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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

But think of how many more iPads your startup could have if only you didn't have to pay taxes. Sure, you'd have no roads to drive on and someone would just steal the iPads from you at gunpoint... but at least the government would be out of your business, leaving you with plenty of time to do God's work: creating a startup to share cat pictures with your coworkers.

(Sorry, this is how I view the HN collective when taxes come up. Cue reply from tptacek in 3.. 2.. 1..)

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I don't think the problem is HN's collective view on taxes per se. It's the general black and white nature that refuses to see reality in shades of grey, which in turn causes that. For a community that so frequently pats itself on the back for being intelligent, you rarely see a nuanced discussion of anything. Taxes aren't all good, so therefore they must be all bad. Ditto intellectual property, Microsoft, etc.

I wish there was a month here where everyone had to argue the opposite point. It'd at least be a blast.

Vacuous and self satisfied appeals to intelligent and nuanced analysis of this kind is something I wish I'd see less of in these discussions. Few libertarians are anarcho-capitalists; they want a state and thus have to accept some taxes. They just want them to be very low and, usually, to be able to enjoy other things that are perfectly reasonable to want to enjoy (pot/cheap foreign labour/excellent foreign labour/raw milk cheeses FDA does not permit/exotic medical treatments). Imagine a thousand square kilometres of California with a laissez faire system akin to that of Dubai. Hackers who want more money (or access to foreign talent, cheap foreign labour etc.) would move there. They would make it apparent that most of the taxes they used to pay, while perhaps used for good in a general utilitarian sense (a point I only concede for the sake of brevity), was not used for their good. Does wanting to move to such a place show a lack of nuance or intelligence on their part?

But... HN has nuanced discussions pretty frequently. Right now the top comments in this thread primarily serve to point out the blinkered view taken by the article. HNers love proving people wrong like nothing else, and until that stops being true I don't think this site will really succumb to groupthink. (I admit that groupthink seems like it's become much more common recently -- and, like you? I've particularly noticed it regarding IP/DRM -- but I still generally see the "minority opinion" surfacing when it's actually reasonable.)

All that said, I do think that HNers are way too quick to upvote comments that happen to support their previously-held beliefs even when those comments are extraordinarily lacking in nuance (see: the score on your post). But I don't think that's ever gonna change.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market_roads

Do you hear of lots of robberies in malls?

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