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Comment by taurath | Hacker News Reader

I’d say you have the first statement wrong - some will give but only not if they’re forced, some won’t give anything in any circumstance, and some would give a lot of not blocked by the other two.

I don’t want to be chained to my employer for benefits, for retirement, for healthcare. It’s stupid to put a sociopathic entity with no accountability to you in charge of your basic needs.

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Similarly, many of us don't want to be chained to a comparably sociopathic and unaccountable government entity. We'd instead prefer to independently manage our own unique needs using our own individual economic agency.

Sorry you think government is sociopathic and unaccountable, it honestly seems like a rough life if that’s what you’ve experienced.

How can anyone look at the atrocities committed by every major government over the centuries of its existence and not see that large governments are orders of magnitude more sociopathic than the worst corporations? Its just a general feature of large and powerful organizations; shared by governments and corporations alike. Governments simply hold the power to commit larger atrocities.

Just look at how the city of Flint, MI poisoned their own citizens water while suppressing knowledge of their actions. [0] While in the grand scheme of government atrocities this actually appears relatively minor, this issue happened in very recent times.

One could fill pages listing government atrocities before even getting to basic incompetence and mismanagement. While inefficiencies happen in all bureaucratic organizations, governments hold singular power over their citizens in a way that no corporation could ever dream of.

This is not an argument against government. There are some services that only the government can provide. E.g., a strong military. Nor is this an argument against government playing some role in promoting general welfare.

I just personally would like the option to not be further dependent upon our government and would rather use my own economic agency to provide for my own unique needs. Many other people feel similarly and therefore reject this further intrusion of government in dictating our labor relations with employers.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint_water_crisis

Bad government is everywhere, but many governments use power broadly responsibly. Private entities are less accountable than elected officials, and they get more scrutiny from the press. That power you talk about is real, but frankly we tried having 0 labor standards in the 19th and start of the 10th century. The vaunted powerful middle class of the 50s and 60s also took place after the largest government programs in our history (the war, the interstate highway system, etc) and also along with very strong labor protections and high taxes that have been all erased since the 80s. Faith in the US government in particular took a nosedive during and after the Vietnam war.

I guess I don’t understand why this is the line in the sand, and why we must depend on private profit-motive entities to provide for basic welfare and an economic safety net when we can see it working in developed countries around the world.

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