Centralization is clearly bad in the private sector. I'm curious why people here don't see centralization of government as similarly bad. With 3.5T in revenue, the US federal government is the single largest entity in existence, and it's scope is vast, covering things as disparate as mail and health care. There are plenty of examples of them abusing their position (and occasionally their people...), yet this forum rarely expresses the same level of frustration and outage found on this thread.
I'm supposed to be represented by my government, which we collectively give power to through the constitution. There's no constitution for Google. We don't talk about centralization of government because we figured it out ~250 years ago. We are just figuring out how to curtail the power of internet giants today. There is no inconsistency.
> We don't talk about centralization of government because we figured it out ~250 years ago.
I know that your parent explicitly mentioned the US, but let's not pretend either that the US found the, or even a, right answer to structuring government, or that no other country has found their own answers.
> Eh, the USA is working okay all things considered.
For many people, it probably is—the key to its longevity (and it's very young on the global stage) is working well enough for enough people enough of the time—but there are plenty of people for whom it's not working—me and plenty of other people in the US, but also the global victims of the international policies of the US. (Before the whataboutism comes in, this is not to say that other countries don't also have dissatisfied residents or bad international policies. I was responding specifically to a comment whose wording could be read as saying that the US, rather than any other country one might want to discuss, had found the right answer to government.)
> There's not one right answer here.
I agree, and that's why I was urging against wording that seemed to imply that the US's answer was the answer to 'correct' government.
Well please propose a solution. I see all kind of complaints, but never any solutions proposed other than nonsense like "we can form anarchy enclaves!" Enjoy your 2 or 3 years of existence before a much bigger despotic army rolls in and takes you over, good luck with research on fixing things like covid, ebola, and polio. We need to work in the system we have, we need protests and activistic populace who act to the benefit of the whole rather than "I got mine"
Personally I'd like to live under a much more European model of governance, but that, too, isn't perfect. (And, of course, one way to do that is to move to Europe. But this thread started not from a debate about the best place to live, but from my response to a post whose wording, "we figured it out ~250 years ago", could be read as suggesting that the US had found the right solution to government.)
But it is meaningful to disagree with "we figured it out ~250 years ago" (a quote from the post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24178311 to which I was originally responding), which says that we already know the answer, even if I don't know the answer (and even if, as I suspect, there isn't just one answer—if there is even one).
> good luck with research on fixing things like covid, ebola, and polio.
Polio is gone. Ebola, to the extent that it is gone, is because of a massive worldwide effort, not because of any one government—it literally, scientifically, could not have been eradicated by one government. It's not clear to me that the US's record on dealing with COVID is such that it can afford to sneer at anyone else's ability to deal with it, "anarchy enclave" or otherwise.
Tech companies are a direct product of your government's structure. If your constitution didn't allow lobbyists from megacorps having more power over legislature than the collective mass of its citizens, these companies would not be in the position of monopoly they are in.
It’s clearly bad (and I’m a left wing liberal), I think we need to give states more rights even if it sometimes will hurt causes we like. I also think we need to do another thing that is similar but not the same which is to drive down the stakes of politics. The president needs less power, and the Supreme Court should be more predictable (for example each president nominates two new Supreme Court justices). Spreading out power is a form of decentralization.
Because there is no alternative; how would the state of Texas defend itself from an invasion from China? If we split up the USA into just the states they would all eventually be taken by a foreign power. There is big value in doing things at scale that can't be accomplished in little anarchy/federalist nodes
