> It's the old "I'm from the government and I am here to help" joke.

What else is the government for? I understand it's a popular Reagan talking point but I don't really grok it.

If you assume the govt doesn't work for us, particularly if you're in politics, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This is probably not the best thread for a political discussion, but I will take a shot. Nobody disputes that governments should be a force for good. Government's obviously can do both good and bad. Many reason atrocities like the cultural revolution came of under the pretext of trying to help. If you think the government has veered into doing bad, it is natural to want to reform it and make it stop doing that. the talking point and metaphor simply conveys a belief that some of the governments work is bad and should be stopped. It's a lot more complicated, but that's the 5-year-old explanation of it

Government that limits its own power by law is humanity's greatest political invention.

Anyone can make a government that sometimes does good. The challenge is to create a government that cannot do unfathomable evil.

> the talking point and metaphor simply conveys a belief that some of the governments work is bad and should be stopped

This is a nuanced and thoughtful position. The statement "The 9 words you never want to hear are I'm from the government and I'm here to help"" is not nuanced and thoughtful, it doesn't suggest governments do good and bad, it positions governments (and their agents) as incapable of doing good. That someone from the government trying to help you must not be, for whatever reason.

I don't know what to tell you. It's not a literal statement. At Best it is a heuristic and more often, a platitude.

It's like don't talk to Cops or corporate HR works for the company and not you.

If you were to take it at face value and debate it against it, you would be making the fallacy error of secundum quid. If you want to have a real discussion about how much good and or bad the government does, you need to find a real human to have that discussion with. The saying alone is a not complete self-contained philosophy.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secundum_quid#:~:text=Secund...

The idea is that government is inherently bad. But no government is worse.

People in government will abuse their positions as much as possible.

So limiting government as much as possible is the goal.

Good example is pandemic. Governments saved a small number of people by collapsing economies. Quit possibly killing more people then were saved. There is a very good argument that the best thing governments could have done is “nothing”.

Government is the worst possible way to solve any problem. Therefore, we should only let it solve those problems that absolutely cannot be solved any other way. There are plenty, and this is not a statement that all government is bad, but that it needs to be tightly constrained.

People constantly rail about the evil wrought by big business, and they're right to do so, but what is the government (in the US anyway), but the biggest (and perhaps most corrupt) business of all? Except it's not constrained by the requirement to turn a profit, so it doesn't suffer the bad consequences of failure, because you can always print more money.

And you're absolutely right about the pandemic response.

It's not really remarkable because governments rarely come up with nasty names. Even then the cultural revolution isn't an inherently positive. Culture can be good or bad and so can revolutions

Of course they don't. But what's remarkable, and the U.S. is no exception here, is that the names they come up with are quite often the diametric opposite of what effects they actually have. The "Inflation Reduction Act of 2022" is but one recent example.

For anyone else who was curious: the Reagan version of this quote used "I'm", not "I am". https://www.reaganfoundation.org/ronald-reagan/reagan-quotes... I mention this not to be nitpicky, but just because googling the quote with "I am" didn't work well.

"Cultural Revolution" is actually a very apt name for what happened. One of the core concepts of it was the destruction of the "four olds": old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits. They were horrifyingly efficient at it, resulting in what was one of the single-largest destructions of cultural heritage in history, and almost certainly the largest one perpetuated by one's own people (albeit the original iconoclasts probably give them a run for their money).

Everyone in Asia did or is doing the same thing.

Meiji did this in Japan, to the point where many B. temples were burnt down (thankfully not as bad as Mao), and the whole of Japan's culture considered obsolete. KMT boys were doing the same thing in China before Mao. Nehru and his Congress cretins who inherited the British state, did the same, and India continues these "destroy Bharata" policies to this day.

In fact, since a lot of Asian culture is tied to India, one might call this an extension of the millennia long war on India from the West, but now on the realm on the realm of ideas. Not surprising that the occidental academia has deep-hatred for India's old-culture and everyone who imbibes it (at the same level as medieval anti-semitism from my own experience). They also have the victim-complex of Islam (and Xtianity to a lesser extent) to their support now.

Westernization is not the same thing as throwing away ALL your cultural heritage and adopting Marxist ideology to the letter...

You might argue it's a difference in degree, but if the Cultural Revolution actually succeeded (or not reverted), it would be the difference between zero and non-zero cultural heritage left.

Please do not take HN threads on generic ideological tangents.

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