I think everyone does see that there is good government and bad government. They just disagree about which one is the good one and which is the bad one.

The real problem is when people demand heavy government involvement but don’t think about what could go wrong if an administration decided to misuse the regulation. They just assume it’s going to be used perfectly as they imagined it, usually to punish the companies they dislike while completely sparing the companies they like.

A good example is the usual chorus of people demanding heavy regulations or bans of social media, who always imagine that the regulator won’t touch their websites. They imagine surgical laws hitting Facebook and TikTok because they don’t use those websites, but they imagine the law won’t touch their Discords or require them to do any age verification on their phone or PC for the sites they use. Then we get the intrusive age and ID checking law proposals that everyone hates.

Alas I suspect the two major forms of government in the US have their own visions of good and bad across the board when there should be no disagreement on issues like CFCs were bad and that we need to break our addiction to coal. But good luck on that when the system itself only rewards short-term achievements and private money is now effectively unlimited. I have issues with both options, but many more issues with one side. But I am fed up with having only two options and picking the lesser of two evils that mostly drop their differences to keep the electoral status quo intact.

You are correct: there is a right and wrong. Rights are actions which do not initiate harm in the form of murder, assault, rape, theft, trespass, coercion, or deception. Wrong actions are the initiation of harm. What is truly lost is the ability to assess on first principles. You are afraid of an outcome, and think "good government" is going to protect you from that risk. A better master who will gaurd you instead of whip you is your end point. It is actually reflective of your character.

> Let's take your argument to it's extreme point: The state should never regulate anything because the state might be bad!

I'm not convinced you understand the sentiment of the parent comment. It's that one should consider all possible scenarios of one's actions when making requests of a powerful entity they can't control. The mechanics of government make it such that once something is under their control, it'll be more effort to remove those controls than what it took to initially add them.

It should also be expected that legitimate regime changes can put people in power that current lobbyists may disagree with. Lobbyists should then be conscious that by lobbying for regulation, they implicitly trust that the will of the people will always align with what they think is best for the industry being regulated in the long term (otherwise they wouldn't be lobbying or would do so in a way that confines the power to the current administration).

This extreme makes the question meaningless. A government isn't a government if it can't regulate and has no authority.

Its fundamentally different to say governments or individuals should have no power or freedom.

By design, governments have the winning end of a power imbalance and limiting them helps protect those on the losing end. Limiting those already on the losing end makes it worse for almost everyone (assuming the government is a small portion of the population).

I don't entirely disagree with your sentiment, but context and scale matters. The damage a corrupt institution can make is far bigger than some "bad" individual can do on their own.

You essentially made the libertarian argument without realizing it. According to this line of thinking, we should leave as little as possible in the hands of government exactly because it's either bad already or it will eventually be bad. We should then apply an exceptionally high bar to government responsibilities. These would be things that would be even worse in private hands (police for a simple example).

Avoid walls when walking in hallways.

I miss the days when that was the argument. Maybe I'm getting old, but growing up the general categorization was that Democrats were for the working class, opposed to large corporations, and for individual freedoms and Republicans were for a small federal government, balanced budgets, and a grab bag of "conservative" views that often rolled up to traditional family and christian values.

Today those tropes are very inaccurate, but many voters still take them as true distinctions. The last balanced budget was under a democratic president. Both parties have voted for expansions of federal authority, the Patriot Act and its renewal for example. Both parties want to tell us what we can and can't do to our own bodies, though they disagree on specific policies. Both parties believe in states' rights only after losing federal office.

The list goes on and on, suffice it to say we don't have a clear distinction of two parties with differing principles of how governments should be designed.

Small government has always been a euphemism for a government working on less distribution of wealth. Governments always intervene in the economy one way or another.

In a two party system, do you vote for the party that promises small government and never delivers, or the party that promises bigger government and does delive?

Despite advertising themselves as such, the party hasn't been for actual small government at least during my entire lifetime (40+ years).

> belongs to a party that is pretty much advertising on wanting to be a smaller government that gets involved less.

It's the other way around. Americans voted for Trump hoping he'd improve the country's economy and address the cost-of-living crisis. For example, one of the main proposals was to make ICE bigger and use it to deport as many people as possible, hoping it'd give back jobs to Americans. Another key proposal was to withdraw from climate agreements and stimulate the mining industry.

>belongs to a party that is pretty much advertising on wanting to be a smaller government that gets involved less. That is a large part of why people vote for them.

I don't think that's been the Republican messaging for years (ever since Trump) and it's certainly not a "large part of why people vote for them".

I think a very large fraction of Republican support in this day and age is based on social and cultural topics and feelings.

That is a view of the American Republican party that is multiple decades out of date.

Then the people voting for them should pay more attention to what that party does when it is in power.

Those days are long gone. Trump is much more of a statist when it comes to the economy. Not that surprising coming from a long-time Democrat.

“Advertising” vs “doing”

"Small government" is a euphemism for letting racist people be racist without censure.

The problem is not a presumption that government can't ever be good. The problem is that the team you personally think is "good" won't be in charge forever.

Everyone loves enabling broad government authority when people they like happen to be in charge.

Sooner or later, a government that is "bad" (for any possible definition of "bad" that you personally approve of) will someday be in charge. Then, suddenly, enabling all that broad government authority seems like not such a great idea.

> Reductionist "if only the government didn't get involved" doesn't work unless you presume no government is beneficial

One can believe a government shouldn't get involved in *some* things without subscribing to the belief that "no government is beneficial".

>You can be critical of the policy of export controls and the meaning of them in modern day but saying it is a problem with the government in general is nonsensical.

Hardly non-sensical. You just have a different default.

You can reverse it. "If the government gets involved" doesn't work unless you presume government is beneficial (it is not since you just recreate all the bad parts of no government anyway).

Agreed. It feels intellectually childish to say we can never have any government because of corruption. This government is flagrantly corrupt, has publicly ignored the courts, and weaponized the DOJ. This is not normal.

The left has been complaining about the executive branch over reach for quite a long time.

Hell as much as the drone strikes get simplified down to "Obama killed people without trials" the main complaint at the time was that he was acting without Congressional approval.

Democrats shouldn't have responded to Congress getting blocked up by Republicans realizing that they could make "ineffective government" a self fulfilling prophecy but pretending everyone is okay with it isn't accurate either.

Saying "both sides" doesn't make you enlightened. It's either intellectual laziness or intentional dishonesty. I absolutely abhor "bothsidesism".

One party is rounding up people and putting them into concentration camps while doing a mass deportation. That same party is trying to end birthright citizenship. That same party set the world order ablaze with a completely pointless tariffs regime. That same party started a war in Iran to please their donors and the Israeli PM, a war that is going to (IMHO) go down as the biggest strategic blunder in US history. One party doesn't want half the population to have bodily autonomy. In fact some of them have openly said they want to hand out the death penalty for getting an abortion. One party has doubled the national debt in a decade to hand out massive tax cuts to the ultra-wealthy and also gutting essential services. One party has a president credibly implicated with Jeffrey Epstein. That entire party bar a handful of individuals (who have been punished for their "disloyalty") have gone to great lengths to hide the evidence of that malfeasance. One party is killing people essentially to manipulate the market with repeated lies about an "imminent deal". One party is wholesale engaged in voter suppression and election rigging.

It's the same party for all of these things. What the other party is guilty of is being complicit in all of the above by refusing to oppose it. Still bad but nowhere near the same.

> "Government is fine if it’s done by people that aren’t in it only for themselves."

Academic studies consistently show that people attracted to a career in politics (regardless of affiliation) score higher on "Dark Triad" personality traits (narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy).

And even for the non-sociopaths, the problem with humans is instinctively we ARE only in it for ourselves and our family. Anyone claiming otherwise, ironically, is probably attempting to signal virtue for...personal gain...yet again.

I'm curious if you apply the same logic to speculation markets and corporate profits.

You can pick which of the two possibilities, neither of which is even close to your political views, will oppress you for the next 4 years.

That's not a choice, that is theatre to convince you to not get together with your neighbours to go lop heads off. It is manufacturing governing consent. Democracy does not to empower you, it only exists to convince you [loosely] of the state's violence being righteous.

Yes, but the other N% of the country still might vote for the government you didn't want.

You say it, but you don't always get it.

Yes, you get to say what you want, but that doesn’t mean you get what you want. With millions of people all saying something different, nobody gets exactly what they want.

There's currently no real democracy on earth.

Issues with majority support never change in almost all of the biggest democracies in the world right now.

For the US specifically its a representative oligopoly with Madisonian gridlock and a few million non-elected bureaucrats thrown in the middle.

The US gives the smallest amount of say to people to pick either Coke or Pepsi. Don't like sugary soda and think its making you fat? Tough luck, you gotta pick Coke or Pepsi.

US is in almost no way democratic. There is not enough unity for that. The idea and reasoning behind Democracy was that a people (i.e. a demos) rules itself. But in US there is no longer one people, and it's fracturing even faster and more.

And the logical interpretation of that statement would be "if a government doesn't do things I want, it's not functioning properly".

ICE does a lot of objectionable things no matter what you think about deporting illegals

> where companies that bribe government officials get preferred treatment

Do you think lobbying did not exist prior to two years ago?

Agreed.

HN perceives America as a temporarily embarrassed Libertarian state.

Crony capitalism, media echo-chambers and inequality have fomented an unshakeable disbelief in positive government intervention, thus the only thing left politically tenable is flagrant corruption (drain the swamp).

I'm vey grateful for the Australian federal government; their actions have steered us to a much better 2025/2026 than many other countries.

I'm enjoying imagining that this comment was typed by Dario. It sure sounds like him. I mean, he's not usually this profane, but maybe on an alt account...

There were certainly self-styled libertarians who were very keen on this particular US administration and its laissez-faire approach to rules, especially rules binding on the executive...

Turns out the alternative to bureaucracy and regulation (good and bad) is executive fiat, which is a lot less predictable and trustworthy even if their reasoning is good (which in this case it theoretically might be) and often is bad