The nanny state is really only a couple decades old.
Government has realized it can take significant powers if it can convince a subset of the populace that it is the only way to protect them from some type of harm.
However I really wish the discourse around this stuff would shift a little bit. I want my government to protect me from huge tech companies and the massive infringement on our privacy, community and culture. Like the government should serve the people, both by not restricting the freedoms of individuals too zealously, but also by protecting people from genuine threats that they can’t or won’t protect themselves from, such as social media companies exploiting network effects that make it basically impossible for users to make alternative choices.
If you think otherwise please explain it to me because I really, genuinely want to understand.
The benefit of letting them play out for a while is that you can see how things ultimately turn out, and cherry pick the aspects that are worth keeping, decide what aspects are worth keeping with changes, and outlaw aspects that are harmful.
It’s a natural experiment where you keep the wins, cancel the loses, then repeat the process, making societies iteratively better.
If you just pre-emptively ban everything before any significant real world harm is apparent, then you lose the ability to be selective and keep the wins.
This is Europe’s big mistake. They’re too eager to ban on gut feel, which means they ban too much, which places their industries at a disadvantage relative to other countries where iterative innovation can continue.
Nuance is tough. It is easier to find a simple thing to blame and advocate against it. But nothing is simple -- governments are composed of people and those people have inside them conflicting motivations, each person's different than the other -- and most of them are not malicious. The same with business, and with the public.
Let's look at issues on their own and not try to categorize everything as part of a black and white choice.
The result is that you keep the good inventions and discard the harmful ones.
What people are proposing here is to preemptively ban new inventions even when there’s no evidence of harm. It’s not a good idea because while it will stop the bad inventions, it will also stop the good ones.
This thread is full of people suggesting Facebook be banned from behaving this way based on little more than gut-feel. They aren’t even capable of giving a hypothesis for harm this could be harmful.