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Comment by wvenable | Hacker News Reader

> "Competent bureaucracy" is essentially an oxymoron.

That's the belief that underpins your opinion but that is far from a fact. It's also a belief that tends to be self-fulfilling -- you get the government that you believe you should have.

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It's a belief based on historical data and personal experience. The "state" and it's blind followers have one of the highest death tolls attributable to it, that's an objective truth. It's fascinating that so many people are fine having their lives decided by others, under the illusion of "authority".

Let's bomb some more kids in the middle east for no reason, shall we?

It's belief based on a small dataset that doesn't represent all democratic governments that exist. If anything, your experience is probably based on significant outliers.

Slavery, Prohibition, Women being unable to vote, Gays being unable to marry; the list of inequities imposed on others due to democracy, and faith in the State to "do the right thing" is long. The aforementioned aren't small data sets, nor are they outliers. That's not even mentioning how many murders the State has contributed to (see: Germany and Russia for significant contributions, in the millions of murders) under the guise of "protecting it's people". (see: USA's actions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, etc.)

Slavery, murder, theft, are inequalities that humans do to each other which the state exists to prevent. This argument is a poor one. You can't simply pick and choose the negatives without balancing it against the positives.

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