"Trust us, we're from the government"

One of the things I run into with great consistency when I try to talk to people about alternate conceptions of social organization (besides the currently prevalent "nation-state") is their unbalanced accounting: they will dig hard and deep to find the most perplexing edge-case for the alternate system (examples include tragedy-of-the-commons type problems, "freeloader" problems, etc., problems that of course exist and are not nicely solved by the current system either) and when the answer isn't a slamdunk proclaim "aha! Your system is broken, conversation ended!", while seemingly not seeing the gargantuan mass of problems that the *current* system already has in widely demonstrable form. I wish I had documented *all* of them, just so I could return their remark with a list of thousands and thousands of not imagined problems or anticipated problems but *existing* problems, but I guess there's no time like the present to start.

To wit: what a surprise, an audit has found that police regularly misues police databases to look up data about celebrities. And yet, the same people that tell me how good the current system is and how bad an alternative would be will just go on assuming that somehow the people who work for government are "different" than eveyrone else, that government is "benevolent" and works "for the people", rather than seeing that there is no such as "government" as an entity, there are only people, the only agents in our society that take action are people, and whether or not people work for the government or not, they still have the same strengths, weaknesses, desires, self-interests, etc., as everyone else. Which is to say: any system designed with the notion that there will exist one "super class" of people that is above human nature and can be trusted to act benevolently even if they do not have sufficient incentives to do is designed from false assumptions and likely to be very dissappointing.

It is likely to end up, say, trusting that "super class" of people with more information and power than normal people and then expecting them not to use that information or power for their own uses.

And that's not theory: it is demonstrable fact. Read the article.