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Comment by clairity | Hacker News Reader

the article ends with a trite dogmatic assertion that individualism will save the world. no, ayn rand, it will not. individualism and collectivism need to maintain a creative tension for economies to thrive. it's irreconcilable that the same troubles cited by the author (income inequality, militaristic aggression, religious extremism, etc.) have roots in stroking the individual's ego.

there are some interesting tidbits like technological change creating (short-term) economic upheaval and credit cannot fuel economic growth. but the conclusion drawn is a curious amalgamation of progressive individualism that simply doesn't follow from the observations that come before it.

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Now it is a good time to read 'The Road to Serfdom' by F. Hayek one more time. Rising expectations of some part of the society that the government can give them a shield from change and solve their problems are common during a crisis. On the other hand, governments everywhere, the West included, are eager to take more and more control over individual life. The book is in the public domain and is available here https://mises.org/library/road-serfdom-0

i haven't read it (and maybe i should) but it sounds like that book might be ideologically dogmatic. i get disappointed by such things because they never model sociopolitical life accurately enough for the conclusions to be useful.

governments are not special in requiring vigilance to keep them in check. religions, corporations and other large political bodies (in the larger sense of the word) also require vigilance. the answer isn't simply individualism. these political bodies form because they provide social and economic efficiencies that we want. such groups form instinctively and immediately, and as such, we won't stop the formation of political bodies. the question then is how to we structure the collection of political bodies so that they keep each other in check, since no one individual can effectively orchestrate such a balance?

democratic capitalism is interesting in that it's an (imperfect) iteration of such a system.

> However, the element of permanence that all societies need should be provided through the enforcement of the rights of the individual, not by protecting the economic or political status of some vociferous sectors.

Am... no, it ends with an assertion that human rights should be respected, not trampled by saving insolvent companies, invading countries and enforcing fundamentalist beliefs.

i don't necessarily disagree with yours as a general statement and i'll admit i jumped a little far to reach my conclusions, but manuel hinds is not simply arguing for human rights either. he's arguing that (democratic) capitalism is the antidote for all our present ills, while at the same time saying technological revolution (fostered by that same capitalism) is the impetus for those ills due to a militant idealization of a technologically simpler and more egalitarian past.

he doesn't attempt at all to address the complexity of balancing the rights of the individual with the stability of the whole society. this is the hard part and he doesn't say anything about it at all. throwing out some rah-rah speech about how we should all be democratic capitalists, even through rough terrain like ours now, doesn't actually make a convincing argument. he also doesn't string together the tidbits of economic data he cites to form a coherent argument for why technological progress leads to our current geopolitical problems, though that's the presumed meat of the article.

that's what i (and seemingly a number of others) was reacting negatively to. even though i'm sympathetic to his line of reasoning, he's anything but convincing.

Using big words doesn't make your point more valid. Just sayin'

So you concede the validity of his/her point? Take your anti-intellectualism elsewhere.

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