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Comment by micahbright | Hacker News Reader

The entire argument here seems to hinge on the idea that government regulation makes it easier to show liability, thus making an industry safer.

I think this is totally off base. It assumes that safety innovation is only achieved via regulation, and cannot be achieved in any other way.

It never ceases to amaze me that people still think roads wouldn't be built without the government, or that they would be sub-par. People think that without government, the world would be in complete anarchy, when the only examples we have close to that show the opposite(http://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?a=80...).

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I don't disagree with you in principle, but in practice in the West, consumers don't prioritize safety in their purchasing decisions, but do a great deal of handwringing (and litigating) when unsafe outcomes occur, even if those negative outcomes are clear and obvious and a "rational actor" would make more careful purchases based on the evidence.

The author is making the claim that legislation can create pressure for producers to create safer products absent consumer demand. I think the car example is well-motivated. We may not like how things work here, maybe things work other ways in other places, but I think his evidence is pretty compelling.

I may be alone on this, but I assume that the de-prioritization of safety is a learned behavior. I don't check a town before I move to see if their water is potable (never lived in Michigan) because that's been a reliable guarantee for me. On the other hand, I have picked locations by the ISP because I know that getting stuck with Comcast is likely to cause me suffering.

Another example for me is roller coasters. In the US I trust implicitly in their safety. On the other hand, when I was recently presented to ride one of those handbrake car tracks down a mountain in southern China, I thought about the rickety bus I rode to get there, on horrendous streets with serious flooding problems, and I actually did consider the safety because I that I was in a place where it may not be automatic.

I think you have a problem with the road argument. Transportation has always been subsidised by a state. You can look at the roads of Rome or the ships of the East Indian Trading Company. "The State," can get a big ambiguous in some of these contexts, I will admit.

Still, your bus/train fairs usually play for 20% ~ 30% of cost in most cities. Tolls for roads offset their cost, not pay for them.

Markets don't exists without States either. The book Debt: The First 5,000 Years talks extensively about this and the great myth of the free market.

>People think that without government, the world would be in complete anarchy, when the only examples we have close to that show the opposite

A) The old west DID have a government. The US government wasn't exactly helpless out there.

B) If you want an example of an area without a government, the best example is Mogadishu between 1991-2006.

Towards the end of anarchy they had reliable and dirt cheap cell phone coverage, internet access and imported goods were often very cheap (no import taxes) and they had multiple, cheap competing airlines.

The roads were terrible though and you would often be charged for using them (between $3 and $300 depending upon your cargo). According to the BBC there were 7 checkpoints in the 50k stretch between the airport and the city.

Dire poverty and unemployment was the norm and the need for security dominated most people's lives. They largely relied upon remittances to survive.

While there was no national government with a monopoly on violence Somalis reverted to clan based quasi-legal structures to mediate disputes, which was ineffective at mediating disputes across clan boundaries.

The society demonstrated that anarcho-capitalism (or the closest viable approximation) wasn't entirely dysfunctional but it was clearly pretty awful. Life is much better there now. The roads are higher quality and don't have checkpoints any more. The need for security doesn't dominate people's lives. The economy is growing again.

"A) The old west DID have a government. The US government wasn't exactly helpless out there."

I'm going to leave this here, since you haven't read it:

http://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?a=80...

>you haven't read it

Which you assume because?

If you're referring to the wagon trains/land clubs/etc. this isn't really all that different to arbitration - which we have today.

A) The old west DID have a government. The US government wasn't exactly helpless out there.

"So-called land clubs were organizations established by settlers before the U.S. government even surveyed the land, let alone started to sell it or give it away."

before the U.S. government even surveyed the land

before the U.S. government

You don't read much do you?

How did the US even operate before the explosion of the regulatory bodies starting in the 1970's? Were there even any paved roads before the income tax?

Isn't your theory regarding roads directly contradicted by the history of the Interstate Highway System?

I have a hard time reconciling this opinion with the horror stories friends who grew up in Mogadishu (and subsequently fled to Minneapolis) tell me.

I'm not sure that the wild west examples given in that article scale well to large cities.

Somalia is bad. _Somaliland_ [0] has carved out a nice spot of land for itself. It's got plenty of problems, but it's not Mogadishu.

Most of the world functions just fine without government oversight.

Also, consider that in the absence of government, our lives (and cities) would be full of thousands of tiny corrections, back and forth, as people responded to the new information available to them.

Governments let problems build, and eventually spend a few years trying to deal with the problem, only to arrive at a good solution a few years after everyone else has arrived there. The problem is they cause massive harm in the process.

Reference:

- War on drugs

- Imperialism

- History of who was allowed to marry who

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

Somaliland has a government. It's the bits without government that have issues. Only someone who's lived their life in a place with semi effective government will think that without government things will function.

Couldn't you also say "someone who's only known living under government will not easily be able to imagine any alternative"?

I.E. that which is uncomfortable isn't necessarily wrong. It's just uncomfortable. If I have an idea that is wrong, it doesn't threaten you, if it's just an idea. It would be safe to evaluate it, consider it, try to understand what weakness in my thinking has led me to that conclusion.

I've never met anyone from somaliland. But, aforementioned friends from Mogadishu say that the situation is completely different there.

The crux of the issue in Mogadishu, as they describe it, is that many basic things which we rely upon in the US just don't exist. E.g. when something gets set on fire, it literally just burns to the ground because there's no fire department to come save yo shit.

My guess is that in the absence of government, large cities would be terrifying. I've not heard of a large city without government before though.

The "Somalia is a comparable form of anarchy" argument is even worse than the "roads would not have been built" argument the OP was dismissing. This hardly needs a rebuttal because it's based on a false pretense that the goal is some form of stateless 'anarchy' without rule of law/courts rather than a minimalist government, particularly in the economic sense.

The original comment literally presented "without government, the world would be in complete anarchy" as a false belief. If "without government" is a false pretense and the actual case being explored is "minimalist government" then maybe they should have said so, but it hardly seems fair to blame the responder for replying to what was written.

Those places have governments, just ones that, relative to the governments of advanced economies, are extremely small and barbaric.

If we define a government as a party with a localized monopoly on force, even an armed robber is a government.

And if one doesn't define government this broadly, that still doesn't invalidate the libertarian argument, since it hinges on opposition to the initiation of force (aggression), as opposed to initiation of strictly government force.

Anarchy is at least morally defensible. "Minimal government" yokes people under government, while taking away their self-determination. It replaces democracy with rule by a self-selected intellectual elite that decides what is and is not a proper function of "minimal government."

Which always seems to come down to "police to keep the poors in line" because they expect to be able to buy everything else.

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