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Comment by tjaerv | Hacker News Reader

"'The West Wing' arrived in 1999 as a televised fantasy of what we wished our government could be. 'House of Cards' arrived in 2013 as a nightmare of what we fear our government has become. [...] The politicians in 'House of Cards' [are] morally bankrupt and endlessly opportunistic. The show is no cri de coeur, but a cold dissection of the post-Obama (or post-the-Obama-many-hoped-they’d-elected), post-hope political landscape. It's a vision of American government not as we wish it were, but as we secretly fear it is."

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It is an excellent illustration of why the powers of government should be limited.

Perhaps the most convincing argument for libertarian worldview to come out of the pop-culture.

Who would want 'House of Cards' politicians to run their lives?

But right there is the counterexample. Who wouldn't want Jed Bartlet to have power?

The central issue here is one of limiting risk. It's far easier to destroy prosperity than it is to achieve it, similar to a reputation. It's less important for a good politician to be able to achieve good things than it is for a bad politician not to be able to achieve bad things.

For example, one might decide to make massive political reforms which sound good (and populist) without fully considering all their implications, and thereby destroy prosperity

The merits of the presidential system are actually a plotline in one of the episodes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLoio0Z6jLw

Well, me. I loved the show (yes, even later seasons[1]) much like I loved "The American President"[2], but would vote against the man in a heartbeat. They do some pretty despicable things while in power[3]. Plus, I notice we end the series in a war.

Re-watch the series and look at what a citizen of this land would get from the White House. It is not a great picture of an administration we would want.

Of course, no TV administration is going to be a good thing. Drama requires conflict and over 7 seasons a lot of rules get broke in a heroic manner. In real life, we call that abuse of executive privilege.

The only thing I can say is President Santos and his education plan is worse for every rural area and budget.

1) Although in later seasons, most of the writers wrote the Republicans as villain of the week instead of honorable adversaries

2) Martin Sheen is amazing in that too

3) not to mention the whole lying about the President's health and never mind the Vice President

Yep, the world really is that simple - abolish government and things will get better. It's a shame so many people don't realize how easy it is to fix all of their problems.

I can't tell if you're joking.

To be fair, this guy did talk about politicians power being limited, not abolishing the government. There are clearly good things we should take out of libertarianism, which is why most people join these fringe movements.

Please stop being facetious, libertarianism != anarchism.

Libertarianism recognizes the value of governance, don't get confused, but it asserts that certain individual rights as inalienable.

okay that's fair. I couldn't help being snarky to such a meaningless and simplistic comment.

> Please stop being facetious, libertarianism != anarchism.

Please. Anarchists (esp. anarcho-capitalists) have made up a significant portion of libertarians in the US since the Vietnam war. The 1974 Libertarian National Convention intentionally made the Libertarian Party platform ambiguous on the desirability of the state's existence (the Dallas Accord) in order to stave off a full scale war between anarchists and minarchists for goodness sakes.

Plenty of libertarians would be happy to abolish government altogether and truly believe that we'd all be better off for it.

(Non-anarchic) Libertarianism goes beyond asserting that certain individual rights are inalienable. It embraces the idea of limited government, which is really quite an insidious and anti democratic concept when you think about it. What classical libertarians believe is that government must exist for certain limited functions, but that democratic forces shouldn't be able to expand the scope of those functions. In other words, people should be bound by government, but not be able to exercise self determination in shaping that government, but rather must be bound by a government designed by philosopher kings, who divine from sacred scripture which functions of government are legitimate and not. The right to property? Makes the cut. Okay for the government to hire jack boot thugs to enforce property rights. The right to live free of discrimination and economic coercion? Doesn't make the cut. Not a legitimate function of government.

I was with you up to the sensationalist examples. "Sacred scripture"? How about "bound by a constitution created by the best minds of the day".

And how do you suppose rights are to be enforced if not the constituted government? By saying please? Or everybody shooting it out? Hope you're a good shot or your 'rights' go out the window.

Why exactly am I meant to be mollified by the fact that our Constitution was the best thing that a bunch of rich, well-connected, slaveholding elites were able to do with trendiest political philosophies of the 1600s?

And, how do you square an appeal to the framers of the Constitution for limited government with the actual decisions of those framers over the first 30 years of the US Government?

In establishing a process that allows for the orderly application of the input of the governed, of "clearing the channels" for democracy, the Constitution has been an extraordinarily effective instrument. In establishing the fundamental principles and values of that government --- something it barely even tries to do --- it is much less effective. Searching the Constitution for principles and values inevitably involves an element of tea leaf reading; pretty quickly you're out of the text of the Constitution and into the Federalist Papers, and now we're talking about a rule by three dead guys.

If people are bound by a constitution, created by the best minds of the day, which specify a government of limited powers not amenable to democratic expansion, then what is that but rule by philosopher kings?

Note that the U.S. Constitutional scheme is not one of minarchist government. The powers of the federal government are limited to those enumerated, but the scheme presupposes the existence of state governments, whose powers are nearly unlimited.[1] Moreover, the Constitution guarantees that these state governments will have republican form.

[1] More or less, the states were considered to have inherited the sovereign powers of the British Parliament, which were limited only by unwritten British constitution (i.e. the historical rights of Englishmen).

Calling for limits on the powers, scope and size of government is not at all the same as abolishing government.

Correct me if I'm mistaken, but on your view, limiting the government's ability to spy on its own citizens without warrants is tantamount to an anarchist's topsy-turvydom in which people are free to kill and steal from one another with impunity.

Is this what you mean?

> It's a shame so many people don't realize how easy it is to fix all of their problems.

Libertarianism maintains that government is not supposed to solve all your problems. That is the job of the free market: voluntary associations and mutually-beneficial transactions. Government's role is to secure the liberties that underlie the free market.

When politicians offer to "solve" people's problems, they are usually offering to steal for their constituents. "Don't have enough money for healthcare, retirement, food, housing, education, [insert your particular problem here]? Vote for me and I'll take it from your countrymen by force of government and give it to you." Voters for such politicians are thieves by proxy. It's a shame that people resort to thievery to solve their problems. But it's not a mystery as to why abolishing such a system would be unpopular.

Please don't write comments like this. You're not a grand political philosopher and this isn't the School of Athens. This low brow form of ideological dribble can just as easily be said in the opposite direction, that capitalists are exploiting their workers and that the free market is inherently unethical, and nobody is better off. If you think the world is that black and white then you're wrong.

If you think the world is that black and white then you're wrong.

How can you be so sure that the world, properly understood, is all shades of grey? That you are so certain of nothing but that the world is grey - is that not itself a "black and white" perspective?

Asserting that the speaker shouldn't make arguments because he's not "a grand political philosopher" and that his comments are a "low brow form of idealogical dribble" does not contribute to a good discussion. It's ironic that this is how you attempt to raise the level of discussion.

My comment was in response to the suggestion that government was popular because it solved people's problems and that therefore libertarianism or anarchism is unworkable. "Yep, the world really is that simple - abolish government and things will get better. It's a shame so many people don't realize how easy it is to fix all of their problems."

My response was that government does solve problems, just in an illegitimate way. Government solves people's problems by giving them benefits that they would not otherwise have, at least not without a lot of work.

The situation is like slavery of pre 1860s in the southern United States. Slavery was obviously wrong, but it survived because it "solved problems" for its constituents.

In both cases eliminating the injustice would result in making the lives of many of the system's beneficiaries worse off. Specifically, in this case, people are willing to accept the rule of evil people like those portrayed in House of Cards because it makes their personal lives more pleasant than it would be otherwise.

I really liked that quote, because for me, it touches on what I find the most disturbing about the Obama election and presidency. It seemed, during the original campaign, that there was a critical mass of supporters who were entirely sucked into a vision of Obama as a miraculous figure, able to right all of the perceived wrongs of the Bush administration and heal all of our radial divisions. Stuff that no politician could ever really do, especially one with such a short record and so little experience. But nobody paid attention to that stuff, it was all just the "hope and change". And now they're all mad that this is mostly more of the same. It tends to make me rather cynical about politics here, and likely to ignore it entirely.

And what are the odds that I've just started a huge political argument...

Usually the antidote to that kind of fatalistic discouragement is the effort to actually try and dive into policy, and understand and analyze the various bits of tradeoffs one has to make to get policy invented and passed. It's possible it would be no less discouraging, but at least it would illustrate that the people actually involved in fighting those fights are people that care very deeply and work very hard. To me, that kind of discouragement - that it's hard - is different than the kind of discouragement that comes from feeling like the whole system is pointless and useless. Another point that may help with that is to read one of the recent descriptions of the career of the recently retired Henry Waxman - someone who was responsible for a ton of change in the long term even if it probably never felt like it in the short term. If that's not the left/right side of change you like, I'd imagine there are other congresspeople on the right side that are equally skilled at quietly affecting slow but effective change over long periods of time.

The Wire precedes House of Cards by about a decade, and the former covered the dark side of politics pretty well (although restricted to just the city of Baltimore).

I've never watched The Wire, but I see so many people mention it... I'm assuming I should probably go and watch it, then?

Yes, it's one of the best shows ever made.

House of Cards was written in 1999. The Netflix version is an interpretation (the original is aboutUK politics), but the book is the basis for it.

Right, I forgot about the UK version, I was just referring to the US one.

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