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Comment by Bilal_io | Hacker News Reader

I hear you, but there has to be some balance between full immunity and no immunity at all. The one thing that comes to mind is rich and powerful people, because they have unlimited resources to sue and ruin the lives of cops, judges and politicians, which would lead to these officials avoiding to hold rich and powerful individuals accountable even when they have committed crimes.

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I'm not a lawyer, but what you're describing sounds to me like an example of strategic lawsuits against public participation, just where the targeted "public" isn't a member of the general public but a public servant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_publ...

These lawsuits need to be charged against the police pension funds, not the city coffers

I agree with you

"would"? There is currently a disparity in how rich and poor people are policed.

I get the point that there should be some limited immunity so they can do their jobs. Debatable, but worth the debate.

The argument about the repercussions of eliminating immunity is logical. It just seems like one of those things where there are multiple factors contributing to undesirable outcomes, and that makes it necessary to talk to experts.

You're so close! Instead of patching the issue maybe let's solve the root problem of spiky power distribution among humans. We don't need to make sure cops have immunity to prosecute powerful people. We need to not have powerful people.

(though realistically speaking yes there's probably some level of procedural immunity that probably makes sense, similarly with business bankruptcies not ruining the people who start the business)

I agree with you, but most people aren’t ready to engage with basic anarchist arguments

I don't know if anarchy helps in this situation, I actually think you need robust social systems with buy in from citizens to prevent the natural accumulation of power. The fundamental problem is that there's a diminishing cost to acquiring power as you acquire power, this relationship should be inverted. The more powerful you are the harder it should be to get more powerful.

This is basic engineering, you don't want runaway feedback loops, the underlying system is unstable so we need a control system.

We need to not have powerful people

What does this even mean?

Make currently powerful people less powerful and currently powerless people more powerful.

C'mon, HN users forgot how to think? Forgot to ask Claude?

To do that you first need to become more powerful than those powerful people, right?

Well, no, you just a need a coalition that collectively is more powerful.

We already have two such coalitions within Congress: Republicans and Democrats.

How is that working out?

They got captured

Those are coalitions of politicians, which to an increasing extent are part of the "powerful" group that needs to be overridden. By coalitions I mean coalitions of the actual citizenry.

I struggle to imagine how would something like that form, function, or become powerful enough to matter. Do you have any examples of such coalitions?

Unfortunately most of them are bad. The Tea Party is maybe one, for instance. Note that I'm not describing any type of "structure" here. I just mean a group of people who are willing to vote for the same things.

It's very easy to get started on this, you tax the shit out of people who have a lot of money because the old adage is true.

Even if you could achieve that, there would still be rich people. Musk would still be a billionaire even if he had to pay 90% tax.

Plus, many powerful people in government are not that rich.

His ability to use his wealth to influence the government and the populous would be significantly reduced. There's a big difference between "rich" and "rich enough circumvent democracy."

Don’t you think a far bigger threat to democracy is that government allows this influence? And voters seem to be perfectly OK with both 250M campaign contributions and widespread lobbying?

Whataboutism. Which is funny because it's literally the same problem.

It's somewhat intractable at this point unless or until we can figure out how to structure society in a way that can actually prevent it. Not sure we have the organizational knowledge at this point.

The government used to have better guards in place, but then what happened? They got weakened because of the monied interests already existed were successful at largely capturing the government. Guess what else happened during much the same time period; The government largely stopped breaking up monopolies, and many unions were busted or otherwise weakened or eliminated.

Weird that you're getting downvoted for this. You're spot on.

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