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Comment by alexryan | Hacker News Reader

This is where all corruption originates. One group seeks to use the state to impose their will on another group. The victimized group, in turn, seeks to defend itself by bribing the enforcers. Instead of capital flowing to those who are best able to convert it into the most happiness for the most people, it flows to those seeking to enrich themselves by pitting people against each other in order to extract ever larger bribes. The state grows ever more corrupt in this fashion. It might be wise to refrain from the impulse to use force long enough to consider alternative ways to remedy the perceived problem.

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> Instead of capital flowing to those who are best able to convert it into the most happiness for the most people

This isn’t the natural progression of free market capitalism though. The money will flow to those who are best able to use it to control the behavior of their customers spending. Making someone happy is just one way of controlling their spending, but there are many, many others.

That's an interesting point. Are there any examples of "alternatives ways of controlling the behavior of their customers spending" which do not result in the customer feeling motivated to withdraw from the relationship?

Addiction

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> capital flowing to those who are best able to convert it into the most happiness for the most people

Capital flows to those most able to make money, which isn't necessarily by "converting it into the most happiness." You can even see it in this space: Facebook is the dominant social network and wins by essentially getting people addicted to getting mild social affirmations from a slot machine. Studies have actually shown social network use makes people less happy.

Or, you know, government happens to be the best solution we have to certain types of coordination problems, some of which plague market economies.

But no, I'm sure literally everything government does that interacts with the market just creates corruption without sufficient benefit to outweigh any such harm, and it'd be better if we didn't do anything at all. Certainly it's easier to think about politics if we can permanently rule out an entire class of solutions this way, saving us from having to consider and weigh each per se. Bonus points if we can define "liberty" as "fewest things outlawed by government"—measuring that is way easier than trying to figure out the degrees of freedom of action available to ordinary people in practice.

Lots of quick hacks lead can lead to the accumulation of technical debt which can seriously impair the ability of the system to function. This can be even more problematic if the technical debt becomes a living entity intent on surviving and thriving whilst being dependent on an ever growing number of quick hacks as its only means of sustenance. ;)

It's a mistake to focus too much on one problem to the exclusion of all others. There are problems caused by government intervention but also problems caused by the lack of it.

What you call "imposing their will" might be called "balancing the scales" by others. In any organized society, government necessarily creates economic rules and incentives one way or the other, through action or inaction. The debate must be over which rules provide the proper incentives to maximize utility for the most number of people, not whether rules should be made at all.

Fair. "Balancing the scales" is a laudable goal. I merely wish to point out that suggested mechanism of balancing carries a significant downside and we might want to consider alternative means of achieving the goal.

Innovation would be my preference. The more corrupt a monopoly becomes, the more motivated the best engineers are to join a startup with a "Don't be evil" mission to take them down. ;)

Instead of 'the market', think of government as a union representing the collective interests of citizens and empowered to intervene when those interests are threatened by forces of nature (which I would say very much includes 'the market')

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