Use the state to fix failures of the state? There's a weird cyclic optimism here that I don't think can really be supported by the facts. After all, those who write a law can just as easily add addendum to that law, or remove it all together. Even with equal banking laws, there's always going to be an individual who the state deems as less equal than others. That's just how it's always been.
Its bizarre that this is such an unpopular idea, when if posted in a thread about anything other than crypto, it'd likely not be scoffed at this hard.
Any fix for a failure in human organization(s) is going to come from ... humans. There are no hall monitors here, and there's also no magic wand. When things are of a large enough scope, the way that humans tend to organize to get things done, or get things fixed, is called "a state". Just like all human efforts, the outcome will likely not be perfect. But there actually isn't another way. Sure, you can suggest the idea that some alternate organization could do something, but it too will not be perfect. And an organization large enough to do substantive things about the issues at the top of TFA will essentially be a state, whether you call it that or not.
Who advocated to blindly trust the government? I thought that whole point is that democracy works by trusting your goverent with open eyes and working to correct it when it strays?
Except that's not what I'm saying at all. What I'm saying is:
1. Bad laws got us into this place
2. There's a lot of inertia in government
3. There's a lot of stake holders in government who don't have citizen's interests at heart
4. It's illogical to think you can, in light of this, just pass a law and fix it.
Yeah, we designed the law, and we know how it works. Sadly, we know also that the way it works is generally not how it should, and it has been co-opted often for the powerful.
And crypto isn't dominated by the wealthy and being used to serve their ends? Open your eyes my friend. There is far more corruption and disfunction in the average cryptocurrency org than the average government.
Did I say that? I explicitly say in multiple places that I'm not advocating for crypto, just asking people to not put the blind trust into their government "just passing a law".
It always baffles me why someone can't say "I'm opposed to X" without another person coming along and saying "that means you're in favor of Y". Don't respond to what you think I said, respond to what I actually said.
I'm not sure how the advice of "just pass a law" is anything other than blind trust. If you didn't think I was advocating crypto, then what purpose does:
> And crypto isn't dominated by the wealthy and being used to serve their ends? Open your eyes my friend
serve? Why would you mention something completely unrelated to their point, then tell them to open their eyes? To me it sounds like you're retroactively recasting your argument.
> You make a law that everyone must be served by the banks. Easy.
Here is the "just pass a law" line. I've summarized a line that makes this exact point. I see no straw-men here. Can you point out where I make a straw-man? Genuinely interested in why you see this as creating a straw-man in my summary. I fail to see how else you can interpret other than 'just pass a law'.
"just pass a law" is longer than "make a law" and is thus not a summarization...
Quotations marks imply a quote or a refernce to a term / phrase. When you deliberate misquote someone and then repeat that all over the thread as the basis for your argument, that is a strawman at best and pure bad faith at worst.
I see nothing in the line you are referencing that indicates any sort of blind trust is suggested. Even simple, easy legistlation works best when the trust it is based on is not blind.
Yeah, I'm done with this. I told you my objective was to summarize, you have decided I'm maliciously twisting someone's words. I'm not. I've told you as much. My misuse of quotation marks isn't proof in the pudding. I've explained multiple times, to you no less, my point but you've ignored it and have actually strawmanned it yourself. This is what you're doing right now actually by accusing me of random things.
I suggest you look into the "principal of charity". Its fine to disagree, but being hostile and accusatory isn't.
The principal of charity is why I suggested you are stawmanning rather than actively trolling. You asked for am explanation and I provided it.
You've never explained how you got to the assumption that anyone here is suggesting "blind faith" in the government. Please go ahead and do that or don't claim you've "explained multiple times."
I suspect because "make a law" conveys some sense of the actual process of legislating, whereas "just pass a law" sounds as if it deliberately minimizes the process and makes it sound as if it is something trivial to do.
I agree with your points 1-3 but I don't think your conclusion in 4 follows logically. It misses important historical context of where passing laws did in fact create more equitable access to important civic resources. Take for instance the Civil Rights Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act. You could have made the same argument you are making now to dissuade people from passing those laws.
I definitely think laws can do what you say. But I think that's not always what happens. What I object to is really more specifically how the gist is "change the laws, its an easy fix". Anyone who spectates government (odd phrase, I know) will understand that this is very much not an easy fix.
"The economic system isn't working well, so let's smash it, eliminate the ability of the government to tax people, and give almost all the world's money to a tiny number of anonymous people, 90%+ of whom are affluent white Libertarian males."
Honestly, this whole thing just makes me tremendously sad now.
Well let's face it, there's a widespread and popular political philosophy floating around (especially in the USA) which essentially boils down "the rich are not rich enough and the poor are too rich", so this proposal would fit right in with that !
Let me change the context and see if you still believe that argument: Countries like Russia and China don't need a global internet; they should just fix their censorship problems. VPN operators are scammers taking money from ordinary citizens.
Don't know anything about China, but many programmers have been leaving Russia for a last few years, and internet censorship is one of the big reasons for that. So it has the desired effect -- Russia has less talent, and thus its regime is less stable. It's tiny, but it's there.
As for "VPN being a scammer", this is all about trade-offs. If we had companies destroyed and robbed by VPN-powered ransomware, and we had plain people losing their life savings to VPNs, I'd argue for making VPN illegal. But it's not VPNs who are stealing people's money, it is cryptocurrencies.
> the way that humans tend to get things fixed, is called "a state"... But there actually isn't another way.
Sure there is. It's called "entrepreneurship". In fact, far more of the improvement in the human condition has come from it than the state.
It's astounding to me that we're on an Internet forum about startups, and people are saying that the only way to improve the world is through political activism.
Well, first of all "Hacker News" is not an internet forum about startups. You're thinking of the purpose of YCombinator, which hosts Hacker News but is not Hacker News.
Second, some of us have the experience of having been through, or been adjacent to, the social and political movements of the 1960s, which largely shunned actual political action in favor of personal change and the creation of new, non-state organizations. Despite the widespread availability of wholewheat bread in 2022, an honest retrospective analysis of this approach would have to conclude that it was largely a failure, at least in terms of the various goals involving widespread political and social change.
Thirdly, some of us have been a part of certain, ahem, startups that have gone on to be as much as part of "the problem" as anything that came before them, meaning that our expectation that entrepeneurial capitalism as the savior doesn't seem particularly promising either.
More like that's how democracies fail. Our current method of "fixing" failures of the state involves layering more and more legislation and regulation on top of the broken legislation and regulation. We do nothing to address the root causes of those failures because that would mean closing a lot of the loop holes that allow politicians to get rich by leveraging their positions aka corruption. Why else would we need bills that are thousands of pages long and seem to accomplish absolutely nothing?
> Our current method of "fixing" failures of the state involves layering more and more legislation and regulation on top of the broken legislation and regulation.
The UK is the perfect example. Hundreds of years of out-dated laws layered on top of each other to the point where nobody can tell what is law and what is a joke.
English law is the preferred basis for cross-border contracts and English courts are the preferred venue for litigation between entities from different jurisdictions. This is very well attested - e.g. first result from Google:
>The UK is the perfect example. Hundreds of years of out-dated laws layered on top of each other to the point where nobody can tell what is law and what is a joke.
Allowing politicians to get rich by leveraging their positions is still better than the alternative. What's the alternative, by the way? What do you suggest we replace democracy with?
You could start with a lot more transparency. Everything that isn't critical to the defense of the nation should be public and auditable. Hot button issues like stock trading while in office, term limits and corporate lobbying could be fixed with simple laws if you ignore the whining of current office-holders. If you want to be more drastic, then start shifting power away from the federal government and towards local governments. Politicians who are close to their constituents are the only ones that can be sufficiently supervised. Reduce the role of the faraway central government to that of referee and coordinator and make sure that 99% of representatives time is spent in their own districts where the people can get a hold of them. Finally, if you want to flip the table completely then institute some form of sortition where another branch of government with equal power is formed from randomly selected citizens who are given the opportunity to represent their communities at the levers of power.
You have to accept though that just saying "ah, the government will fix it" when historically governments have been a major contributor to wealth inequality, is somewhat glib. There's a reason NGOs and private charity exist.
I think this approach is just as wrong as saying "crypto is the answer".
And that is another instance where many people part ways, because another big aspect of crypto is that it is partially motivated by a political ideology that most people politely reject and many people think is full of crackpots and scam artists (because it is).
I'm not advocating crypto here, I'm just pointing out that saying crypto is bad because you can "just pass a law" is just as illogical as saying "internet blockchain money will give us freedom".
> saying crypto is bad because you can "just pass a law"
I think you're misconstruing the original suggestion, which was that a legal solution to the problem of the unbanked would be viable. You could pass legislation mandating that banks turn no one away, you could establish a publicly run bank of last resort, etc.
I believe those measures would be "easier" solutions to the problem than replacing the entire financial system, but that's just an opinion about a hypothetical.
Not suggesting we replace the banking, just pointing out how this path you suggest is still not going to be an easy fix. There's no easy fix. Again, not advocating for crypto as a solution. Just asking people to consider more deeply the issues of saying "use the government to solve it!".
> You make a law that everyone must be served by the banks. Easy.
This is the one I'm specifically discussing, its from a different user. This is the line that started the thread. Plenty of users are discussing this specific line I believe.
FWIW, I thought the "Easy." you cite was meant sarcastically. The full context is:
> The same as national health insurance. You make a law that everyone must be served by the banks. Easy.
and national health insurance is famously a fiendishly hard public policy issue (albeit one for which several competing models exist and have been put into practice). Working from an existing public policy model (like using France's example of offering bank-of-last-resort services through the postal service) still seems way easier than just deciding to solve it with crypto.
On the other hand, what would the world look like without democratic governments? Look at history, and you will notice that it is rarely better. Those who seek wealth and power aren't created by governments, nor will they magically disappear if governments disappear (or if their power is neutered). At least democracies have some checks and balances, even if they are nowhere near as effective as we need them to be.
> On the other hand, what would the world look like without democratic governments
Nobody here is advocating against democracy. People are just pointing out that blind trust in state institutions is equally as illogical as blind trust in the EVM. States have a track record of serving the powerful first, and sometimes exclusively. Trusting apparatus with a track record like this masks a sort of flawed optimism, just like putting your hopes of change in the blockchain.
Why are you so insistent that the trust necessarily be blind? Having legislation is the first step to getting banks to comply with how we think they should work. What's the alternative method of coercing their behavior?
The initial discussion started with someone saying something to the effect of "just change the law, easy". To me, that reads as "just use the government, it'll be fine". Perhaps it's just me, but that sounds a lot like blind trust in an institute.
> There's a weird cyclic optimism here that I don't think can really be supported by the facts.
That's a pretty American, libertarian take. As somebody who grew up in Western Europe, I'm not disillusioned by "the state" per se, and I think that the facts rather support that privatisation doesn't always make things better (e.g. railways). None of us may be "right" (it always depends on your experiences), but it's worth considering that "using the state to fix society" isn't a completely ridiculous take for everyone.
I'm not American. This take tends to come out of countries where the government has strayed away from its objective of serving the people. There are plenty of governments I'd trust, and not hold a libertarian view towards. Funny enough, most of these are European governments, so your point is well taken. That said, using the state to solve this problem isn't universally going to work. I bet Nordic nations could pull it off, if they've not already.
In short: if the government doesn't work for the people, and is structurally broken, I hold a libertarian perspective. If I see a government that works for the people, I lean neoliberal.
The lack of banking services for the poor is a market failure not a state failure.
State competition in markets that have failed to deliver necessary services has long been effective whether its through provision of housing or bare bones post office bank accounts.
It not only provides underserved communities it whips competitors into line because - surprise surprise - competition works.
It's the one weird trick parasitic oligarchs hate.
The same as national health insurance. You make a law that everyone must be served by the banks. Easy.