Hacker News Reader

Comment by mmirate | Hacker News Reader

> but you also need to ... understand that [the problem is] actually solvable. Most people would assume that any effort would be wasted as the authorities would prefer to keep their revenue generator, so they'd never go through with the project.

Any reasonable person would make such an assumption without a second thought.

I'm still baffled that the city took any action whatsoever in response to this guy's request. How could he have known that they would just roll over and cough up $60k in lost revenue? It's seriously out-of-character for them.

View on HN

You’re making the common (and fatal) mistake of evaluating a government on the terms of a private business entity.

Governments are of the people so long as the people maintain them as such.

When you treat a government like a business, it falls behind on it’s maintenance schedule, and begins to resemble one. There are a lot of people who wish the government was their business, and will encourage you to play along. These people work night and day to lower your expectations of what you’re capable of.

Stop falling for it!

The USA had some ingenious (and flawed) founders who set in place some rights and traditions that reserve at least a small finger hold which resembles democracy, by which the people can mobilize effectively.

But, in any nation, that fingerhold can exist when enough people come together en masse.

> You’re making the common (and fatal) mistake of evaluating a government on the terms of a private business entity.

> Governments are of the people so long as the people maintain them as such.

"We the people" decided that government has some set of tasks to perform. Those tasks require resources, so "we the people" decided that we should steal some portion of each others' earnings, in order to provide a means that these tasks be accomplished.

The continued legitimacy of this ... arrangement ... is due to Social Contract Theory.

If, for discussion's sake, we temporarily step into the average-person's shoes and accept the Social Contract Theory at face-value, then it is most simple to conclude that what we are really doing is paying the government a lump sum in exchange for some set of services, and by garrulously quarrelling and advertising to each other we can decide who pays how much, and what is the set of services, and to a limited extent how the services ought be provided; under the limitation that if all the lump sums can't pay for all the services, then the difference will have to be made-up by printing more money and thereby reducing everyone's purchasing power (in short: further theft-from-all).

From that we can conclude that the "best" government would be the one which satisfied the majority of the desires of the majority of the people while appearing to take, in return, as little as possible. Does that not sound like the goal of a business?

> The USA had some ingenious (and flawed) founders who set in place some rights and traditions that reserve at least a small finger hold which resembles democracy, by which the people can mobilize effectively.

Correct.

Problem is, that kind of mobilization will cause enough chaos that it's not worth doing it over just a parking-ticket racket.

No, it will likely require some single, unambiguous, flagrant, overt, unapologetic and high-stakes treason against the letter of our principles and procedures ... before the 2nd Amendment's most fundamental purpose is put-to-action.

And I have no faith that the outcome of such an event, will be nontrivially better than the Articles of Confederation; it probably won't even outshine the Constitution of 1788.

But this whole discussion is going far afield enough that my betting-money says we'll soon hear from Fearless Leader Ang...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com