.

But that is only an answer when you are also dissolving private power by correcting for millennia of violent power accumulation. By families, corporations, individuals, dynasties, societies, ethnic groups. You cannot reach that libertarian / anarchist utopia without starting everyone off without any violence and without any disadvantage, or else your system has failed before it begins and you just forfeited the only power the poor have ever accumulated, no matter how paltry or flawed, in their vote.

Which then becomes self contradicting. You can never actually dissolve the state and equalize power, because to wield the capability to reset the world economy to equality and absolve the history of suffering behind all wealth accumulated, you must wield absolute power, which means you will always be absolutely corrupt. All roads to that chair are paved with falsehoods about greater goods and coincidental personal benefit by crushing your rivals and billions of human lives in collateral.

That is probably why politics is always cyclic. There is actually no answer for anyone seeking to eliminate the suffering and maximize the liberty, while there are infinite answers for those seeking to create suffering to maximize their own influence at the sacrifice of others.

In the end, power is evil, or at least always eventually leads to it. The more of it, the faster and worse it gets. But it is impossible to consistently dissolve power - it takes extraordinary circumstances and people to ever reverse the centralization and exploitation of power, because by its nature altering power requires having it. There is no mathematical method to guaranteeing liberty - it just requires the right people in the right place at the right time with a ton of luck to reverse the status quo of more centralization of power and more suffering as a consequence of it, in all its forms.

[strken]

It's not clear that making the state smaller makes it any less powerful, or any less able to protect the poor. You could replace all the existing welfare programs with a redistributive tax on capital, and still technically have shrunk the state if there were fewer regulations and fewer government employees afterwards.

One of the most important insights that YC and friends have given me is that a massive heavyweight isn't necessarily better than a small and nimble competitor.

[wyager]

> Shrink the state = let rich & corporations get loose.

Ah, of course, 40% of GDP is a necessary expenditure to keep Scrooge McDuck from taking over. A penny less and we'd all be lifelong indentured servants.

[DictumExNihilo]

> let rich & corporations get loose

This belief only causes the state to grow. It inflates politicians to the point where they are worth buying, so they are bought. They then make laws that hurt their competition and help their corporation. They make laws that make it extremely difficult to ever start a business to compete to begin with. So the corporations get bigger, and have more to buy the politicians with. And the scope of what the politicians control grows, so it costs more to buy them. So access to your government shrinks to the point where only the most wealthy have any real say in it.

And what does that look like? That looks like what we have. Congratulations for being a part of the problem through the unwarranted fear of your fellow man.

Because so many of you only want to see simple cause and effect, not the multitudinous unintended consequences that every law and regulation creates. You are controlled by your fears. If the state fails to do something, grow it. If it succeeds at anything, grow it.

This is all I will say on this subject. I have spilled a lifetime of digital ink over this, as have countless others, but to no avail. When the civil war comes because everyone finally decides that everyone else is the enemy, don't ask me for help. I'll be looking after myself and mine. I want with all my heart for that not to happen, but you're going to start wanting it with all your heads first.

[hueving]

>That is special kind of stupid.

Very thoughtful and well reasoned. Take that trash elsewhere.

[enraged_camel]

>>Shrink the state.

This simply means "get rid of the departments and programs I disagree with, while giving massive amounts of power to rich people and corporations."

[ycmbntrthrwaway]

> while giving massive amounts of power to rich people and corporations

Corporations have their power by means of the state.