> It is a weird concept for the libertarian mind

"Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes."

"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names."

"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Yes and we managed to do that for 150 years with a fraction of the current government size.

You think we protected everyone's rights in 1874?

Many things like childcare, elder care, or healthcare have significantly changed over the last 150 years and now people have much less slack[0] to go back to the old ways.

Anyway I care little about the size of a government as it is the result of many perverse incentives (vetocracy, companies pushing for both deregulations and regulatory capture, late stage capitalism trying to make almost everyone poor and/or unstable) but the latest generation of attacks on the size of the government feel a lot like a Embrace Extend Extinguish on social safety nets so that predatory industries like healtcare insurance can better extract wealth from the lower classes

[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/12/studies-on-slack/

Do you think inequality has risen or decreased as the size of the government increased? Regulatory capture can only exist with the existence of unchecked regulatory power. I personally work in a space that is insanely difficult to new entrants because of the thousands of regulations you need to comply to (90% are garbage btw). If tmrw, our industry had a regulation reform, the entrenched players would die overnight.

> Do you think inequality has risen or decreased as the size of the government increased?

I would say inequality decreased as the size of the government increased, and inequality increased as the size of the government decreased from its 1967 peak, yes. The New Deal was the single greatest reduction in inequality in national history.

I am not arguing for or against size of the government, nor I am arguing long term strategies, I am saying that ripping out wellfare programs is a rugpull on a lot of people

Inequality has generally gone down as time goes by.

Because regulations cut both ways. They stop bad actors and they stop innovators.

Innovators thrive at the start of an industry, later once its commoditized, its going to be driven by people who want to cut corners. See enshittification.

Regulations put a ceiling on harm by bad actors.

Either we need industries that do not obey such laws of physical reality and entropy, or we need to accomodate for the most probable occurrence efficiently.

You will always have examples of failures of these regulations, the measure of their efficiency is from the counterfactual losses and gains.

... there's a lot of people who aren't landing-owning white men who would disagree with you.

So you are saying if the founding fathers had 100 agencies then slavery wouldve been abolished?

I'm saying your premise is so hilariously ahistorical it deserves mocking.