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Comment by oldsklgdfth | Hacker News Reader

Personally I think that 1) is not attainable in a practical sense. It would require resources that are not available and would just add to the ridiculous overhead of running a government.

I used to believe in an ideal state as the one you describe. More recently, I think about what a system - i.e economic, political, social - that is stable (in some sense) looks like. For example, liberatarians believe that markets sort things out on their own. I usually conclude that small societies are optimal for quality of living.

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> I usually conclude that small societies are optimal for quality of living.

I came to the same conclusion. Sadly many 'libertarians' often gets dismissed as disliking all forms of government and regulation, which is not the case, rather preferring a limited one. But I guess intentional/unintentional misrepresentation is a savvy and common political tactic because it's effective.

My question to you is how do you achieve a limited/small government (without a revolution)? I believe controls like this are one way to achieve it. Much like how the strict policies of the Constitution (or Bill of Rights) have limited/stopped potentially hundreds of thousands of overreaching policies in the US alone over the last two centuries.

The constitution, aka strict pre-emptive limitations, are good. But I believe post-defacto limitations and reviews are also a necessity. Because as I said, some policy does seem rational at the time - which then becomes out-of-date or a bad idea with retrospect.

We currently have no good tools to deal with those outcomes...

I think that you can't, PERIOD. Catalonia was attempting to have a small local government and got shut down. Also, revolutions don't benefit the masses, only a different small group of people. The american revolution displaced the english royalty with new american power. The rebels become the new establishment.

I think the only way to guarantee that you don't government overreach is not have a sociaety where all member are active and responsible. Not in that they all vote. In that they all deal with issues in their community, rather than pawning it off to the government and also giving them the power they need.

I think that society that takes care of itself - instead of inventing institutions to do so - is feasable, but a real pain in the ass to maintain. And it's just easier to not. Sorry if i ranted a bit.

I thought it was a rich part of Spain didn't want to subsidize the poorer bits - like say the south east of the UK wanted to dump the poor parts of the north.

If the opposition is boycotting the referendum its sort of obvious the promoters of the referendum and a hidden objective

You can't fix political bias with more political bias.

The central problem isn't rent control, it's the fact that property is a very privileged asset class that allows owners to extract rent from those with less political and economic power.

Rent control is like pushing down on a balloon that's inflating. The inflation keeps happening whether you like it or not. The best you can do is minimise the effects in selected locations.

That doesn't mean rent control is causing the problems. The underlying problem is the inflation, and you can't make it go away with palliative measures.

In the US, you can't make it go away at all, because the economic system has been designed to privilege rent-seeking - at various levels of obviousness and abstraction - over other kinds of activity.

Rents in the Bay Area and the financial biases and traditions of VC and startup culture are both manifestations of the same underlying problem.

They are, however, suboptimal for defending against conquest by larger societies, which historically has been a more important metric.

Small societies also mean small markets. That's one of the reasons why so few of the largest and most successful companies were founded in small countries; you need a certain critical mass to allow for growth and economies of scale.

Which is often the positive effects of restrictions on bureaucracy, such as timeframes and review agencies, creating limits on the size of government directly and indirectly.

The current costs of never-ending legislation and regulation is incredibly underrated IMO:

https://imgur.com/a/zagcH (please excuse the non-log axis, but the point remains)

Pretty much the only limit on the scope and extent of legislation is the constitution, which affect a limited scope of the interests of society. We must as a society demand that the legislation being enacted is demonstrably effective and useful, beyond the era it was enacted.

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