I see the point, without centralized power you wouldn't have messes at this scale, there would be local messes that local power would be incentivised to clean up because it's in their backyard and it stinks.
How about it's never too late to work to rectify the mistakes of the past. We at least have to do our best as human beings. I can't do anything about something 1000 years ago, but I can help that person I saw on the street maybe, or I can add my voice to those who decry some terrible behavior of the government. I can vote. I can go to city councils and speak out.
Who goes around implicitly trusting central power. In any aspect of their lives.
I can literally think of no one I know who wouldn’t respond to me telling them “hey you should stop implicitly trusting central power” by asking what drugs I’m on if I think they implicitly trust central power.
I guess this straw man is necessary to create so some can beat it down, but as far as I can tell such people don’t actually exist.
Who goes around implicitly trusting central power. In any aspect of their lives.
It's required for the government to provide a "social safety net" and more broadly for the Progressive vision of society. That includes Progressive-era reforms in education and retirement, as well as Progressive inspired reforms in healthcare and welfare, esp. the Great Society.
These reforms are predicated on the notion of a government agency collecting statistical data and reviewing comments from the public to determine policy that provides baseline services and acts as a buffer to economic variance.
Note also "implicit" trust. Trust is transitive: you might trust in some service the government provides without necessarily understanding that the service relies on some centralized power. Thus you might not explicitly trust a central authority, but because you rely on the services it provides you may be implicitly trusting it.
None of that stuff really requires any great level of centralization at all. Many components, like social security, are effectively mandatory requirement savings and could be replicated at the level of an individual if they didn't exist, simply by using the money not paid in social security tax to buy an annuity.
The primary thing you would require any government for at all would be redistributive programs, but that still doesn't require uniformity of centralization. We don't even have it as it is -- the Saudis are some of the richest people in the world, they make most of their money from the US and Europe, yet they pay no income tax to either region.
Meanwhile you could implement redistributive programs even at the level of a city. There is nothing stopping New York City from imposing a land value tax and using the money to fund a UBI, if that's what they want to do.
Centralized government actually interferes with this significantly, because San Francisco or the state of California can't implement its own healthcare policies when they have the US government overriding them, and hoovering up the state's money and sending it to other states, using it for military spending or sending it back with strings attached that require it to be spent on less efficient or less appropriate programs than the state would choose to fund for itself.
To be clear, I wasn't arguing whether policy should be one way or the other or what anyone should do, just whether or not people do commonly trust central authority.
You bring up a fair objection: the Progressives' big pushes for central planning were around 100 years ago, and there's no reason the same goals couldn't be met with a distributivist approach, and many novel programs rely far less on central planning.
All true, and you're going to find hundreds of people on HN who could go into far greater detail.
Outside this techno-libertarian bubble, most people have no notion of distributed anything. If you ask most people, "how can we do a major program," their conception will be a big government agency planning it out.
And they'll have reasonable arguments for why, such as economies of scale and standardization.
Meanwhile you could implement redistributive programs even at the level of a city.
I think this hits at a problem with the original concept of "trusting a central authority" as you bring up what is a smaller central authority, but nevertheless somewhat central.
Comments
Tell people around you to stop implicitly trusting centralized power.
But whom has the power to clean something like this up except for centralized power?
"The market."
Just kidding.
The market is irresponsible.
Not kidding.
I see the point, without centralized power you wouldn't have messes at this scale, there would be local messes that local power would be incentivised to clean up because it's in their backyard and it stinks.
The people that created it.
This mess was created by the US government.
How about it's never too late to work to rectify the mistakes of the past. We at least have to do our best as human beings. I can't do anything about something 1000 years ago, but I can help that person I saw on the street maybe, or I can add my voice to those who decry some terrible behavior of the government. I can vote. I can go to city councils and speak out.
Who goes around implicitly trusting central power. In any aspect of their lives.
I can literally think of no one I know who wouldn’t respond to me telling them “hey you should stop implicitly trusting central power” by asking what drugs I’m on if I think they implicitly trust central power.
I guess this straw man is necessary to create so some can beat it down, but as far as I can tell such people don’t actually exist.
It's required for the government to provide a "social safety net" and more broadly for the Progressive vision of society. That includes Progressive-era reforms in education and retirement, as well as Progressive inspired reforms in healthcare and welfare, esp. the Great Society.
These reforms are predicated on the notion of a government agency collecting statistical data and reviewing comments from the public to determine policy that provides baseline services and acts as a buffer to economic variance.
Note also "implicit" trust. Trust is transitive: you might trust in some service the government provides without necessarily understanding that the service relies on some centralized power. Thus you might not explicitly trust a central authority, but because you rely on the services it provides you may be implicitly trusting it.
None of that stuff really requires any great level of centralization at all. Many components, like social security, are effectively mandatory requirement savings and could be replicated at the level of an individual if they didn't exist, simply by using the money not paid in social security tax to buy an annuity.
The primary thing you would require any government for at all would be redistributive programs, but that still doesn't require uniformity of centralization. We don't even have it as it is -- the Saudis are some of the richest people in the world, they make most of their money from the US and Europe, yet they pay no income tax to either region.
Meanwhile you could implement redistributive programs even at the level of a city. There is nothing stopping New York City from imposing a land value tax and using the money to fund a UBI, if that's what they want to do.
Centralized government actually interferes with this significantly, because San Francisco or the state of California can't implement its own healthcare policies when they have the US government overriding them, and hoovering up the state's money and sending it to other states, using it for military spending or sending it back with strings attached that require it to be spent on less efficient or less appropriate programs than the state would choose to fund for itself.
To be clear, I wasn't arguing whether policy should be one way or the other or what anyone should do, just whether or not people do commonly trust central authority.
You bring up a fair objection: the Progressives' big pushes for central planning were around 100 years ago, and there's no reason the same goals couldn't be met with a distributivist approach, and many novel programs rely far less on central planning.
All true, and you're going to find hundreds of people on HN who could go into far greater detail.
Outside this techno-libertarian bubble, most people have no notion of distributed anything. If you ask most people, "how can we do a major program," their conception will be a big government agency planning it out.
And they'll have reasonable arguments for why, such as economies of scale and standardization.
I think this hits at a problem with the original concept of "trusting a central authority" as you bring up what is a smaller central authority, but nevertheless somewhat central.
People trust centralized power because there is no viable alternative to trusting the centralized power and hoping for the best.