Comment by nosianu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nosianu | Hacker News Reader

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The only "free" society is you alone in a large area. In any other place, with other humans nearby, you will not be "free". And this definition of "Freedom" only looks at the impact from other humans, totally ignoring the restrictions the world itself imposes on you (but to human psychology those don't matter nearly as much as the will of other people imposed on yourself).

This sounds cliche, and it is, but for whatever reason I feel kind of forced to reemphasize the obvious in response to your self-centered-universe-outlook comment.

In a human society, the alternative to government is rule of the strongest. That's how we got nobles and kings, later the great capitalist tycoons and their private police and armies.

> An objectively free society

That does not mean anything. Well, it means you are trying to shove your world-view down everybody else's throat while shutting out any discussion and arguments that you dislike.

>In a human society, the alternative to government is rule of the strongest. That's how we got nobles and kings, later the great capitalist tycoons and their private police and armies

If you feel that that's the case then you must realize that what stopped this status quoue wasn't legislation but industrialization and guns. Legislation is always after the fact.

Guns were around for a few hundred years before this alleged democratizing effect.

Also, of note, is that guns were invented in China thousands of years ago and it has been a monarchy or dictatorship since then.

Steam engines have been around since the 1st century, but like guns, they weren't going to be as important as they could be without all the advancements in ideology, planning and sciences that resulted in industrialization.

Which brings me back to my point, the current status of civilization is due much less to legislation than people say it is.

If you specifically mean the existence of an elected group of people writing the laws matters less than people say it does, we agree.

But if you say that the systematic codification of rules (i.e., laws) matters less than people say it does, we disagree completely. Laws literally defined every major civilization back to the dawn of recorded human history.

For more modern examples, CA's employee rights laws are the reason that SV happened in SV rather than New York, Boston, Chicago, or Detroit--all cities with larger scientific and industrial bases than SF or LA. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act literally made the internet as it exists today possible; without it Youtube, Twitch, Facebook, Twitter, and even Amazon and Google couldn't exist as they do today.

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