A lot of computer culture is now 20 years older. Libertarian philosophy has less appeal when you start having kids, especially daughters, need blood pressure meds and have obligations like starting to think about caring for aging parents.
There are a lot more people from outside the computer industry here too these days. They offer a fresh perspective.
There's also been a lot more negative press about technology companies in recent decades, and a lot of the techno-utopian optimism that was so prevalent in the early days of the internet is harder to maintain in the face of, say, the rise of the surveillance state and ever the growing inequality that technology and technologists have enabled.
The world is turning in to a technological dystopia and people are starting to wake up to it.
Or places a lot more conservative than Silicon Valley.
Personally, I've gotten more and more libertarian (though maybe less isolationist in terms of foreign policy) the more and more taxes I am forced to pay. Every time I see my paycheck and the taxes I pay I die a little-bit inside. Though if I could even decide where a small fraction of my taxes went, I think I would be a lot happier with the whole situation.
People from the one go to work for the other regularly[1], often as a reward for serving one-another's interests. They constantly scratch each other's backs, such as politicians awarding fat contracts to corporations and then being rewarded with a high paying job at the same corporation when they retire, or just outright bribery in a variety of forms. Governments also regularly hire highly placed executive from corporations to regulate industries.
History is full of examples of the military used to protect private (including corporate) interests, which are often seen by the ruling class as virtually synonymous with national interests. Protecting oil in the Middle East is one obvious example, but so is protecting banana corporations in South America, nevermind older examples such as using the military for colonialism and to further the slave trade.
Media corporations have been highly complicit in provoking and defending war. The newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst was infamous for boasting for his paper's ability to start wars, saying, "You furnish the pictures. I'll furnish the war." Later media magnates (like Fox News' Rupert Murdoch) and outlets have been no less influential.
Private individuals who've made their fortunes in corporations, like the Koch brothers and Peter Thiel, can also have an enormous influence on politics and the government through their donation, advocacy, and having the ear of powerful politicians.
The military-industrial complex is yet another good example where corporations and governments are deeply intertwined, to the point of corporate interests having massive influence on both domestic and national security policy. It is a truism that political representatives in many states can't vote against military spending for fear of getting kicked out of office by their constituency, who depends on this military spending for their jobs (and their profits). There's endless corruption, bribes, billions of dollars going "missing", and kickbacks in the military as well, to the benefit of private individuals and corporations. Many politicians also own a lot of stock in military contractors and companies like Halliburton which benefit from both military spending and then reconstruction spending after the wars they authorize. This is yet another massive conflict of interest.
So when you favor corporations over governments, don't be so sure they're not two heads of the same beast.
[1] - Trump himself is probably the most famous current example, since he's top corporate executive and business owner at the pinnacle of political power in the US while having massive conflicts of interest between his economic and corporate interests and those of his political office, but this happens all throughout government in every administration (though usually not quite so brazenly).
There are actual agencies that fight, deter/avoid, and persecute corruption within the government. But people believe the worst so they’ve accepted the worst behavior from government.
This should be a moment where people learn how actual government agencies work and what exist. Like this https://www.oge.gov/
For decades, the US government has been a shining example of republican democracy with actual oversight and minimal corruption.
> There are actual agencies that fight, deter/avoid, and persecute corruption within the government.
They are doing a terrible job since our government is corrupt from top to bottom.
[edit] There’s a really good comment to the parent by chrisco255 that was flagged for some reason. It says:
> I believe in the old idiom, "Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely." The whole reason I want government to be small is because I know that the bigger and more powerful it gets, the more corrupt it will get. The more unwieldy it is to change.
> The U.S. government has tons of corruption. And we've seen that in recent years with the CIA and the FBI, with the spying, and mass data collection. You look at how the U.S. government treats Assange and Snowden and tell me they aren't corrupt. The fake Russiagate scandal was built on lies forged by our own intelligence agencies. The Iraq war was supposed to be based on WMDs. I could go on and on...but you've got to be naive to call the U.S. government corruption-free or anything close to it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_the_United_State...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index?w...
Corporations benefit plenty from war and famine. Some of their actions are more overt than others. If corporations were allowed to force people to work at gunpoint, make no mistake: They absolutely would. In some parts of the world, they just do so by integrating themselves deeply into the local governments. Then those corporations can point towards the big bad government as being the reason why they employed slave labor, while walking away all the richer.
I'm not saying corporations should be trusted, I'm saying that the government is far worse than any corporation in terms of corruption and coming with "ties" to how your money is spent.
I expect I'll get some votes from folks who find my mindset different from their own. But I think it's healthy to talk about this stuff calmly. Even though I strongly disagree with you, it's good to know how others feel and you expressed it without being dismissive or pejorative towards folks like me. Thanks!
Even if taxes are much less efficient, having a lot more money in the pool means more of it ends up where they want to see it distributed.
Also, a lot of stuff the government does actually cost a lot of money and needs to be done but people wouldn't donate like infrastructure maintenance
If I, as a socially-minded millionaire, make a lot of philantropic donations, but my neighbor, the not-so-socially-minded millionaire doesn't do that and instead uses their money to fund a think tank that lobbies for the abolition of social welfare, then we have a problem.
Rather than engaging in philantropy, it is more rational for me to fund a think tank that lobbies for the expansion of the social welfare system.
Now, there might nonetheless be a case for taxing your neighbor millionaire a bit more, but it would have to be somewhat different. (For instance, you might think that having more millionaires around creates negative externalities in the form of way too much corruption, rent-seeking etc. from aspiring millionaires. This would indeed be the kind of thing that taxes could correct.)
Also, I can make only so much impact on my own. Advocating for taxes gets many people to give.
but I want more taxes... I feel greedy and unethical making as much as I do.
Edit: This is on the borderline of not even offering an opinion, but a statement of facts; but I guess go ahead and downvote facts you do not want to hear because they disagree with your politics.
When all you demand of business is that they seek to increase profits, but you demand of government that it protect everyone (including itself) from said businesses, enforce contracts, enact and enforce just laws, and provide all sorts of other services... of course you'll end up seeing business as perfect and government as flawed.
The good news is that this is a very simple hypothesis to test: look at the price of meds and healthcare in a range of developed countries, and correlate with government involvement (or not) in provision of said meds and healthcare