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Comment by kauffj | Hacker News Reader

I think this is one of if not the most important issue in the entire world.

We currently have two primary forms of government: dictatorship and democracy.

Almost everyone prefers democracies. But many, if not most, living in democracies also take major issue with the way their countries are run. The best defense of democracy is Churchill's: democracy is the worst form of Government except for all the rest.

A framework in which we can experiment with other forms of societal organization, especially one in which minimizes or eliminates externalities, has the potential to produce massive benefits if it discovers better forms of political organization.

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That's all well and good but it seems to me all of these "new" forms of organization are essentially to benefit the ultra-rich at the expense of everyone else. There is nothing here that will help working-class people, and instead, seems to seek to abandon them.

Stable governance and solid protections for property rights would be a massive benefit to the working class in at least half the world.

I'll just point out that plenty of people experiment with alternative forms of societal organization. It happens all the time. The Amish have been doing it in the US for centuries. The Mormons have taken a swing at it too, and their fundamentalist offshoot, the FLDS, is still trying. And there are all sort of other intentional communities out there.

As far as I can tell, what most of these experiments show us is things we already know. E.g., the FLDS mainly seems to demonstrate that patriarchy is indeed awful for everybody except the men on top. [1] A lot of the rest seem to show that however people start, it tends toward familiar things, like oligarchy and dictatorship. So unless these folks have taken special care to avoid the problems, I expect that for-profit communities will end up being the city-state version of Away: high-minded language, an always-positive public face, and a lot of abuse and exploitation behind the scenes.

[1] See "Under the Banner of Heaven" for a readable take: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000FC1R2S/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...

> The best defense of democracy is Churchill's: democracy is the worst form of Government except for all the rest.

So Two Cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism. Two cheers are quite enough: there is no occasion to give three. Only Love the Beloved Republic deserves that.

- E.M. Forster, "What I Believe", 1939, from a collection bearing the name Two Cheers for Democracy

They are after venture backed city states. Funding sovereigns if you have enough money. Government run by corporations will not be pretty. Most likely not a direct dictatorship, but not far.

Not far? It's fascism without the middleman and a laughable veneer of neoliberal extremism - for legitimacy.

How exactly does seasteading accomplish any such thing? What other means of government are they itching to try exactly? And how do you judge the success or failure of each experiment? How can you possibly eliminate externalities from any such system?

>>>how exactly does seasteading accomplish any such thing

Not sure if i capture your subject currently, but you literally do what the article states, for one.

>>>>>what other means of government are they itching to try exactly?

Why does that matter? If it does to you, should you not research it? The point is that competition will allow the best to replace the garbage we have today. More choice is always better. That is a fact. If you want to know what those choices are, you should inform yourself.

>>>>>And how do you judge the success or failure of each experiment? Its not as hard as you make it out to be. The seasteading project didn't gain traction. Failure. The opposite will be deemed suceess. People vote with their feet. It really is that simple.

>>>how can you possibly eliminate externalities from any such system?

Just because you havent formulated it in your mind, doesnt mean it is not possible. And even if it was not possible, it shouldnt matter. Not everything is black and white. You dont need to eliminate externalities to have something that helps working people live better lives. Eliminating externalities is not the goal

> We currently have two primary forms of government: dictatorship and democracy.

Hate to break it to you, but democracy and dictatorship are not mutually exclusive. See Kenneth Arrow.[1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theo...

> We currently have two primary forms of government: dictatorship and democracy.

No, we have a third form: plutocracy.

There is no democracy, there's a farce of it. Most people don't get to decide on almost anything, except via direct protest. You get to pick "representatives" from 2 or 3 alternatives. These alternatives are heavily decided by electability that is directly related to funding and the few people do the most of it.

"democracy is the worst form of Government except for all the rest"

That's until you realize that representative democracy (rule of majority) is effectively an authoritarian system, which is based on the monopoly of force and the monopoly of currency, and which incentivizes politicians with low time preference to spend more money than what they take (by force) through taxes, therefore indebting and impoverishing the whole population progressively.

There's a social organization system that allows for individual freedoms: free markets with no centralized governments. It's not a setup that will be implemented through revolutions, reforms or good will. It's inevitable that we'll get there as the cost of transactions becomes increasingly small (therefore making centralized systems of organization not viable). Refer to the work of Ronald Coase to understand why that is.

Please don't take HN threads further into generic ideological flamewar. It leads to tedious, repetitive, and usually nasty discussions—see first reply below.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

My observation is not ideological, it's a reference to the work of an economist...

People understand these words differently, but by the standards that apply on HN, it's definitely ideological and generic. These are things we're trying to avoid, because internet forums don't have anything new to say about them. The arguments just get increasingly repetitive and nasty.

Why pick on this comment, though? The whole thread here is an ideological debate between forms of government and is repetitive; you may as well lock the whole thing at this point.

The comment was significantly more generic, which makes for worse discussion, especially on divisive topics: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....

One thing to look for is whether a comment remains anchored in the specific content of an article, or has become unmoored from it. Most of this thread retains at least some contact with it. Even the parent of the comment I replied to (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21866584), which is pretty generic, has at least a wispy string connecting it to the OP. But https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21867096 just goes into talking points.

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