Further, the cognitive dissonance in this viewpoint is strong, in that they can see how treating any other composite entity, e.g. corporations, or a single corporation, or whatever as a monolith will be ridiculed as "you can't judge this composite entity as a whole based on a subset of it's components". Similarly when the effects of the entities they like look like the results the fear from the government, it is all OK, because some magical thinking results in not understanding what a choice really is (namely that somehow being forced to do something because it is the only choice that minimizes harm when the mechanism is not government is freedom, but when it is government it is tyranny).

It's not that government can't do good things, it's that when they screw up, they do it real bad, and fixing it, if at all possible, takes decades.

If the government can pass a sensible internet privacy and security law, then I'm all for it. It's just that the potential of times probability of a screw up that makes everything worse for everyone is very high.

Yes there are people to whom government becomes the hammer. But they are not the same set of people who say "lets not go overboard with the nails guys". (for all nails)

But that's a strawman. Companies are ultimately guided by the concern for profit - but they can only make a profit (long term) by providing a value to all their stakeholders. Of course companies can some times profit in the short term by screwing over one group of stakeholders, but generally they only get to do that once per stakeholder group.

> The rest of us say, oh there is this government tool, and there look, it solves the problem without contortion.

Hardly. Yes, it can solve the problem (it's hardly a rule that government actually solves the problems it takes on). But even the problems that can reasonably be said to be solved, there are more often than not some unintended consequences.

This is semantic wrangling. It is generally pretty easy to create corporations. It would be even easier if the "regulation is strictly forbidden" crowd had their way. As it exists now, corporations are fairly anonymous, and as such, spinning out a corporation per "screwing" is not that hard. Sure long term value per corporation is non existant, but the long-term value of the strategy is pretty straight forward. It has already been shown that investment as it exists today favors short term profit over long term value anyway. Numbers this quarter are generally the main driver.

Further, without regulation preventing the screwing over of people, why wouldn't every company choose the guaranteed profit over other methods. They could just take the profit safe from the fact that anyone not generating gobs of cash right now could be simply "competed out of the market" via mechanisms that are currently illegal as monopolistic. It isn't conjecture either - those rules are a response to companies getting rid of the competition then as soon as the specter of "a good company" isn't looming over them, they returned to screwing people over.

Yes, a very crude and usually ineffective one. So are corporations.

There is no good means to solve cooperation problems in the general case. The only way we know of that actually works is to have a group of people who are all committed to a specific goal and who all share the same factual beliefs as to how best to reach that goal. That is very rarely true, which is why cooperation problems rarely get solved very well.

That's my point: Schneier is not dictator. Network regulation would be in his interest, if he could dictate what form it would take; as a minority in a democracy, he's on the wrong end of the regulatory pointy stick.

You're right, I'm treating a democracy as competing factions, not as a cooperating monolith ("people fighting themselves" ; "people governing themselves").