For anyone interested in living in a country where there is little to no government intervention are more than welcome to move to Central Africa to see what they're missing out on.
Seriously, don't you all get tired of burning the same straw man over and over again? I'm sure you don't support every possible kind of government, including Pinochet's Chile and the Khmer Rouge. It must also be democratic, somewhat respect human rights and such, no? Likewise, people who argue against them also have conditions they believe would be necessary for a stable country. You may think they are wrong, and point out why, but just saying "look at <country in shitty conditions>" is not a good argument.
It's ridiculous to me how people talk like they're so far apart on their views of what a government should be, but when we really get to the nuts and bolts we're all pretty much after the same thing.
My post had nothing to do with agreeing or not with you. I expressed no opinion on the issue. I was just trying to explain why I think the "why don't you move to Somalia?" is a bad argument.
Without the FDA and its outmoded regulations, there would be a flourishing of condoms for people to choose from, instead of just the three entrenched companies that can afford to deal with the gov't. If nothing else, the article details the fact that there are a LOT of people who care deeply about and are trying to solve this problem (and should be left largely unconstrained to do so).
What I do see is HN not taking lightly claims that someone just makes out of hand without evidence as if they are obviously the truth, no further proof needed.
I dont think anyone would make the claim that any government is beyond reproach. If you have been paying attention to the recent snowden or schwartz or any of the recent police action related articles posted on here, you would see criticism of the government hitting very high levels of (well deserved) vitriol.
Really? Last time I checked, most HN users subscribed to the notion that the government is slow and inefficient and does not do as good of a job as private companies in most fields.
Libertarian viewpoints tend to be heavily downvoted though, and for good reason. There are some people whose love for private enterprise and the "invisible hand of the market" blinds them to reality.
Government is lazy and callus about updating regulations regarding to development and testing of prophylactics. Innovative and better alternatives were taken off the market due to said regulations.
The commentary was spot on. The point of the original comment was to provide bullets without lengthy justification and citation and it was upvoted.
Then this "lazy" bullet was added and all the sudden the author needs to back up his assertion with detailed arguments? The pro-government bias here is insane.
As I said, don't be critical of government on HN unless you don't care about the group think popularity karma contest going on here.