Hacker News Reader

Comment by stcredzero | Hacker News Reader

Hallelujah! Markets are great because they are a decentralized method for regulating resources that can adjust for changing conditions. One wants them in situations where there are too many factors and actors to be regulated by something as large and slow moving as a government. Markets aren't to be worshiped. They are a tool.

Governments and laws are good for certain things too. I would like murder and violence to be illegal. I want human rights to be a given. Democracies aren't perfect, but they do embody a mechanism for ensuring the above. Unfortunately, they also allow their constituents to turn them into non-democracies. Democracies require constant maintenance.

View on HN

Who has committed more murders and violence in the past century? Random individuals/groups, or Governments? If you support nonviolence, why support an organization that threatens violence if you do not follow rules have no moral basis (ie, not "don't murder" and "don't steal") that you never agreed to follow?

Do you honestly believe that random individuals organized in some other fashion than government - say a corporation - are not just as able to murder and pillage on the same level as governments past?

If you think that governments are some sort of special organization, and that the same problems would not occur with any other power, you sir are a fool.

Voted up, but almost didn't with the reference to corporations being as evil as governments.

Haven't seen that yet, mostly due to free market influences. (There is a good reason why your neighborhood store owner is not also a flagrant lawbreaker -- it's bad for business)

But substitute "armed gangs", "the mob", "terrorist organizations", etc -- works great.

Give corporations power and an absence of government and it does happen. Look at the industrial revolution prior to workers' rights, or even look at telecom and communications monopolies today.

That law that the store owner doesn't dare break is what holds him back!

But it didn't happen. No private organization ever produced something on the scale of the gulag or the Nazi concentration camps, even in places where government was very weak.

Corporations are government-defined entities. You can't have them without governments.

Not trying to argue, but it's a non-sequitur.

The industrial revolution had corporations over-taxing the body politic. It was the natural result of taking rural agricultural ethics and putting them in a mechanistic world. It led to labor reforms. trust-busting, and labor unions. Sucked a lot, and lots of folks probably died early, but it was hardly the stuff of the holocaust. You have to remember that everybody was just figuring all this stuff out as it was happening. Once it became clear where we were headed (and that we didn't want to go there) then the government, which defines corporations, defined what they could and couldn't do in a different way. Badda bing, badda boom, your democratic republic at work.

So your theory is that no matter how people organize themselves they will always commit mass atrocities? I can agree with this on some level, there is a lot of psychological disturbance among human beings and has been throughout history.

I'm wondering if you are aware that there is ample evidence in the work of Adorno and his collegues (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarian_personality), Lloyd deMause and the Institute for Psychohistory (http://www.psychohistory.com/) and Alice Miller (http://www.alice-miller.com/index_en.php) that political and military disasters are not linked to something intrinsic and inevitable in human nature, but rather to childhood and even prenatal experiences that can be avoided?

If you haven't, you might take a look at Lloyd deMause's book "The Emotional Life of Nations" (readable online: http://www.geocities.com/kidhistory/childhod/chindex.htm), which I think traces this ability of humans to murder and pillage to it's source and provides a plan for how it can be eliminated in the future.

So your theory is that no matter how people organize themselves they will always commit mass atrocities?

Not quite, my theory is that the ability to commit atrocities is (much like I would assume your evidence would suggest) certainly evident in every being on the planet.

Mass atrocities and murder on large scales is simply a result of many people getting together, regardless of how they do so. Because it's the individual, and not the organization that is the actor, your point that "governments have murdered more people than corporations" is bunk. Given more power, any organization is capable of such crimes. For example, the Catholic Church.

Well if you ever have some time to kill, check out some of those links, they provide a way out that isn't easy, and is probably mulitgenerational.It seems pretty solid to me and would get rid of the ability to commit atrocities not by a new form of organization, but rather by curing individuals.

"Who has committed more murders and violence in the past century?"

Just googling around, looks like communists governments, by a long shot. Made Hitler look like a boy scout.

http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COM.FIG1.GIF

Reply on news.ycombinator.com