Hacker News Reader

There's a reason Plato's Republic looks authoritarian to people, because it models a city in which justice is the highest good, and justice and freedom are ultimately opposed to each other.

Since governments and laws exist to ensure justice, freedom will always be the price we pay.

View on HN

>governments and laws exist to ensure justice

Governments mostly exist to coordinate resource usage to out compete other societies.

Some amount of justice and welfare and roads, or whatever other things (varied by society and time period), are what they pay us so that our compliance is mostly voluntary and is therefore substantially more efficient.

You can bicker over exact word choice and the minute, but this general form is how it's always been from the present all the way back into the ancient world.

Governments exist to monopolize violence in the hands of a few so that we may have less violence and more order overall.

>There's a reason Plato's Republic looks authoritarian to people, because it models a city in which justice is the highest good, and justice and freedom are ultimately opposed to each other.

So, Singapore?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com