alt Hacker News> Orthogonal concept.
It's the sort of thing people generally mean when they say that someone acting in their own interest can be in your interest, and is the thing which is happening in the example from the thread.
> Concepts like taxation; deterrence through corporal punishment, jailing and fines; paying salary for labour; hell, religion–these are all about aligning individual self interests with collective goals.
And the practical implementations of all of those things are severely flawed to the point of questioning whether most of them are even net positive.
Taxes are supposed to benefit the public, and be paid with some fairness. In practice they go disproportionately to cronies or buying votes from affluent retirees, the tax code is so full of carve outs for special interests that it looks like swiss cheese and various political incentives cause it to impose severe benefits cliffs on lower middle income people that create poverty traps that benefit no one.
The criminal justice system on paper operates based on the rule of law, but the laws are so complex, overlapping and sparsely enforced that it really operates on whether a prosecutor is inclined to charge you with something. The results are mass incarceration and a system that enables a corrupt incumbent to use the threat of prosecution to extract favors.
The principal-agent problem inherent in hiring someone is well-known and is dramatically exacerbated by large organizational hierarchies that put long chains of inaccessible authority between the customer and the person ultimately doing the work.
Religion seems like a long debate but I don't think it would be controversial to assert that there have been issues there.
> I'd argue competition is more an optimiser on these primitives. Not a primitive per se.
Try to imagine any of the others operating without it. You have to pay taxes but have no alternatives on which jurisdiction to live in or who decides how much tax you pay or how the money is spent, what happens? You want to be hired or use the money you earn to buy something but there is only one employer and only one supplier of goods and services, what happens?
> sort of thing people generally mean when they say that someone acting in their own interest can be in your interest, and is the thing which is happening in the example from the thread
It's a single example of temporary alignment. Employment, citizenship and affiliation are non-kinship examples of more-durable bonds.
> the practical implementations of all of those things are severely flawed to the point of questioning whether most of them are even net positive
We can debate that. What we can't debate is whether they work. Complex societies exist and work. Everyone who has a choice makes the choice, dominantly, to stay in them.
> You have to pay taxes but have no alternatives on which jurisdiction to live in or who decides how much tax you pay or how the money is spent, what happens? You want to be hired or use the money you earn to buy something but there is only one employer and only one supplier of goods and services, what happens?
Sure. This is a modifier. It makes these other things work or not. Imagine a system with competition but no taxation. You lose public services. Same for competition without private employment–you're in a totalitarian state with a monopsony on labour.