Comment by yucky | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yucky | Hacker News Reader

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   I imagine you've never really engaged in political philosophy very thoroughly?

The opposite, I grudgingly came to this conclusion after decades of believing (or I guess, hoping) differently. Not that it's an original conclusion, many philosophers called it out long before I was even born. Took me awhile to see it.

   When you say "we are stuck relying on the intelligence and wisdom of the masses" you're making a pro-elitism argument. In that the masses ought to be ruled by people better than the masses

Yes, and again I always hoped this not to be the case. But the reality is the majority of people either can't be bothered to think logically or simply aren't capable.

    So in short, I think you should probably read a little more about political philosophy to be able to say something as big as "Democracy is incompatible with freedom". It's a pretty big statement.

It's the only logical conclusion though. Government only grows. And with that growth comes more and more taxation to fuel the growth and more and more laws/restrictions/regulations on individual freedoms to justify the growth.

> Government only grows

But, say, in western Europe, a ton of things used to be run solely by the government (water, energy production, steel, carbon, telcos, radio, tv, train, local transport, air transport, postal services) and have now moved out of the government purview, isn't that the opposite of "government always grows"?

Yet in the European country I live in, taxes have not stopped growing throughout the last 20 years. The government just finds different ways of spending the money, not necessarily related to the welfare system.

And given the degradation of the postal service and passenger rail system since privatization, one might accept growing government as the lesser of two evils.

One could argue that liberal democracy offered a solution by making everyone have the same rights and focusing on making sure every one individual's right are protected in front of the majority.

The idea that everyone has the same rights and noone can legally break them was the pre-political basis of our democracies.

One could argue that, as of late, we've been focusing more on collectives and less on individuals.

Collectives can't be all equal (i.e. per definition they might have different size, us vs. them) leading to them causing an unhealthy imbalance in social power dynamics, that wouldn't happen if we focused our attention to the individual.

What author do you draw from ok that subjects ? I’m asking because there is a lot of various work in that field

Here's a good one: https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Economics-Politics-Perspect..., but there are many.

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