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Comment by mohamedkoubaa | Hacker News Reader

>but the tick-tock has always ticked further towards a freer, more equal, and more equitable society.

This is a popular sentiment, not a statement of historical fact. Arguments both for and against this are credible.

You can make a credible argument that the American society is less free, less equal, and less equitable than it was at its founding?

There are just so many ways in which this seems crazy to me. I feel like you think you’re luring me into some sort of rhetorical trap - but to pick the two elephants in the room, a large proportion of the population was literally owned by other people, and only white male landowners could vote.

That wasn’t the claim: it was that the tocks always outpace the ticks.

One area that this extremely obviously does not align with is immigration. Privacy is another area in steady decline for generations.

It’s very reasonable to consider that in many areas we may regress to a mean somewhere in between founding days and the peak.

Exactly. It is a high dimensional space and it depends which sample you select

Income tax did not exist at the time of founding. The freedom to spend freely from the fruits of one's labor has been lost.

I don’t think any reasonable person would think I am claiming that every ‘tick’ makes things better along every possible axis for every possible person. It’s pretty obvious that judging whether America’s ‘ticks’ have been towards ‘a freer, more equal, and more equitable society’ means considering the state of society in aggregate.

On your particular example, there are lots of debates to be had about forms of taxation and which kinds are ‘fairer’ - but more importantly, and more overwhelmingly: eighteen percent of the population of America was literally owned by other people in 1790. They couldn’t ‘spend freely from the fruits of one's labor’ to any extent at all.

Your line of argumentation asserts that freedom has increased over time with allowances for any form of subjugation by the government short of enslavement. I don't doubt that you're making a good faith argument, but it doesn't engage with the real problem of abuse of power and disenfranchisement of the people because no matter how bad it gets for the average citizen it will never be as bad as chattel slavery. It's hard to argue in good faith on a nuanced issue with someone who has a one liner mic drop response to everything.

Do you honestly think that our society was more (or as) equal 200 years ago than it is today?

Or even 50 years ago? Even in the 1970s, there were places in the United States that women couldn't get a checking account without a man co-signing on the loan.

We can certainly take issue with how rich countries oppress and exploit poor countries today, but you can't honestly say it is worse today than it was during colonialism.

Prior to the enclosure period of English common law, land was assumed to be available to the private use of government subjects. The American West was the same before it was swallowed by the US government. The current situation is provably less free along this dimension. You could argue that this is not important relative to other things (this is a value judgement), or that things done outside of the state are outside of the discussion (this is a a fallacy, a lot of things once outside of the state find themselves inside it today), or you could say that this does not account for intra-community conflict between settlers and natives (this is a straw man)

Life in Nauru today seems much worse than the colonial period

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