There's an obvious contradiction: How do we (Hacker News readers at least) agree that this is crazy but society keeps doing craziness like "arresting a mom for letting her kids, 8 and 9, wait at the condo for an hour".
The rational part of the population is bigger than people often realize it's just that they don't yell as loudly.
Because HN isn't a statistically representative sample of society as a whole.
Because HN readers tend to be an extremely small subset of the general population. General population will happily vote for Trump, le Pen, Orban, Petry and other populists, which in my opinion is equally stupid with arresting parents for growing up their kids "range-free"...
More and more, I have the feeling that "Idiocracy" looks more and more like a documentation of now than a satire.
'Progressive' ideology places the State in greater and greater control over defining most aspects of life, and tends to turn to law and mandates more frequently than other ideological systems. This naturally drives the use of state mechanisms as a means of operation and resolution over non-legal communal resolution between individuals.