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Comment by a_gnostic | Hacker News Reader

You need a model that is not financed through extortion. By granting a small part of the population rights and duties that would be criminal for anyone else to perform (do you even have a right to extort, kidnap, and murder?), you are playing people against each other and perpetuating a struggle for control of the government to act on their behalf, at the expense of everyone else.

governance ≠ government

As long as extortion is involved, the various organs have no incentive to improve, and further more succumb to mission creep (1) to justify and expand their budget, necessitating further extortion.

1. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mission%20creep

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Do you have a practical solution that you think people would adopt?

David D. Friedman's solution seems pretty good.

http://www.daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf

Law without government - Robert P. Murphy

https:/www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8pcb4xyCic

> granting a small part of the population rights and duties that would be criminal for anyone else to perform

No, I don’t want anyone to have nuclear codes. And yes, I want someone to ensure randos aren’t building nukes.

> governance ≠ government

Sure, but to the degree we’ve made progress on the problem of governance, it’s been in proving the necessity of government. Anarchist collectives far well until someone comes to take their stuff; this is basically the warlord era of any civilisation.

To be fair, the current scope of government for most of the world is far beyond mutual defense at this point. Governments of the 19th and 20th Century also provided defense, and did so with a much smaller portion of GDP.

I think there's a pretty strong argument that global military is close to a zero-sum game, but I agree that this doesn't mean there is a obvious alternative.

Last, I think it's pretty indisputable that there's been significant scope creep given that western government taxation & spending are now pushing 50% of GDP. If you look at the US, the federal government was 2% of GDP in 1920, and closer to 25% today. This is despite 10x in inflation adjusted GDP per capita. This means that more realistically, government is consuming/directing 100x more productive capacity per person.

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