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Comment by patrickmay | Hacker News Reader

Power will always attract the corrupt and corruptible. The problem is the power. Reducing the size and scope of the federal government and devolving power to the states, communities, and individuals is the only way to minimize the negative effects of humans with too much authority.

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Power is not the problem, because power exists regardless of who owns it.

We the people actually have a relatively high amount of power in our states and communities. We just don't use it. The real solution is to convince the masses to pay attention, which is harder today than it ever was.

This assumes that govt and individual families are the only players in the game. Now as in other historical periods large corporations hold arguably more power than either of those groups and reining in govt leaves little obstacle to them consolidating even more power and wielding it globally.

Reducing the size of the government just makes it where billionaires and corporations control everything instead, which we're already seeing now. You'd need a way to reign in their power/wealth as well.

+1... Reducing government is part of power reduction, not the sum total. To reduce the size of government you need to reduce the size of things it manages. So, for instance, anti-trust would need a huge buf in enforcement to eliminate concentrations of power in business. I'd think strongly progressive inheritance tax would cover the rest.

Abolishing private property is another way of defanging power

Has this been tried successfully anywhere? Seems like mostly a dead end as long as we have resource scarcity.

Let's start with your private property.

95% of the commenters on this post own no private property.

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