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Comment by Kenji | Hacker News Reader

The solution is shrinking the state to the bare minimum and making as many transactions as possible voluntary.

Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. Those lead to black holes of sameness which we're keen to steer clear of here.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14453781 and marked it off-topic.

I love how you never do this with comments broadly advocating universal basic income, of which I have seen many. The bias is real. Look, I know, you're moderating for the site, but I also hope you're aware of what you're doing here. Dissenting opinion is an "ideological tangent", "black hole" and "not constructive".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13110004

I wish the Libertarians who post this solution ("shrink the state to the bare minimum") would ever actually show us where it's working in practice, to provide a decent quality of life for people.

In China, they're building mad infrastructure--big state. In Europe, they're providing a good quality of life--big state.

The "small state" places I can think of, none of them are places people are flocking to for an improved quality of life.

Why can't we see how well this idea works out in practice? Why does no one ever say "look at [minimal-state place X] and see how people are happy, thriving, and free"?

Let's be honest, there are not that many examples to choose from.

What I like about China is, it illustrates how effective a mostly benevolent dictatorship is. It is the optimal political system imho, provided it remains benevolent of course, which is no small feat.

Provided they don't trip and fall, if China is not the absolute supreme leader of the planet in 25 - 50 years I will be shocked.

I would hardly classify China as a "benevolent" dictatorship.

Yet neither is it suicidal (usually termed something like "murderous"), the other end of the dictator-polarity spectrum.

> Let's be honest, there are not that many examples to choose from.

Yes, I think that's the point. There are decent numbers of places where government has neither the ability or desire to regulate heavily. None of those places seem to have blossomed into oases of free enterprise and infrastructure construction.

This point is likely subject to the "correlation is causation" debate. All the countries doing well with big governments are also likely resource-rich and home to ancient empires and culture.

What countries have small states that you are referring to anyway? Zimbabwe? Burma? Equador? Places in the jungle? There are lots of other reasons these places might not be economic powerhouses. It takes a lot more time to trade coconuts through a deep jungle.

Just because it seems difficult now under a heavy antiquated state-controlled system, doesn't mean, say, something like a crypto-currency-backed decentralized world isn't possible. We very well could one day be paying taxes just to local governments, and many local governments compete for our citizenship through things like low taxes. Cut the 25% u pay in taxes that goes to military related expenses (because, say, china now becomes the world's "supreme leader" as someone else said), and now we are well on our way to a small-state government.

I hope we can fix these problems. Things are so inefficient. I'm excited to see how far decentralization can take us.

The ones I think of often have a government that either doesn't have the ability to regulate the things a libertarian thinks they should (libertarians aren't generally anarchist, and so their desired government would function to some extent) or the government does have the ability to regulate but uses it arbitrarily for corrupt interests (and so a startup company that does well enough will eventually be forced to comply with the government wishes).

If there is no well designed set of rules and corresponding righteous enforcement, I would not expect any oasis to arise. Without this, it is very easy for people with ill intentions to forcibly seize power and muck it up for everyone else.

I wouldn't go so far as to call it benevolent. Just because it's not Idi Amin or Pol Pot doesn't mean it's benevolent. In fact, there is a valid question as to whether any regime, anywhere is benevolent[1].

But rather than getting bogged down in quantifying the exact degree of its benevolence, it's key not to let your larger and more important point get lost alongside that red herring, and it's one that gets little press here: China and SE Asia have shown, over a period of decades, that heavy-handed state-guided development alongside market forces is a credible third alternative to the One True neoliberal agenda the West has pushed since the 1980s.

Japan and South Korea also "grew up" in a heavily state-sponsored manner and with closed private economies. Despite its visible lack of conformity to official American prescriptions about how to do things, the US tolerated it during the Cold War as part of the general bargain with those countries, in which they were allowed to develop as they saw fit and to have unrestricted and preferential access to America's bottomless consumer market. In return, they paid in unwavering anticommunist allegiance.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005GPSLHI/

> it's key not to let your larger and more important point get lost alongside that red herring, and it's one that gets little press here: China and SE Asia have shown, over a period of decades, that heavy-handed state-guided development alongside market forces is a credible third alternative to the One True neoliberal agenda the West has pushed since the 1980s.

Thank you for being a refreshing voice of reason.

I think China's "benevolence", if that's what it indeed is (only time will tell), may not look like it because they are working towards a longer term goal, and for reasons of prudence, sometimes you have to make unfortunate compromises (such as absolutely violating basic human rights of some of your citizens) to achieve goals in a timely manner (strike while the iron is hot).

This is just my theory, there's no way of knowing if it is correct.

I just got back from China and the rate of infrastructure expansion is amazing. I have a theory that since they are highly centrally planned they don't really have to worry about if infrastructure is "profitable" in the Western sense of the term. They want to build roads and high speed trains? Well the government entirely controls the banks and construction companies so they just make some money and give it to the construction company, no concern for short term profit.

It is amazing I'll grant, but it is useful? Are they building cities for nobody to live in, roads that nobody will travel, and bridges to nowhere? If so (which they have been accused of though I don't know the facts) it is wasted effort. All those workers could have stayed home to play go in the park and been just as productive without the environmental downsides of building infrastructure.

Note that building infrastructure "too far" in advance is wasted effort. You end up with infrastructure designed for yesterdays needs that needs updating when you need it. (ie houses with coax that cannot handle digital TV, not wired to internet.) You also lose any useful advances that might happen (brand new never used air conditioners that use so much energy you can buy a new one just on the energy savings over a couple years)

Use you need to plan and build for tomorrow. However do not do too much as you don't know what tomorrow will bring.

I believe China's leadership is very well aware of all of your concerns, and I think if you could get a closer look you'd see much of these concerns tend to eventually find a way of solving themselves as time goes on. These are not dumb people.

The dictionary defines benevolent as "well meaning and kindly."

And here are some counterexamples to the claim that the CCP is "well meaning and kindly" --

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1...

http://www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org/blog/chinese-gov...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/political-prisoners-chin...

http://www.news.com.au/world/asia/extreme-torture-inside-chi...

http://thediplomat.com/2017/03/chinas-urbancide-in-tibet/

https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/chinas-environmental-crisis

China's government is to "benevolence" as the Ministry of Love is to love. As far as "optimal political system" -- I'll simply disagree as we are all entitled to an opinion. However, the facts indicate that China is pretty much the opposite of "well meaning and kindly."

I lived there many years and love China -- but it certainly isn't because of the "benevolence" of the government.

The interesting thing is that nearly every one of the links I posted is blocked in China. I guess the government wouldn't want the people to find out just how "benevolent" they really are.

There's no doubt they rule with an iron fist. I think an argument can be made that they have benevolent long term intentions, but rightfully or wrongfully have decided that to achieve their long term vision it is prudent to crush anything that gets in their way, if necessary.

Ask yourself this: do you think things are getting better or worse as time goes on for the typical Chinese citizen, and to what degree? (And as a followup: what information sources are you using to form this conclusion?)

Things have gotten better for the typical Chinese citizen, but the bettering also corresponds to less government (in my admittedly foreign view). The death of Mao removed the problems of Mao's ineptness (famines, Cultural Revolution). The reforms of Deng Xiaoping led to foreign investment, which allowed knowledge transfer to Chinese firms. The transition to a market economy from State-controlled economy created factory jobs for the peasants (and mega-billionaires). People can now own (well, lease for 70 years) property. The loosening of travel restrictions caused allowed the now-wealthier citizens to experience the world.

The Chinese government has managed the country reasonably well, for a authoritarian government. However, I think the evidence shows that the less of the Chinese government authoritarianism there is, the better off the people are.

Galt Automotive have just announced a huge new factory in Somalia.

Not a libertarian, but Japan apparently has 16 private railway companies, most of which are profitable:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transport_in_Japan#Major_...

That is a fairly natural outcome of having unsubsidized car and air travel.

It's really hard to claim libertarians believe uniformly in some things (they're wildly across the board on pretty much every issue), but most libertarians I know would cringe and fight back on higher gas taxes and airport fees.

The US would count as a small state by most OECD averages, so assuming by quality of life you mean, 'high GDP and standards of living', Texas would be a fairly good counter-example of a successful small state. I don't think there are many people in the libertarian mainstream who would suggest shrinking government revenue to below ~15-20% of GDP (US average is currently ~27%, Gary Johnson only recommended a 3% reduction in his presidential run [0]), so if you're only interested in refuting the lunatic fringe, then you can probably stop reading now.

To answer your question more scientifically, a preponderance of the evidence does suggest that countries with smaller governments as a percent of GDP do experience higher growth in standard of living [1]. So if your goal is to maximize long term standards of living, you would tend to support a relatively smaller government than is common among rich countries today.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/10/no-not-... [1] https://taxfoundation.org/what-evidence-taxes-and-growth

Doesn't fit with studies I've read. E.g nordic countries had similar tax levels to the US but started increasing taxes substantially in the 1960s without experiencing any lower economic growth. In Europe as a whole nordic countries tend to have the highest taxes but best performing among most economic metrics, growth, uemployment, competiveness, innovation etc.

I suspect these studies are massively skewed by low tax asian countries which have had high growth due to the catchup effect, and very high savings rate. Also cultural peculiarities means e.g. Countried like Japan doesn't need as much welfare system. You already got lifelong employment and companies trying to keep employees in downturns.

By all means, do your own research -- I've personally had a hard time finding a strong body of evidence supporting the idea that high taxes (over ~25% of GDP) are supportive of economic growth (please share if you have something!).

If you're worried about sampling bias with respect to Asian countries specifically, here's a time series analysis supporting the same conclusions [0]. Another angle that you may find interesting is that low tax US states tend to outgrow high tax US states [1].

One other way to look at is expert opinion. You'll note that under the CBO dynamic scoring methods, they assume higher economic growth under low taxes -- this is controversial politically, but the majority of economic forecasters appear to use an inverse relationship between taxes and growth -- presumably this should be worth something. Also note that, although there is not a hard, climate-style consensus, there are substantially more professional economists who believe that taxes slow growth than not as it relates to the current US system [2].

A lot of people like to point to some anecdotal evidence of good results in Sweden, but then ignore poor results in Denmark -- I think broad based statistical evidence is needed for these sorts of things since many other factors, such as debt, immigration policy, trade policy, and so forth can easily confound your results. The key is to look at the same problem from a wide variety of angles and see if a conclusion starts to emerge given that some studies will point in one direction and some will point in others. If 90% of the research is saying one thing, 8% is saying there's no effect, and 2% is pointing the other direction, what should you believe?

[0] http://www.nber.org/papers/w13264 [1] http://www.laffercenter.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/2012-... [2] http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/laffer-curvehttp://www.igm...

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