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Comment by atoav | Hacker News Reader

A government ideally is a representation of the democratically chosen will of the people. If it is not, work towards making it so. IMO wherever someone says "the government" we should mentally substitute "we all, collectively".

But a specific type of person appears to labour under the illusion that somehow we can get by without we all collectively steering our direction and choosing people who do what needs to be done without commercial interest. Their idea is that instead of choosing people who do it, we just make them compete for who can squeeze the most profit out of dealing with a problem and "somehow" that leads to a better result. When you press them for the details on that part of the mechanism, you will usually get crickets.

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Thank you, that's also one of my peeves.

Interestingly, the people who try to separate themselves from "the government" also seem to be the kind of people who want to "spread our model of democracy to the rest of the world".

How they can even reconcile being such a great democracy that the world needs to ~copy~ be force-fed with having an adversary government I don't know. The cognitive dissonance is so great that it's hard to fathom.

It's all such a self-defeating ideology, they think the government isn't doing a good enough job, so they lobby to make it impossible for them to do a good job and then pretend that it proves their point.

"we all" is wrong, always.

You do not agree with me. You can't claim to have my interests or my will if you are against it.

Yes? With sufficient pedantic spirit anything can be argued against. This is what you're doing. So to give a counter-example: You drive with three friends in a car. You ask them: "Do we all want to go to MC Donald's?"

Explain how it is wrong and why it would be. If it is always wrong it follows it has to be wrong here too. The answer is that the meaning of "we all" is context dependent and that friend of yours that argues that we all somehow includes people in the whole city is an oddball that doesn't pick up the context within the words have been said.

We can all go around and make each others day worse with deliberate pedantry by ignoring the context of words, but that is basically just a waste of human energy. If you disagree with the fundamental point I made, argue against it based on the merits of the idea instead of arguing semantics.

This reads like a tired response not even engaging with the point. What amount of detail would relay to you "human energy"?

You don't even engage with the original argument, you skip past it and claim "we all, collectively" without understanding the meaning of the words, and absolutely they matter.

You do it again with me with the lame "McDonald's". My advice to you is to stop railroading a conversation. It never works. Unless you only want to speak to people like cassianoleal or hgoel.

> IMO wherever someone says "the government" we should mentally substitute "we all, collectively".

No, we should substitute "unaccountable bureaucrats". The people who enter and leave power from elections are not the source of the daily frustrations people have with government, it's the rest.

If this is in fact an issue where you life, then you should consider stopping to elect politicians that allow bureaucrats to be unaccountable. Or stop believing politicians who rave on about how bureaucrats are unaccountable while they themselves have the power to shape systems where that would not be the case.

I don't have to believe politicians, I see it with my own eyes whenever I deal with government employees.

how do you think that alleged amorphous mass of unaccountable bureaucrats got their jobs?

Same way anyone else got their job, but that's beside the point. The point is that accountability in government is significantly lower than in private industry, and this is a big source of the problems.

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