for the record I am not a conservative, nor was my account just created today (specifically just a few minutes ago like your account. Let me guess, your past yc news account was NSX2?).

I just feel that hacker news is a forum for posting a wide range of ideas. If you don't agree with an article you can do one of two things:

1) post a logical counter argument like some people already have.

2) ignore it.

I really hate posts that really have nothing to do with the general ideas that articles convey. it tends to become useless noise.

This isn't about conservatism vs liberalism. This is about US Social Security. Please stick with the subject.

"I really hate posts that really have nothing to do with the general ideas that articles convey."

Agreed. You gave us the courtesy of titling the thread in a way that made clear what the thread was about. Anyone commenting here can express one opinion about Social Security or another, preferably with evidence, and then we can all learn something. I just found a link from Harvard

http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/hjackson/UnfundedMandates...

mentioning that Congress has exempted Social Security from a law designed to identify programs that set up "unfunded mandates." That's food for thought.

In a site populated by hackers and entrepreneurs, you're going to get people with a strong preference for individualism over collectivism - that's the nature of the beast here. People are going to be very free action-oriented, anti-paternalistic, and not too many of us are going to like the government. We've also got the smart people thing going on where we think politicians are numbskills that spend more time politicking than doing anything intelligent.

So you've got that. But past that, it's hard to find intelligent discussion on economics, government, and society, and a bit coming into HN is healthy for the discussion.

What I'm impressed about is that we get practically no political current events here - and that's pretty cool. Most of the ideas we talk about in terms of economics, society, and government are pretty broad, intellectual strokes instead of inflamed stuff. And for the record, I'm all up for talking about market failure, monopolozation, and unfair initial distribution of resources. And we can have some good discussion.

Edit: This was originally a reply to someone who said HN was being invaded by Conservative lobbyists getting free publicity or some such. byrneseyeview replied to the same guy quoting some of it before he deleted it if you're curious as to the gist of it.

A social safety net isn't "collectivism". "Collectivism" is an emotional button hard libertarians try to push. Agree or disagree with Social Security, but please don't tar "hackers and entrepreneurs" with a single political brush.

Pardon me, I didn't know it was a politically-loaded term these days. I meant it as a more general term the way people would make the broad statement that "Eastern societies are more collectivist, and Western societies are more individualist." More responsibility to the group, with the associated pros and cons of that.

I was making the point to the original poster who said HN has a conservative lean. My point was you're going to tend to see more individualistic people on the whole here, and more individualistic people tend to dislike the government having a larger role in their lives. That's true on the whole in my experience, but certainly not for everyone.

Anyway, thanks for pointing that out. I'm just here for good discussion and the free cookies, not to push any emotional buttons or tar people I respect with a single political brush :)

Every time people write sentences that start with "Hackers tend to" and involve "the government", I throw up a little in my mouth. You could use the same logic about "individualist hackers" to argue against gun control. But then you'd be Eric Raymond.

Hackers are people who like to build things. That's all. They don't all think like you. Some of our country's greatest entrepreneurs are also its strongest believers in the social safety net. You might consider starting with Warren Buffett.

No worries, I feel like I've learned an important lesson here about generalizing. For the record, you don't need to talk about being tarred, throwing up in your mouth, for me to get your point - but it does get across that how you feel about this. I'll be more careful about broad generalizations going forwards, and best wishes.

Sokay. You're being nicer than I am at this point.

I would take your point about there not being many political current events a step further. The broad ideas discussed here are some of the most important issues of our day. I might be overstating things a bit, but I think it's safe to say that the HN audience is largely composed of the people who work to propel society forward through their ventures. The readership here are highly educated and are largely "in the trenches" every day solving problems and building the things society needs. These professional problem solvers and hackers are the very individuals I want to be engaging in healthy debate about the virtues of various policies and their impact on business, innovation, and society as a whole.

The problem is when the policy debate degenerates into the standard political name calling and senseless bickering that does nothing to advance intelligent ideas. If any community can keep that to a minimum, it's this one.

I would be interested in talking to many of the people here about cooking. But this isn't "Hackers Discussing Cooking"; it's "Hacker News". Your idea about what this site should be is a slippery slope.

MIT started long before it was in the people's republic of cambridge.

Serving the market doesn't make any sense, the market is letting people voluntary interact with each other.

I have seen a lot from libertarians; few from conservatives or Conservatives. Which particular anti-abortion, pro-war, pro-Drug War, traditionalist, or otherwise conservative articles were you referring to?

I think it's really funny that when you see some viewpoints with which you disagree, it is because some big, anonymous agglomeration ("Conservatives!") must be abusing their freedom of speech by saying things with which many HN readers agree (and your solution -- telling an actual big, anonymous agglomeration to push their viewpoints here -- just seems to exacerbate the problem). A few other points:

In Conservatism, the purpose of people is to serve The Market.

What does it mean to 'serve' the market? The market is an abstraction -- you can't make 'it' better or worse-off, though you can do that to participants.

Our unregulated Conservative markets

You're referring to how the unregulated hedge funds produced much worse returns than the highly-regulated commercial- and investment-banking industries -- and how the only safe spot in the current financial turmoil is the highly-regulated, government-created, government-subsidized mortgage industry, right? Right?

Mississippi and Alabama have Conservative state governments, and have practically no startup activity. Massachusetts and New York are not Conservative, which makes them capable of spawning MIT and Silicon Alley.

Has it not occurred to you that you have the cause and effect wrong, here? New York and California can have more abusive governments because even if you pay 50% of your marginal income in taxes, you're still better off starting a startup in CA than in Mississippi, or trading derivatives in New York rather than Alabama.

What happened when we had sky-high taxes on rich people, and highly regulated markets?

Some day, you will be introduced to the term 'loophole'. You will wonder why the three-martini lunch and the company car used to be so common, and are now so rare. You will run the numbers on the Reagan tax cuts and find that the reduction in nominal rates would imply gigantic cuts in total income received, which is not what happened -- and then you'll realize that, in general, tax cuts are accompanied by loophole-closing, and tax increases are accompanied by loophole creation. That's just how things work.

Thank you for linking to Paul Krugman, well-known as the first person to be awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize for his political rants in a popular newspaper, rather than his academic papers. I haven't actually read what the prize committee said about him, but everyone I've met who agrees with Krugman's polemics seems to see the prize as new evidence in their favor, so I am assuming that this is what the award was for. Right?