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Comment by wallace_f | Hacker News Reader

That's exactly the point. The first steps in the path to illegitimate authority is to start legitimizing it using these low-hanging fruits.

This is just textbook play calling. Removing net neutrality starts "we just want to help hospitals and police have faster internet, don't be ridiculous." Drug prohibition, the War on Terror, the TSA, police militarization. It all, every time, comes with "they're just trying to do something good and it doesn't seriously affect you." Except maybe thre TSA, because when someone starts searching you all of a sudden everyone is a civil libertarian.(1)

The problems 1) One can always make the argument that "those are just not worthwhile freedoms." 2) The idea that using the threat of violence from the government to solve every problem is the actual path to tyranny.

1-https://theintercept.com/2018/02/05/the-nunes-memo-and-katie...

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We already have laws about which animals can be kept as pets. This is hardly an egregious extension of that power.

The law is very plainly there to prevent guinea pigs from being abused. It is not there to extend the government's power.

What an extremely odd thing to argue.

The concept is about 'what constitutes legitimate authority?' After all, consider your argument:

>'we already have laws about which people can get married. This is hardly an egregious extension of that power. The law is very plainly there to protect children.'

What you're advocating by disavowing the above, yet allowing the topic is to say you: "agree with authority when it happens to agree with my moral compass."

Sayinf "disagreeing with this is an extremely odd thing to argue," reveals the fact that the original intentions of the founders of this country (assuming you live in the States), as well as those of Enlightenment figures, that government is only legitimate whwn it is limited, is so odd and alienating to you makes me think that no wonder humanity always turns itself in to tyranny, over and over again.

You might consider that Switzerland is probably the most democratic country on earth and "legitimate authority" quite directly means "the will of the people". If it wouldn't, they could easily change it as everybody can submit a law change suggestion (sorry, I don't know the correct term) and with enough inital support everyone can vote on the issue. They vote on far-ranging things several times a year, there can be no tyranny in this context.

> If it wouldn't, they could easily change it as everybody can submit a law change suggestion (sorry, I don't know the correct term)

Referendum to kill an existing law, popular initiative to propose a new one.

They use different tricks when they're extending their power. This is definitely not one of them.

Laws they suspect could be overturned by voters they create 2 simular but separate ones shortly after each other, so people get tired of fighting it etc.

It definitely doesn't involve guinea pigs.

It's not that anyone ever sat around a board room with an evil plot involving the protection of guinea pigs. It's that it is so normal that the state act as your parents, which was never the intention of Western democracies, that nobody even thinks "should we really be letting ourselves hand over so many decisions to a monopoly on violence?"

The thing is, once you have a monopoly on violence, you've inherently handed over all of your decisions to them already.

(There's no alternative, though, so deal with it)

I get the point you're trying to make, it's just that you have picked the perfect counter-example to make it against. Both with animal protection (no human will profit) and with Switzerland (we as citizens can force a popular vote against any law our elected government is about to pass, or even propose new laws).

You're right that Switzerland is just about the least concerning place in the world in terms of government tyranny. However, there are problems with only starting to be critical when the government starts confiscating your phone at the airport, reading your email, etc. At this point you've even set precedent that they should be allowed to do those things, just so long as it can be justified as good, or even "the will of the people." So in this case we have ourselves to blame for this being in this mess.

And this kind of government js actually quite a shift from the type of democracy that Enlightenment figures helped developed for us, which gave us so much in the world.

Governments are responsible for most of the evil in the 20th century. Culling that probably starts with thinking about what a legitimate government should be permitted to do in the first place.

I completely agree with you in general, even in Switzerland we're not safe[0]. You just picked a really shitty example, and in europe we're in general a bit more pro government than in the US.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_files_scandal

Err, the "shittiness" of the example was deliberate. Of course I could point out violations that everyone would agree with, such as the TSA confiscating your electronics. That threat is personally threatening to people, so all of a sudden they're civil libertarians.

Consider another example: what benefit is there in the government spending so much time and money giving due process, health care and other rights to murderers, child predators or terrorists, while free, good people go without healthcare? It's not because the criminals deserve it. If I advocated human rights for these people when we didn't have them, you would say the same thing you are now: "I agree with human rights, but you just picked a really shitty example." The point is this: to consider what constitutes legitimate government.

> while free, good people go without healthcare?

Doesn't happen in Switzerland.

> If I advocated human rights for these people when we didn't have them, you would say the same thing you are now: "I agree with human rights, but you just picked a really shitty example."

Nope, I wouldn't. In fact I got heavily downvoted on HN before because I advocated for freedom of speech even for terrorists.

I think you'll find that this kind of thing started with making slavery illegal, a.k.a the actual use of force by the government to take away people's freedom to own other humans. The idea that all authority is immoral because authority can be used for immoral purposes is a simplistic slippery slope, and frankly anyone arguing that is just arbitrarily picking one ingredient of tyranny and saying that it should be banned. Tyranny also requires people. Let's get rid of people!

Permitting private individuals to enact injustice such as slavery is advocating anarchy. You should read a little bit of Locke, Hume, JSM, Jefferson on democracy... The idea is very generally that we agree to a social contract to "give up some of our liberties to protect the remainder." Nobody has a right to remove the rights of another in this tradition, and it has always been that way going back, long before the Civil War. So the state using force to protect the liberties has always been just.

You're right, it didn't start with the Civil War. I just thought that slavery was a nice simple example of the legitimate use of force by the government that was decried as abridging the liberties of the Confederates. I get that you don't think 'the right to own other people' is, like, a real right like 'the right to kill animals however I want' and all the other ones you object to the government regulating away, but that's your personal and very subjective line and not some foundational precept.

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