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Comment by cucumber3732842 | Hacker News Reader

>China, which is a country with very little street crime, grafitti, vandalism etc

And very little ability for anyone or any group of people from any walk of life to resist getting screwed by the government if the government chooses to screw them.

The long term cost of putting locks on doors and bars on windows and all the other things that need to be done to deter small scale crime is peanuts compared to the cost of giving up the ability to disobey the government and work counter to the government with a low likelihood of being caught so long as one's profile is low.

I know that by putting it so plainly I'm gonna piss off a lot of people and draw the ire of many who want to see their favorite rules enforces with an iron fist at low cost. I don't care. I have judged those people to have bad ideas and bad morals and they are fundamentally bad people so long as they maintain them.

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> And very little ability for anyone or any group of people from any walk of life to resist getting screwed by the government if the government chooses to screw them.

Sorry to break it to you but if the Feds in the US have it out for you, it won't matter how squeaky clean your record is. They'll fuck you up and ruin your life without batting an eye.

Which is a great argument for Less Surveilance and Overreach.

Big time. The harder the feds have to work to ruin someone's life the better.

The more power granted, the heavier the collar and chain should be.

100% oversight commitees should be regularly conveening over their actions. And these Oversight Comitees should not be Politicians but random people.

There is a huge difference between the feds having it out for a specific person and the feds having it out for a whole class of people.

Society is not rich enough for the government to skim enough off of us to provide itself with the kind of resources it would need to go after every petty deviant or inconvenient activist the way they'd go after a mob boss.

They don't need to go after everyone. They just need to make an example of a few, ie 40 years in prison for "moving evidence".

They set the example that even if you're not related to the person shooting the gun, or even at the location, you moving vaguely political speech is a federal crime.

> the way they'd go after a very inconvenient activist

FTFY

>> and the feds having it out for a whole class of people

Are you suggesting this is not happening with the goverment suddenly criminilizing the status of legal immigrants? (this is in addition to enforcing laws against illegal aliens)

> And very little ability for anyone or any group of people from any walk of life to resist getting screwed by the government if the government chooses to screw them.

There isn’t, and has never been, a nation in human history where regular people have meaningful recourse against random targeting by the government. This is as true in Sweden as it is in China.

The best you can hope for is that a court eventually rules in your favor, after years or decades of spending all your money and energy on it, having your life utterly destroyed in the process, and at the end you get a half-hearted apology (very often not even that), plus a tiny fraction of your expenses back if you’re really lucky. The shame and desperation will be with you until your last day.

This happens all the time and absolutely everywhere in the world. I’m not even convinced it happens more frequently in China than elsewhere, though people in the West certainly like to pretend so.

> There isn’t, and has never been, a nation in human history where regular people have meaningful recourse against random targeting by the government. This is as true in Sweden as it is in China.

Truly spoken like someone who lives in neither.

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