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Comment by aalleavitch | Hacker News Reader

Many of millennials' problems specifically stem from a lack of government regulation. They're locked into temp jobs and self-employment because they reached adulthood in a recession driven by financial deregulation. They face massive invasions of privacy and personal autonomy as a result of lacking sufficient regulations on the usage of their personal data. They face brutally unfair treatment at the hands of tech companies giving them temp work (like Uber and Instacart) without regulations on their treatment of workers (which, by the way, artificially inflate the jobs numbers: no one thinks uber driver is a career, it is a way to be able to eat). And now we face an end to an open internet (one of the few ways to reliably start a small business) because of a lack of FCC regulation.

Libertarians need to wrap their heads around the fact that sometimes regulations are deeply necessary.

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What the fuck are you talking about? Have you looked at the markets recently? What recession?

I’m a millennial and i don’t feel like I was affected by the recession in the slightest. No millennial is locked into self employment, unemployment is at like 4.5%, the job market is doing fantastic. All this doom and gloom and “poor me” is fucking ridiculous.

94% of the net job growth in the last decade has been "alternative" work (temp jobs, contractors, self-employed).

https://qz.com/851066/almost-all-the-10-million-jobs-created...

Wages are stagnant, so even with a booming stock market your average worker is seeing none of it:

https://hbr.org/2017/10/why-wages-arent-growing-in-america

Just because you're doing well does not mean anyone else is doing well. You are a sample size of one.

From this, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15993012, and many other uncivil/unsubstantive comments, it seems clear that you don't want to use the site as intended, so I've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned on HN, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

In the abstract, your opinion sounds reasonable, even righteous. Unfortunately, there's just too many actual, concrete examples of regulation locking vulnerable individuals out of markets, of property being unjustly seized/devalued, etc.

Calling out libertarians isn't constructive when they're simply reacting in their own way to wrong-sized government. They dont respond to corrupt, shitty leadership with muddled "at least they meant well" excuses.

But this is somehow the state of the discourse right now! It's laid out purely in extremes. People aren't even entertaining what ought to be the obvious conclusion given the data: there are good and bad regulations. The existence of bad regulations does not wipe out the existence of good regulations, and vice versa. Instead when I suggest that there are beneficial regulations we can put in place that would benefit a large portion of Americans, people get defensive about it! This doesn't preclude the notion that regulations can be done poorly, and that some regulations are even actively harmful. But when making arguments people rarely want to consider more than just the extreme positions.

Right, and there's truth in what you say - especially wrt extremism. Your argument brings to mind the argument that "capitalism isn't the problem, crony capitalism is". Like, if only powerful people wouldn't lie, cheat, steal and write the rules to apply differently for them.

I will concede that, on a limited basis, government - specifically in the regulatory (and law enforcement) capacity - can do some good.

I'm more pessimistic than you though and believe that the vast majority of new laws are not written for my benefit, and most of the time we - the society as a whole - would be better off without more rules. It's not about my trusting my fellow citizen more than the ruling class, my position is about my distrust of and opposition to busybodies and cronies.

If you believe - for whatever reasons - that laws are not written nor enforced for your benefit, then maybe libertarianism isn't the worst thing. And that's all I was driving at.

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