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Comment by nirnira | Hacker News Reader

Governments like this should just fuck off and let people take their own risks. Jesus. If you're worried about people getting ripped off, why don't you just run a campaign giving advice on how to choose to spot scams? Why not treat people intelligently? Oh no, sorry, something scary and different that you don't understand? Kill it!

Old dinosaurs.

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Because most of that people will come running to the government institutions when they get ripped off, will complain in the newspapers that the government has allowed this to continue for far too long, etc, etc, etc.

To follow HN's mandatory analogy policy, it's like when PCs had too many options and users were shooting themselves in the foot and then Apple came along and simplified things by removing those options. Some are mad to this day, others love how they aren't caught in difficult situations.

In your analogy, there's still competition between Linux and Apple. It's not like a designers union passed a law that no more than 3 parameters per app should be available to users.

Within Schengen, there is increasingly competition between governments, too. You can choose anything from a big-government state like Sweden to a small-government state like Latvia, and differences on many other axes as well. Especially true in tech, where things are getting pretty integrated and mobile (and converging on English as the lingua franca).

The problematic part for the big-government states is that there is nothing preventing the Swede from going to government paid school & university in Sweden, making his millions in Latvia and retiring to Spain while still getting his Swedish government pension.

So Sweden's government will have to become more Latvian.

Looking at the direction of net migration, I think Latvia is currently losing that competition: people who attend university in Latvia go to pursue careers in Sweden much more often than the reverse. In fact I would guess that the "low-tax" strategy is partly motivated by an attempt to combat the brain drain. If they weren't losing so badly, they could probably afford to be a higher-tax, higher-service society, but right now they have to compete on price.

The state pensions these days are tied to where you worked and paid taxes. At least that's the case in Denmark (not as familiar with Sweden). If you work in Denmark 40 years, you're entitled to a full state pension. If you work 20, you're entitled to half of one. If you work 4, you're entitled to 10%. You don't get it solely by citizenship. There is some basic welfare support for those who live in the country, though, e.g. if you're a Danish citizen who lived abroad and ends up back in Denmark dirt poor aged 70 and lacking a pension from elsewhere to support yourself, you won't be on the street. But that is relatively uncommon.

Generally so far it hasn't been a major issue, though things are being continually tweaked, and there are some tax shenanigans especially at the corporate level. But Scandinavia has been fairly successful in the inter-country competition for being seen as a nice place to live. It's pretty uncommon for people who study at university here to pursue careers elsewhere for more than a short period of time, because most Scandinavians prefer to live somewhere with a functioning civil society and government, low levels of crime, good support for raising children, and generally a working social system.

and It is why the coop is in such trouble in the UK some greedy rich pensioners invested in hi yielding bonds (PIBS) thinking oh 7%/8% yield with out understanding their responsibilities.

They whined about having to take a haircut to the press and MP's and the coop had to sell off its family jewels to private equity vulture funds who are gong to screw over the holders of PIBS anyway

The Spanish government is the one that puts taxes on people using their own solar panels for personal consumption:

http://www.thelocal.es/20131112/spains-solar-police-to-kick-...

It must be one of the most anti-progress political moves I've seen.

I know this law well, it's not a tax but a grid fee – you pay a c/KWh fee if panels are connected to the grid and/or use the grid for alternative supply, but not for off-grid panels. The fee doesn't specify if the panels are for personal or industrial use. Something very similar to what the state of Arizona does. That article doesn't do a very good job of explaining the raison d'être of the so-called "tax".

I'm so conflicted in how I feel about Libertarians lately. I've always been sympathetic to many the ideas, especially those that relate to moral values rather than economics.

OTOH "I love the music but I can't stand the scene."

I've always found it rather puerile, for exactly the lack of understanding and subtlety displayed by OP. It's no wonder to me that it's so popular with engineers, it's an expression of the same mindset an engineer has when he sees a problem from afar and is convinced that he has the perfectly modeled solution.

Now if only those pesky humans and their idiosyncrasies would conform to the ideal behavior...

If you want to represent "humans and their idiosyncrasies" in terms that can be understandable to a classical liberal economist...

Government itself is an emergent phenomenon. Rent seeking, regulatory capture or other market distortions are not the only emergent elements of government. Legislation, elections and all the other basic components of democratic government are themselves emergent, changing in response to "market" forces. I don't personally think this is the best framework for thinking about these things, but even within the framework it is possible to consider them.

You're obviously not familiar with the massive economic literature on the many, many various ways governments distort economies, create waste and hamstring growth - all while often utterly failing to achieve stated goals.

This isn't to say that governments aren't providers of certain goods (national and personal security, protection of property, legal systems, systems for pricing and controlling externalities) that are critical for growth.

You're obviously not familiar...

So to combat my personal opinion that advocates of naked Libertarianism are essentially juvenile, you provide a naked display of naive realism:

The three "tenets" of naive realism are:

That I see entities and events as they are in objective reality, and that my social attitudes, beliefs, preferences, priorities, and the like follow from a relatively dispassionate, unbiased and essentially "unmediated" comprehension of the information or evidence at hand.

That other rational social perceivers generally will share my reactions, behaviors, and opinions—provided they have had access to the same information that gave rise to my views, and provided that they too have processed that information in a reasonably thoughtful and open-minded fashion.

That the failure of a given individual or group to share my views arises from one of three possible sources—

- the individual or group in question may have been exposed to a different sample of information than I was (in which case, provided that the other party is reasonable and open minded, the sharing or pooling of information should lead us to reach an agreement);

- the individual or group in question may be lazy, irrational, or otherwise unable or unwilling to proceed in a normative fashion from objective evidence to reasonable conclusions; or

- the individual or group in question may be biased (either in interpreting the evidence, or in proceeding from evidence to conclusions) by ideology, self-interest, or some other distorting personal influence.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na%C3%AFve_realism_(psychology...

I disagree. There are many things that are illegal because they are bad for society.

"crowdfunding" is completely unregulated, and just like other startups that decide regulation isn't a good idea (Mt Gox, airbnb, that unlicensed taxi thing, etc etc), things rarely end well.

For every 1 legitimate crowdfunding campaign, there's probably 100 that are just there to scam people out of money. And when people are increasingly scammed out of money, who will they look to to compensate them? Their government.

and who will regulate the regulators? In recent history, it appears no one will. Will things end well with respect to that? History tells us no.

No, people should just do their homework and choose the crowdfunding platforms with the best reputation (which will be the one which force funding seekers to verify themselves with the best identity platform). There should be a free market so crowdfunders can compete to offer the best reliability.

Honestly, there's no need whatsoever to regulate this whatsoever. The market will evolve of its own accord until it's "good enough." Regulation will be impotent at best and destructive at worst.

This is the exact same thing that happened with banks. People got angry because banks went bust, and the government stepped in to insure them with public dollars (i.e. take risks that no private citizen would take with their own money.) How did that turn out eh? 100 years down the track and people still fail to do their homework because they can trust the government will pay. And everyone loses.

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