[geeks] Liber-fascism

[nate at portents.com]

> On Oct 25, 2008, at 01:00 , William Barnett-Lewis wrote:
>
>> I am so tired of these people who bitch about taxes while happily
>> using the infrastructure the rest of us have paid for.
>
> Most of us bitching about taxes get very little benefit from the
> infrastructure, and most of the taxes are *WASTED*.
>
> If anything, the "infrastructure" lowers the quality of life we have
> and cripples private enterprise in most cases.
>
> The government is only supposed to take on a limited number of roles.
> I don't mind paying for those, it's the other 60% (conservative guess)
> that they are *NOT* authorized to manage that bothers me.
>
> I find it incredibly ironic (and disappointing) that we spent vast
> amounts on socialist bullshit, and almost nothing on worthwhile
> projects like NASA, R&D, or long-term solutions.
>
> Yes, I know that technically NASA is also not officially legal, but at
> least it is a worthwhile project, one I don't mind paying for.

Eh, the problem is really just one of the oldest there are - power issues.

Bureaurocracy gets entrenched over time, people try to grab power, don't
want to let go, mechanisms aren't put in place to balance it out or
properly *expire* bureaucratic mechanisms created to adjust for something
at one point in time, and things get bigger, more cumbersome, and more
unnecessarily convoluted over time.

For example, just think about how something like our existing tax system
is now messily tangled up into the (sort of) free markets we have - entire
supply/demand cycles and the prices that result from them are determined
by a lot of stupid tax stuff, so that if say you wanted to clean up the
tax code, you'd have all sorts of disruptions of markets.  I can look
around government today (let's call it point A) and can envision a better
tomorrow (point B) but what I don't have is a path from point A to point B
that isn't highly disruptive.

It's trivial to complain about stuff today, but what I don't see is anyone
suggesting ways to untangle things, reduce centers (and abuses) of power
while simultaneously being relatively non-disruptive to markets.  I've
been doing a lot of thinking about it, and I'm not sure yet how tractable
a problem it is, really.

And personally I don't find labels such as 'socialist' very helpful, since
I think it over-simplifies the discussion.

- Nate