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Comment by sgift | Hacker News Reader

> My policy is 'Fuck Chesterton Fences'(FCF). I don't want to live in a world of rusting fences.

I remember that policy from the time of rampant privatization here in Europe. "Why should the government provide this service .." - well, a few years later we knew why.

It's also quite often the mentality of people that say "you know what? Our software sucks and the architecture is stupid, I will build a new, far better one!" ... yeah, that usually doesn't work either.

I saw a comment the other day which sums the problem with that attitude up quite nicely (paraphrased, cannot find it right now): "Without inside knowledge it's hard to distinguish stupidity from good engineering"

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> I remember that policy from the time of rampant privatization here in Europe. "Why should the government provide this service .." - well, a few years later we knew why.

Going roughly by what I assume to be the GP's logic then, there should be a minefield surrounding discussions of having the government provide public services at all, since, naturally, that will lead to Soviet-style communism and the deaths of tens of millions.

I'd also be wary of ascribing to large-scale political sentiment (not even shared by all) the kind of purpose and wisdom involved in engineering decisions.

As you quoted "Without inside knowledge it's hard to distinguish stupidity from good engineering" - in this case, there is no inside knowledge.

That's not the argument at all, because there was nowhere in Europe where the government provided no services[0]. Chesterton's fence isn't an argument in favour of non-intervention or laissez-faire economics, it's an argument in favour of inertia. If anything, it implies that the Soviet bureaucracy should have been slowly and carefully dismantled, which isn't obviously wrong if you read accounts of what happened after the dissolution of the USSR.

[0] At least in theory. Failing to provide a promised service is not the same as deliberately providing no service. It might not even possible for a government worth the name to do literally nothing.

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