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Comment by scarejunba | Hacker News Reader

I've seen the effect of San Francisco "governing itself". In many respects, I would rather they didn't.

"Governing itself" isn't some magical good. The cost of incompatible laws in jurisdictions can be large and invisible. Since the legislature ignores the cost of laws, they are encouraged to complicate things as much as possible.

I'm on Lyft's side here.

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You want corporate interests to rule a city? That's not even remotely democratic.

"Governing itself" isn't some magical good

I don't think one who holds this particular stance is particularly concerned with the merits of democracy. Call me on it, if I'm wrong, scarejunba.

For what it’s worth, I read that comment as drawing attention to the fact that democracy, while powerful, can be misdirected. People make mistakes, and in large groups, peoples make mistakes, especially when working with a complex set of top-down rules that we’ve built up over centuries for the purpose of controlling other people in a world that has had billions of years to develop its own complexities. As an aside, that fragility is why such top-down structures are so rare in nature.

The topic is city level democracy vs. county or state level democracy.

A lot of housing and transportation problems are caused by the regulation being too local.

a lot are caused by things like messed up state level property taxes.

California's housing problems are multiple levels of poor regulation.

It is certainly more "democratic" to have important issues, such as housing, governed at the state level, and not at the local level.

Do you oppose democracy or something?

Look at California, New York, or Texas. There's parts of those states that may disagree with the political leanings of the states policies. How are they supposed to get their own say in their community?

I want regulation at the state level. Obviously, people know the legislation would be too heavy handed so they're trying to pass it at a layer where they don't need to compromise. That's a perversion of the system.

Why the scare quotes?

Just normal quotes in this instance. I’m specifically discussing the phrase “governing itself”.

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