In a market, I get what I want when I "vote" and the decisions can be fluidly changed. If I want to drink orange juice in the morning, I don't have to assemble a coalition of like-minded orange juice drinkers. Nor do I run the risk of losing and having to drink Coke for the next four years because I couldn't persuade enough of my fellow citizens to drink orange juice instead.

I already did that. Somehow the crooked politicians keep getting elected.

The huge difference here is that actual markets are quite refined. I control how much I choose to spend and how engaged I am with other members of the market. With a government, I don't have that degree of control and a lot of other people wouldn't like it if I did have the desired degree of control. That's the primary reason I favor throwing off most government functions to the private world. I get to have the control I want and you get to not care.

A free society where we can be the best we can be as we see it.

There isn't one obvious standard of optimization. Optimization inherently requires a choice about what is to be optimized. For example, a common failure mode is to optimize that which is more easily measurable. Governments do this all the time economically with GDP, a measure of economic activity. This results, among other problems, with the well-known problem of the Broken Window fallacy where economic activity is considered more important than the creation of value.

Prisoners' dilemma is the classic example. That covers a broad category of human interaction right there where one person can potentially screw over another for personal gain. Then there's a number of large projects where coordination of activity results in a better outcome than uncoordinated action.

The high prevalence of unintended consequences, delusional viewpoints, and "bang-bang" control.

For example, let's consider the current story. Prosecutors got to this point of casual abuses of laws and ethics because there are no consequences. People cared more about the appearance of "being tough on crime" and expediting the prosecution of crime than on results, the unintended consequence is that now there are a bunch of out of control prosecutors who can harass people and organizations just because they feel like it.

There are plenty of delusional viewpoints such as ignoring or rationalizing law enforcement abuses, rationalizing that it's ok to jail people because of drugs or unpopular things said on the internet, or assuming that the government which commits blatant abuses in one area of intervention won't commit similar abuses in an area that the person wants intervention in.

And a near universal delusion of government intervention is that it is possible for an external group to know enough about a problem to effectively intervene. Commonly, there are profound knowledge gaps that aren't acknowledged and which greatly impair actual intervention attempts.

Finally, the real world bang-bang control problem is balancing a rod, like a broom, by moving the bottom end back and forth, The official version allows movement in one dimension and the only choices are to move left or right at constant speed. For cases where the rod isn't too far out of balance or moving too fast, you can keep it suspended indefinitely even in the presence of small, continuing, random disturbances of the system. You are always moving left or right. This uses more energy than a gradual approach that uses smaller adjustments when conditions are near balance.

Government intervention is not gradual or nuanced. And it's not uncommon to see government set up systems with fundamental flaws and then propose increasingly complex and bizarre fixes as the system goes more and more out of balance.

A classic example is the military-industrial complexes of the developed world, particularly, the US. The fundamental problem is that the system is a vehicle for transferring wealth from the public to a well-connected private network. National defense and security is lower priority whether by intent or not.

This has resulted in the sorry spectacle of a system that can keep track of the quality of the screws, but not the quality of the final product. There are plenty of major US defense contractors who have produced crap, overpriced products for decades (with really nice screws), yet still get plenty of business from the US government. There's no credible means to correct the problem because there are a small number of suppliers and any punishment would either impair the US's near future defensive capabilities or be trivial enough to ignore.

In summary, there's plenty of evidence that the approach doesn't work very well, due to the ignorance of the people controlling the system, the crudity of the means of control, and often just due to having terrible goals that are wildly incompatible with the needs of society.

You're starting to see why I use a credit union. Yes, they charge nothing for routine transactions. My point here is that one can do a lot to protect oneself from nefarious actions of a business - most often simply by not doing business with them.

Shop around a little. It's not that hard to avoid bad players. But you have to try first.

Whoever I was replying to.

And I'm just pointing out that there are plenty of times when government intervention is not only unwarranted, it is actually counterproductive. I think a large part of the problem here is that =advocates of government intervention frequently don't have much idea what "judicious government intervention" means.

I don't agree that this was "fake" communism. But the author of the previously linked story agrees that the supposed transition from capitalism to communism starts with something that isn't actually capitalism. This is the difference.

In other words, it was a communist revolution that completely derailed once Lenin died. The thing is here that most such communist revolutions were by people who drank the kool aid and lived to a ripe age such as Mao Tse Tung, Ho Chi Minh, and Pol Pot. Marxism has wholesale murder and dishonesty baked into the philosophy (for example, a fair number of communist revolutionaries brag about how the capitalists would gullibly assist with their own executions). And because communism completely fails to take human nature into account, it has failure baked in as well.

Capitalism doesn't have these problems. There's no murder or failure baked into the system. There's no assuming that humanity will act differently than it always has. And capitalism has elevated over the past century more people from poverty and enslavement than communism put in.

I don't have a similar problem. The issue here is that you need very ample individual rights or you just don't have a counterbalance to the overwhelming might of the collective. Even if we have pure rule by the collective, somehow eliminating the insidious conflicts of interest of rulers, we still have fundamental conflicts between us. They commonly manifest as discrimination against an outcast minority and short sighted decision making. For examples of the former in the US, we have Jim Crow laws, current attempts to classify Asian Americans as just Caucasians, blocking same sex marriage, and the propensity to ban stuff (hobby science and HFT come to mind).

For an example of the latter, we have "too big to fail", the current "jobs" metric (where politicians brags about spending an absurd amount of money per job created), the War on Crime/Drugs/Terrorism, and a huge emphasis on short term individual, business, and societal risk reduction even when that increases risks in the long run.

I don't have a similar problem. The issue here is that you need very ample individual rights or you just don't have a counterbalance to the overwhelming might of the collective. A vast problem here is

Depends on what you're trying to optimize. But having said that, I'm quite aware that there are a variety of situations where individual action results in suboptimal outcomes. I just think that's a terrible excuse for generating an even worse outcome via government action.

No, it doesn't. It was only an official diplomatic correspondence of the day.

Or me rubbing my nose. I got to stop doing that.

What platform would they run on? I think you've eliminated most of the legitimate Republican platform except perhaps some vague economic prosperity stuff. And you know, everyone is for economic prosperity.

Sure, they are. I think this story is an obvious counterexample for the prosecutor side. The burden of proof is too high. And since when have defense attorneys been able to lie in court? I see that they can be disbarred for doing so and there are other consequences.

Credit union.