Hacker News Reader

Comment by rubberstamp | Hacker News Reader

Government should be an organization serves people rather than trying to control people and limit what people can say or do. If government try to do such things, sooner rather than later, government will create dissent with the people. Without a free society, we won't be able to be awesome. Government's job should be to ensure that everyone gets their basic human needs/rights such as good education, healthcare, maintain fair law and order etc. These acts will create good citizens who will to do greater good for all of humanity. Currently the situation is alarming in many countries including china, usa, north korea etc. I think Croatia is a good model as they have a great society as a result of good education system.

View on HN

>Government should be an organization serves people rather than trying to control people and limit what people can say or do.

What if 55% of the people want to control and limit what the other 45% do and say? It's never as easy as 'government should just do this' because a government needs to have power to fulfill its mandate. Any concentration of power can, and will be abused and there will be cycles of this occurring as the society around it grows more and less apathetic to abuse of power.

I didn't say government as in the democratic implementation we have now. Democratic or not, I meant that the function of the government should just be ensuring justice, promoting civility, ensuring health care, providing quality education for everyone. If the 55% in control doesn't want the other 45% to have those, then thats a problem with the society -that shows severe segregation.

We are not modernizing and improving laws to reflect changing times. Can give plenty of examples for that. Instead we are clinging to what forefathers thought was best at the time. We are in the best time to implement true democracy. Are the red and blue candidates your only choice? Is it so hard to implement a better way to field candidates based on merits/goods that you do for society rather than dirty politics? Too much change too soon will often not be well received. So things needs to be improved one by one. But I don't see that happening. All I see is government desperate to violate on the rights of people.

Hell, if you could build grandiose scale systems to snoop on people, it not that hard to build something that betters the living condition of people. Currently the government doesn't care. Too much energy(time, money, lives) are spent on waging meaningless wars. Now if that much energy were to be focused on advancement of society..

If the 55% in control doesn't want the other 45% to have those, then thats a problem with the society -that shows severe segregation.

No, it's a problem with the state. The state is not the society.

We are in the best time to implement true democracy.

No, we are not. No one knows what it even is.

Are the red and blue candidates your only choice?

That's a majoritarian consideration. Eliminating that for the U.S. is only one of many issues.

Is it so hard to implement a better way to field candidates based on merits/goods

Yes, it is extraordinarily hard. As a practical matter, any system based on electing representatives makes it impossible to ex ante anticipate the decision making that the representative will actually undertake in office. There is no guarantee that the elected agent will abide by the expectations that they have conveyed to the principal. Further, decision making in a system of collective action has profoundly different semantic considerations and rules from that of a contractual exchange.

(This topic has been well-studied under constitutional economics, voting theory, rational choice and political science. For starting points, see The Logic of Collective Action and The Calculus of Consent followed by Patterns of Democracy. For radical reappraisals, see Organization Theory (Kevin A. Carson) and Democracy: The God That Failed).

> any system based on electing representatives makes it impossible to ex ante anticipate the decision making that the representative will actually undertake in office.

If the candidates were those who have done many good for the society, then there is high probability that any of them will do comparatively well for the society than candidates chosen not based on their merits.

> true democracy -No one knows what it even is

are we even doing any debate on how to improve the situation? that would be a start.

> 55% in control doesn't want the other 45% to have those

those(healthcare and education atleast) are needs of everyone. I don't see why anyone would disagree with making those mandatory and free/accessible for everyone. If that is implemented, coming generations would be well civilized and well behaved as it eliminates many societal problems.

If you don't see why anyone would disagree with making state schooling a compulsory activity, then your understanding is far too narrow to engage in a discussion of this nature.

If that is implemented, coming generations would be well civilized and well behaved as it eliminates many societal problems.

Oh boy. Not even wrong.

See: Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich, Compulsory Miseducation by Paul Goodman, anything written by John Taylor Gatto, John Holt and A.S. Neill.

It's also trivially disprovable by mere observation.

I am all for making education accessible to anyone who needs it. Currently college is not affordable.

By education, I meant some better form of learning. Those books describe an actual problem that needs to be fixed. If the education system would teach people to think critically, analyze and identify the good and bad with something, then that is the ideal education. Once a person can think clear, it will almost always show in his actions.

I had a teacher, who taught us to think about the why's? We really struggled initially. But then it made me curious about many things, which I followed by reading up on it. Reading about many different things, be that stories, news, science, technology, culture gave me a view that is accommodating of other humans and their point of view. I am very fond of that teacher. Without her, I wouldn't be what I am today. I cannot tell the same about any other teacher in my life. Now that was education I received from her.

I tend to agree with you about the rest, but I'd say that a 55% who hates the 45% is a problem both in society and the state. It's not like they're mutually exclusive.

> a 55% who hates the 45%

You don't even need "hate". You only need 55% of the people to own houses, and the other 45% not to. The 55% will vote in the government that makes it easiest for immigrants to come in and push up those house prices, including rents. Just look at Australia/NZ and Canada wrt immigrants from particularly Asia: 55% of the people will sell citizenships to the detriment of the other 45%. Since 2008, the US has started doing the same, not out of people having "hate" but out of making money from their houses.

That's a majoritarian consideration. Eliminating that for the U.S. is only one of many issues.

You may have many issues, but you need to start fixing something. Better if what you start with is key to fix the rest. Unfortunately it's also the key for the people in power to stay in it, so it's the most difficult issue to fix.

Tyranny of the majority is still tyranny. There's NOTHING about the concept of democracy that requires majority-rule to be the way to run it. Majority rule is the stupidest and most dangerous way to do any democratic decision-making.

Better options include consensus, multi-stakeholder representation (like needing overall approval from many different groups within society for a decision), and score voting (See http://electology.org/ for more on practical voting systems).

>Better options include consensus, multi-stakeholder representation

this.. i give you a thousand points

Please don't do this (or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10871890 or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10871899) on HN. We're looking for thoughtful, substantive comments here. It's best to post fewer and make them more like that.

However you can work around consensus also by widespread manipulation, coercion, and torture.

And government will be irrelevant after the heat death of the universe. Of course any system can be subverted. That doesn't stop some implementations from being better than others.

>like needing overall approval from many different groups within society for a decision

I'm going to guess you've never been on a committee and needed something important done but very few people understand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law_of_trivialit...

I really appreciate people like you referencing citations to logical fallacies. It helps explain to me what to look for in illogical statements.

All of Chinese history, right up to their creation myths, is about controlling people and nature (mostly the rivers)[0]. What China is doing today is in line with their history step for step. It makes sense in a way. Those river valleys are incredible for making babies and with urbanization and the power afforded to a single person with technology, controlling 1.7 billion people is the only way to have a society. Not that I believe any of that crap though. Still, look at their history of dynasties and warlords and you'll see that the CCP is doing the same dance steps as always. Chinese government has never been about the rights of people, rather it has always been about keeping the warlords at bay and trying to keep those river valley people from killing each other in the famines that always come.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Chinese_history

Off topic: You know what Wiki is missing? More images. When I click on one of the ancient Chinese cultures you point out, I'd like to see photographs of excavations instead of just a blur of words and numbers.

Oh, that was the timeline. Click into one of the articles and you'll see more pics. Wikipedia inherits it's roots from the encyclopedias, where text was a lot cheaper on the printing costs than pictures. To some extent, the bandwidth for text is cheaper than .jpgs even still today.

Croatia had a civil war in very recent memory. That makes it hard to say long-term things about it.

It may have had that, but does it look like any other country that have had a civil war in recent history?. I came across it while I was looking up recently independent countries with good human development index.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com