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Comment by pemulis | Hacker News Reader

But private companies are constrained by the need to turn a profit and outmaneuver their competitors. Governments aren't. To keep them from being wasteful, people have to watch them closely and make a big fuss when something is wrong, trying to get enough people to care. That's difficult, time-consuming, often demoralizing work.

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that's just not true. There are many stable oligopolies which can either resist, tamp down on, or co-opt new upstarts and maintain a status quo for themselves.

And there are people who have to do the same difficult, time-consuming and demoralizing work acting as gadflies against the egregious abuses of multi-national corporations.

And the notion that Governments don't compete is always either false or double speak. It either is the case that governments compete with the private sector (e.g. government backed plans for health insurance can operate more cost efficiently than the private sector, so they're a problem), or they don't (as you've just claimed).

And there are opportunities where people have successfully competed against governments as well. Governments collect mapping data and you can pay for access to that content. And yet there are tons of mapping companies out in the world, many of whom have better services and capabilities.

Lastly, for people who might wish to claim that government can wield undue influence over free markets when they get involved in industry, nothing has stopped them from getting involved in industries they're not directly involved in. The federal laws banning online poker are a great example.

Industry lobbying is such a powerful and distorting force, again enabled by a lack of transparency, that it seems laughable to be worried about undue government influence.

> There are many stable oligopolies which can either resist, tamp down on, or co-opt new upstarts and maintain a status quo for themselves.

Can you please point out some of this many oligopolies that somehow force me to do business with them? I can not buy from pretty much anyone I don't like, if I avoid paying taxes I will probably end up in jail.

That's a red herring.

Your participation in government and society is still contingent. If you don't want to pay taxes, go become a monk and take a vow of poverty (yeah you will still have to file returns, but whatever).

If you participate in society, you are going to have to pay taxes. Just the same way that if you want to get access to the internet, you will have to pay a company like comcast.

And, when it comes down to it, the oil and automobile companies, as a practical matter, have done a pretty good job of ensuring that Americans have to have cars, and have to pay for gas in order to live in society. That is for all intents and purposes the same thing.

From your logic I can only draw the conclusion that government owns society. You may believe that it is so, and that it's even rightfully so. I choose to disagree. I was born free, and the soil that I was born on can in no way be owned by the government. The government never homesteaded it. Since the government can't have greater powers than those of individuals who choose to delegate their powers to the government some individual has to have homesteaded the soil and explicitly signed it away to the government. Of course, this never happened, we all know how our governments came to claim sovereignty over huge land areas. I say that might does not necessarily make right, I say you own what you mix your labor with. Although government claims to be the highest authority and backs that up with the threat of violence, you can't assume that their claim is rightful.

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