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Comment by openfuture | Hacker News Reader

When I talk about free software I make sure to mention the word 'infrastructure' because that's what it is. Just like roads or electricity it is a predicate for building a business (life) on top of.

Look at the biggest companies in the world (google, apple, facebook , amazon, microsoft ..) they own platforms i.e. infrastructure! but since these platforms aren't free you hear constant complaints from those who try to build a life on top of them (app store ranking not fair? Search not fair? OS/messenger/web browser/social network is walled garden? Etc.)

But even breathe the suggestion that taxes should support building reliable infrastructure (i.e. already existing free software projects) and you'll get a "government shouldn't interfere with functioning business" response.. no matter what structural risk that business carries for society and even though the "interfering" is just offering a viable alternative.

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I would be happy if taxes couldn't be used to pay for nonfree software. If all government servers and government office PCs and school computers had to run free software, there surely would be money to support its development.

FWIW, the goal of the still-working-to-fully-launch funding system Snowdrift.coop is to do the best we could on a voluntary basis in the absence of tax-funded free/libre/open work. Like all public goods, these things are the sort that make sense to fund through taxation, but getting political power to make that happen is even harder than a half-way effort to increase voluntary mutually-assured donations…

I'd love it if SD.C allowed users to contribute extra money each period that was banked as an endowment-like-fund and drawn on only to cover unexpected shortages.

They're doing neat things, and I'd love to see it up and running.

Government can not be "alternative" to private business, for the simple reason they are fundamentally unequal. Government can use coercion to achieve its goals, private business can not (unless, of course, they capture a part of government, thus producing the worst of both worlds). Government can force people to consume certain products and avoid consuming others. Government can use coercion to extract money to cover economically deficient strategies. Government is largely immune from the consequences of their mistakes, even disastrous ones - if a private business does a mistake that harms people, they can be fined, or even put out of business, but if a government agency does it, it usually ends up with somebody getting early retirement with full benefits, and that's it. There can be no fair competition if one of the competitors vastly overpowers the others and can destroy any of them on a whim. That's why government's activity is called "interfering", not "providing alternative" - because of fundamental inequality of positions and capabilities.

<eyeroll> Standard libertarian/ancap nonsense that confuses interference with regulation, and actively maintains a blindspot to the role of government in fundamentally supporting every single business within the economy by providing a monetary system, markets, legal systems, law enforcement systems, transportation systems, as well as a myriad of subsidies and direct loans.

Please don't go on about 'privately produced law' or how private roads will replace public roads. I used to be an ancap and looked into PPL quite deeply back in the 90s - the field has made little progress since then that I can see, and appears to serve mainly to assuage the conscious of ethical libertarians, providing flimsy-yet-vaguely-plausible reason that something will fill the void when their desired collapse of government occurs.

>"Government is largely immune from the consequences of their mistakes, even disastrous ones - if a private business does a mistake that harms people, they can be fined, or even put out of business, but if a government agency does it, it usually ends up with somebody getting early retirement with full benefits, and that's it."

Are you freaking kidding me? Private business doesn't make myriad of mistakes and keep on going, even being rewarded? Did you miss the 2008 financial scandal? BP managed to poison an entire vast ecosystem and shoreline populated by millions, they're still going strong. Have you ever heard of the term 'golden parachute'?

As someone who has always seen ancap stuff as a mix of bullshit and good intentions (and it's easy to correctly identify a flaw in the status quo while having only non- or counter-productive ideas about what to do instead), I'd like to know more from a former ancap…

Do you have any ELI5 about stuff like (A) whether there's anything interesting in ancap stuff or if it's just repeating the same simplistic dogma all the way down and (B) how to get ancap folks to recognize the validity of agnosticism (i.e. somehow get them to take the first step from blindly dogmatic to being able to express their ideology as interesting ideas they like but acknowledge that they can't actually know omnisciently that it aligns with reality…)

> <eyeroll> Standard libertarian/ancap nonsense that confuses interference with regulation

<eyeroll> standard statist nonsense which thinks by changing labels the essence of things changes. See how easy it is to argue a position when you think argument means finding a name to call your opponent?

> Please don't go on about 'privately produced law' or how private roads will replace public roads

Please don't attach your comment on discussion with voices in your head to mine. I never said anything about private law or roads.

> Private business doesn't make myriad of mistakes and keep on going, even being rewarded

Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don't. Government always do, that's the point. Excepting violent revolution, of course, but you don't want to go there, do you? That's the difference - business very well may escape the consequences of mistakes, just as murderer can escape justice. That happens and nobody would pretend otherwise. But for the government consequences are not even on the menu - like for an executor in state prison, there's not even a question whether he can be accused of murder - of course not. That's the whole difference.

> Have you ever heard of the term 'golden parachute'?

Yes, I did. And a private company can afford only finite number of those. Unless, of course, it is too big to fail - in which case, government comes in, which can force me, the taxpayer, provide the gold for those. I don't like private sharehodlers being fleeced, but what is even worse is when I'm being fleeced even without being a shareholder. And that's what the government does.

Roads and electricity are paid with taxes, they have nothing to do with being free.

We see how well they are kept in shape in countries where the money doesn't go to them.

I don't want electricity that only runs for a few hours in the day, or roads full with crates created by the weather almost unusable when there is a bit of heavy rain.

Who gets to pick which "reliable" infrastructure program wins the subsidy, and when I become that person how can I craft the definition of "reliable" so that taxpayer money gets sent over to my friends?

A common problem with government funded projects which neither health care or education is immune from. In some cases money goes to someones friend (corruption), and in other cases it goes to people that are sincerely trying to make society a better place. The problem is to minimize the corruption. Oversight programs are one way, certification is an other, and in cases like medical funding there are boards which rules on a case per case and are governed under ethic rules (ie, money can't be given to anyone that any person on the board has a personal relation with).

There is however no perfect way to do it, and neither political party would want to take a extreme side. The right do not wish to stop medical research funding (private pharma can't survive without the government supporting the industry) even if some will be wasted on incorrect definition of "reliable". The left would not want to stop oversight programs and just hope that everything will work. As such we get some form of middle ground.

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