5 ms·

You know, libertarians have been saying for a long time that it's best to keep government as local as possible, so you could choose how you wanted to live, and

by SiVal 10y ago

You know, libertarians have been saying for a long time that it's best to keep government as local as possible, so you could choose how you wanted to live, and live that way to the greatest extent possible, without having to worry about what happened in other states or in the federal election. You decide how you want to live and others can decide how they want to live. Liberals responded with a policy of moving as much power to Washington as possible, explicitly to enforce a policy of, No, we will decide how everyone lives, and enforce it federally to minimize others' ability to escape our reach. Libertarians have been saying that judges should do their best to interpret the meaning of the legislators, so that whatever laws we had would be those written by legislators elected by the people. Liberals said, No, we want judges to interpret laws to mean what they ought to have said if they people had done as we wanted, so that the laws will be what the political elite want them to be, regardless of what the know-nothing rabble choose for themselves. So now, we have the precedent established and argued for for years from the left that the law is what the court wants it to be, not what the people said. Nice work. All along, those promoting local government rather than central, unescapable authority have been derided as fascists by liberals. Now the chickens come home to roost. Do you think now that maximizing and centralizing and moving out of reach as much power as possible was a good idea? No? Want to change it? Why didn't you in all the years you were in power and advocated the opposite, because now you've turned that power over to another group. It didn't have to be this way, but you wouldn't stop. Probably still won't and will instead just fight to regain control.

zanny 10y ago
I absolutely agree with this premise philosophically, but history speaks against it sometimes. Civil rights are a great example. Minorities living in the south during Jim Crow were always legally allowed to move north to freer states that wouldn't discriminate against them. But they didn't. Mostly because they were economically and informatively suppressed to the point where they no longer possessed free movement - either they could not afford the cost, or did not know the option existed through intentional disinformation. The same applies today, for everything from legalized cannabis, to right to die, to bathroom law, to abortion availability and rights, to gay marriage before the supreme court decision. People who are oppressed by hostile local legislation still choose to stay, often because they don't have a choice. But that is fairly black and white, and reality really isn't. The more interesting, and I think where the liberal argument gets its support more than anything, is in those who have the choice but have to weigh their options. It is an awful situation to be in to decide between gaining rights and leaving everything you know behind. People really resist leaving their homes, in all definitions of the term. There is resistance to leaving your parents house. To leaving your hometown. To leaving your home culture. And that resistance often defeats people who would, objectively, and purely analytically, be better served just leaving. But that is 20/20 hindsight showing itself. At the time, these people do not know what might happen. They have to weigh the risks. And there is a tremendous natural human aversion to risk. It drives millions of people who would be more prosperous - economically, personally, etc - to stay where they are and not take what they perceive and weigh as unnecessary risk. A lot of this is a problem of the times. The more opportunity you have in your destination the lower the risk of moving there. Opportunity, in aggregate, is at generational lows today in the US. It suppresses mobility, and that generational lack of opportunity and thus promotion of conservative decisions regarding your own prosperity and rights creates the environment for top-down policy to centralize authority over the whole, to use a wide brush to direct ideology than letting people chose their own. Because in practice, many people cannot make that choice, objectively or as a product of their own uncertainty, and the liberal wing that pushes centralized power to assert their beliefs see that people suffer in conditions they wouldn't need to if they had perfect information and had no emotional baggage holding them back from seizing opportunity. Distributing power, localizing governance, and making it as democratic as possible in the process is the path to maximal liberty and happiness. But it requires that people actually take advantage of that opportunity. If you build it, how are they to come if they don't know its there?
- hackuser 10y ago
  > Minorities living in the south during Jim Crow were always legally allowed to move north Rights are not services sold in the free market, matched up by supply and demand. They are universal and inalienable. Whether they move or not, those people were 100% entitled to their rights and to a government that protected them. That's why governments are instituted among men and women.
- slicktux 10y ago
  It is important to note that RIGHTS differ from POWER; I as an individual whom has a libertarian philosophy say "limit the federal government, not the people" and I know what that implies; A federal government of which its power is limited to adherence of the US Constitution, Article 1 Section 8; Dr. King fought for a uniformity of African-American Civil Rights through out the united states, so he is a perfect example of the power individuals have when it comes to RIGHTS: Now we get in more gray areas like abortion maybe it can become a right to abort through out the united states, or maybe not, but that is not to say that states cannot deal with the issue; it gets messy when government starts to PAY for such programs through the POWER it has from taxing people that it becomes messy; if that is the case states have the right to both make it a RIGHT and to use its POWER to pay for such programs; now for the federal government, whether it goes through the legislative branch, or not, it becomes UNCONSTITUTIONAL if and only when the POWER to TAX is used to pay for such programs (back to Article 1 Section 8), but if it simply becomes a RIGHT to abort without imposing state sponsored programs (which would be abuse at this point) then it is not unconstitutional. Long live the constitution!
csallen 10y ago
This is vague and hyperbolic. For starters, there is no united group known as "liberals" whom either of us can speak on behalf of, but I will indulge you and also speak in generalizations. Liberals do not arbitrarily support "moving as much power to Washington as possible". Rather, they believe strongly that human rights should be dispensed equally to everyone in the country. If abortion is a right, then being born in Texas shouldn't deprive a woman of that right any more than being born in the south in the 19th century should've deprived blacks of their freedom. Similar arguments can be made for gay marriage, miscegenation laws, female suffrage, the availability of healthcare for the poor, quality education, etc. There's nothing whatsoever baked into the liberal ideology that supports things like domestic spying and warrantless wiretaps. Rather, the better explanation is any branch of government (in this case the executive branch) is incentivized to increase its own power, and people tend to be biased in favor of their party's presidents. But I've met countless pro-Snowden liberals, and I think you've really mischaracterized the essence of what makes liberals liberal.
- rayiner 10y ago
  You're skirting around his point. American liberals don't just believe in human rights for everyone in the country--they have embraced using a strong centralized government and its court system as the way of enforcing those rights. But the side-effect of that is taking away autonomy and independence from the states, which leaves states less capable of opposing centralized surveillance. Liberals may not want surveillance, but they helped create the power structure that enables surveillance as a byproduct of pursing end goals they do want. I think the benefits of that approach far outweigh the drawbacks, but it's important to acknowledge the drawbacks. If you give the central government more power so it can achieve X, you have to be aware of the possibility that it will use its power to also do Y.
  - matt4077 10y ago
    I fail to see how civil rights legislation or Loving v Virginia allowed the creation of the NSA. It appears that most surveillance programs are operated under the foreign intelligence and/or defense umbrella, a part of government that has been centralized longer than the country itself exists. I'd also like to see a few examples of states vigorously opposing these programs. I mean – so many of them are willing to overstep their authority when it comes to hot-button issues such as the widespread voter fraud that some must have tried to get creative to stop surveillance, right?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
jjoonathan 10y ago
I really ought to know better by now, but I'll bite. > libertarians have been saying for a long time that it's best to keep government as local as possible, so you could choose how you wanted to live ... and maximize the reach of the market, which is more global than any government on Earth, and in practice works in the opposite way: organize your life around making yourself useful to those with money, fast, or you will starve. If that means uprooting your family and moving someplace where you can work yourself to an early grave in the coal mines, so be it. If that means neglecting your duty as sherriff and looking the other way while the company machine-guns striking workers, so be it. If that means giving blowjobs to strangers on the street, So. Be. It. Such liberty! Very freedom. > Libertarians have been saying that judges should do their best to interpret the meaning of the legislators ... unless they're striking down regulations that are a result of government overreach, which is quite OK. Every corner of the political spectrum accuses judges of judicial activism precisely when the rulings don't go their way. It's like complaining about the referee in sports, except easier, because laws for society are much more complicated than the rules for sports, which are complicated enough. Yesterday's legislators and their laws agreed with each other about as well as today's legislators and their laws, which is to say "not at all," so everyone has a claim to the judicial activism argument and everyone uses it when they want to sound insightful but don't want to expose themselves to the risks of talking specifics. Yawn. > All along, those promoting local government rather than central, unescapable authority have been derided as fascists by liberals. That usually happens when local government is being especially asinine -- buying their police department tanks, targeting minorities, making poverty illegal, making protests illegal, etc. Local != benevolent. Local != escapable, either, because opinions and incentives tend to be highly correlated between communities, so even if it is worth it to up and move you'll find that every other "local" government is doing the same damn thing. Options without choice. Something that should be all too familiar to free-marketeers ;) > Now the chickens come home to roost. Do you think now that maximizing and centralizing and moving out of reach as much power as possible was a good idea? Even if we wanted, an option to federate power was never really on the ballot. All parties want power, that's why they seek it. Everyone thinks they are right, or else they would change their opinion, and everyone wants (reasonably) to fight for what is right. Show me a politician who wants to devolve power and I'll show you a liar. They may not know it yet, especially if they've never won power, but it's true.
hiou 10y ago
> we will decide how everyone lives everyone? Dial back the extremism for a minute. Get off Facebook.
- coredog64 10y ago
  When a reporter drives out into what they think of as "hicksville" looking for a quote that can be ginned up into a big story[0], that is one thing. When the subject of the story has to close up shop due to death threats for holding a position on gay marriage held by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton circa 2009, now we're shading into that "will decide how everyone lives" territory. [0] http://reason.com/blog/2015/04/02/was-memories-pizza-a-victim-of-irrespons http://reason.com/blog/2015/04/02/was-memories-pizza-a-victi...
Kenji 10y ago
Related (Trey Gowdy excerpt): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yxonn5QjaJY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yxonn5QjaJY
pdkl95 10y ago
> libertarians have been saying for a long time that it's best to keep government as local as possible Libertarians have in practice spent far more time trying to remove as much power from government as possible and handing it to corporations[1]. This strategy is either very naive or based on self interest, because it doesn't actually address the concentration of power; it only moves it to a different group of people. The way to manage power is to spread it out as much as possible, subject to as many self interest based checks and balances as possible. Neither governments or corporations[2] can be allowed to "win", because it is the struggle itself that keeps power restrained to a necessary minimum. The system fails without both: corporations need to use their money and influence to push back against government overreach, and governments need to use their various powers to regulate the corporate world. > those written by legislators elected by the people That's what the judges are addressing, because it isn't always clear what those laws actually say, especially in ambiguous situations that didn't exist when the law was written. > we want judges to interpret laws to mean what they ought to have said Yes, which is necessary because the law isn't magically unambiguous. How else do you think we should interpret the law in ambiguous or unforeseen situations? Also, remember that the legislature - the people that were elected by the people - can simply override judicial interpretation at any time. > the laws will be what the political elite want them to be That problem happens anyway. The branch of government used is simply whichever is currently convenient. This is an orthogonal problem (that needs to be addressed). > Liberals responded with a policy of moving as much power to Washington as possible You are seeing what you want to see, which seems to have led to some very creative misinterpretations of how government works. Instead of following the politics of fear and blaming a very large group of your fellow citizens, I suggest trying to find ways we can work together to dilute power away from "the political elite". A lot of people will try to distract from this idea with suggestions that prey on fear and ignorance to simply move power around, so this will require a lot of effort, vigilance, and sometimes a sacrifice. That cost, unfortunately, is the price of liberty, but it's a manageable cost if it keeps power form concentrating in the hands of the few. [1] and the people, but most of the time the capital to actually take advantage of the power vacuum is usually held by corporations. [2] the people (and things that serve the people directly like trade unions and civil rights orgs) are, of course, also involved as a check on the other two groups.
vacri 10y ago
Ah, yes, those evil liberals and their centralising ways. Never mind that conservatives have, in actuality, done more centralising than liberals have. Also, can you give some examples of "deciding how everyone lives"? What have liberals actually put in place in the US that curtail what people can do, that isn't in the name of freeing up part of the population (such as anti-discrimination law). What are some actual examples of federal liberal enforced monoculture in the US?

by SiVal 10y ago

zanny 10y ago

I absolutely agree with this premise philosophically, but history speaks against it sometimes. Civil rights are a great example. Minorities living in the south during Jim Crow were always legally allowed to move north to freer states that wouldn't discriminate against them. But they didn't. Mostly because they were economically and informatively suppressed to the point where they no longer possessed free movement - either they could not afford the cost, or did not know the option existed through intentional disinformation. The same applies today, for everything from legalized cannabis, to right to die, to bathroom law, to abortion availability and rights, to gay marriage before the supreme court decision. People who are oppressed by hostile local legislation still choose to stay, often because they don't have a choice. But that is fairly black and white, and reality really isn't. The more interesting, and I think where the liberal argument gets its support more than anything, is in those who have the choice but have to weigh their options. It is an awful situation to be in to decide between gaining rights and leaving everything you know behind. People really resist leaving their homes, in all definitions of the term. There is resistance to leaving your parents house. To leaving your hometown. To leaving your home culture. And that resistance often defeats people who would, objectively, and purely analytically, be better served just leaving. But that is 20/20 hindsight showing itself. At the time, these people do not know what might happen. They have to weigh the risks. And there is a tremendous natural human aversion to risk. It drives millions of people who would be more prosperous - economically, personally, etc - to stay where they are and not take what they perceive and weigh as unnecessary risk. A lot of this is a problem of the times. The more opportunity you have in your destination the lower the risk of moving there. Opportunity, in aggregate, is at generational lows today in the US. It suppresses mobility, and that generational lack of opportunity and thus promotion of conservative decisions regarding your own prosperity and rights creates the environment for top-down policy to centralize authority over the whole, to use a wide brush to direct ideology than letting people chose their own. Because in practice, many people cannot make that choice, objectively or as a product of their own uncertainty, and the liberal wing that pushes centralized power to assert their beliefs see that people suffer in conditions they wouldn't need to if they had perfect information and had no emotional baggage holding them back from seizing opportunity. Distributing power, localizing governance, and making it as democratic as possible in the process is the path to maximal liberty and happiness. But it requires that people actually take advantage of that opportunity. If you build it, how are they to come if they don't know its there?

hackuser 10y ago
> Minorities living in the south during Jim Crow were always legally allowed to move north Rights are not services sold in the free market, matched up by supply and demand. They are universal and inalienable. Whether they move or not, those people were 100% entitled to their rights and to a government that protected them. That's why governments are instituted among men and women.
slicktux 10y ago
It is important to note that RIGHTS differ from POWER; I as an individual whom has a libertarian philosophy say "limit the federal government, not the people" and I know what that implies; A federal government of which its power is limited to adherence of the US Constitution, Article 1 Section 8; Dr. King fought for a uniformity of African-American Civil Rights through out the united states, so he is a perfect example of the power individuals have when it comes to RIGHTS: Now we get in more gray areas like abortion maybe it can become a right to abort through out the united states, or maybe not, but that is not to say that states cannot deal with the issue; it gets messy when government starts to PAY for such programs through the POWER it has from taxing people that it becomes messy; if that is the case states have the right to both make it a RIGHT and to use its POWER to pay for such programs; now for the federal government, whether it goes through the legislative branch, or not, it becomes UNCONSTITUTIONAL if and only when the POWER to TAX is used to pay for such programs (back to Article 1 Section 8), but if it simply becomes a RIGHT to abort without imposing state sponsored programs (which would be abuse at this point) then it is not unconstitutional. Long live the constitution!

csallen 10y ago

This is vague and hyperbolic. For starters, there is no united group known as "liberals" whom either of us can speak on behalf of, but I will indulge you and also speak in generalizations. Liberals do not arbitrarily support "moving as much power to Washington as possible". Rather, they believe strongly that human rights should be dispensed equally to everyone in the country. If abortion is a right, then being born in Texas shouldn't deprive a woman of that right any more than being born in the south in the 19th century should've deprived blacks of their freedom. Similar arguments can be made for gay marriage, miscegenation laws, female suffrage, the availability of healthcare for the poor, quality education, etc. There's nothing whatsoever baked into the liberal ideology that supports things like domestic spying and warrantless wiretaps. Rather, the better explanation is any branch of government (in this case the executive branch) is incentivized to increase its own power, and people tend to be biased in favor of their party's presidents. But I've met countless pro-Snowden liberals, and I think you've really mischaracterized the essence of what makes liberals liberal.

rayiner 10y ago
You're skirting around his point. American liberals don't just believe in human rights for everyone in the country--they have embraced using a strong centralized government and its court system as the way of enforcing those rights. But the side-effect of that is taking away autonomy and independence from the states, which leaves states less capable of opposing centralized surveillance. Liberals may not want surveillance, but they helped create the power structure that enables surveillance as a byproduct of pursing end goals they do want. I think the benefits of that approach far outweigh the drawbacks, but it's important to acknowledge the drawbacks. If you give the central government more power so it can achieve X, you have to be aware of the possibility that it will use its power to also do Y.
- matt4077 10y ago
  I fail to see how civil rights legislation or Loving v Virginia allowed the creation of the NSA. It appears that most surveillance programs are operated under the foreign intelligence and/or defense umbrella, a part of government that has been centralized longer than the country itself exists. I'd also like to see a few examples of states vigorously opposing these programs. I mean – so many of them are willing to overstep their authority when it comes to hot-button issues such as the widespread voter fraud that some must have tried to get creative to stop surveillance, right?

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

jjoonathan 10y ago

I really ought to know better by now, but I'll bite. > libertarians have been saying for a long time that it's best to keep government as local as possible, so you could choose how you wanted to live ... and maximize the reach of the market, which is more global than any government on Earth, and in practice works in the opposite way: organize your life around making yourself useful to those with money, fast, or you will starve. If that means uprooting your family and moving someplace where you can work yourself to an early grave in the coal mines, so be it. If that means neglecting your duty as sherriff and looking the other way while the company machine-guns striking workers, so be it. If that means giving blowjobs to strangers on the street, So. Be. It. Such liberty! Very freedom. > Libertarians have been saying that judges should do their best to interpret the meaning of the legislators ... unless they're striking down regulations that are a result of government overreach, which is quite OK. Every corner of the political spectrum accuses judges of judicial activism precisely when the rulings don't go their way. It's like complaining about the referee in sports, except easier, because laws for society are much more complicated than the rules for sports, which are complicated enough. Yesterday's legislators and their laws agreed with each other about as well as today's legislators and their laws, which is to say "not at all," so everyone has a claim to the judicial activism argument and everyone uses it when they want to sound insightful but don't want to expose themselves to the risks of talking specifics. Yawn. > All along, those promoting local government rather than central, unescapable authority have been derided as fascists by liberals. That usually happens when local government is being especially asinine -- buying their police department tanks, targeting minorities, making poverty illegal, making protests illegal, etc. Local != benevolent. Local != escapable, either, because opinions and incentives tend to be highly correlated between communities, so even if it is worth it to up and move you'll find that every other "local" government is doing the same damn thing. Options without choice. Something that should be all too familiar to free-marketeers ;) > Now the chickens come home to roost. Do you think now that maximizing and centralizing and moving out of reach as much power as possible was a good idea? Even if we wanted, an option to federate power was never really on the ballot. All parties want power, that's why they seek it. Everyone thinks they are right, or else they would change their opinion, and everyone wants (reasonably) to fight for what is right. Show me a politician who wants to devolve power and I'll show you a liar. They may not know it yet, especially if they've never won power, but it's true.

hiou 10y ago

> we will decide how everyone lives everyone? Dial back the extremism for a minute. Get off Facebook.

coredog64 10y ago
When a reporter drives out into what they think of as "hicksville" looking for a quote that can be ginned up into a big story[0], that is one thing. When the subject of the story has to close up shop due to death threats for holding a position on gay marriage held by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton circa 2009, now we're shading into that "will decide how everyone lives" territory. [0] http://reason.com/blog/2015/04/02/was-memories-pizza-a-victim-of-irrespons http://reason.com/blog/2015/04/02/was-memories-pizza-a-victi...

Kenji 10y ago

Related (Trey Gowdy excerpt): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yxonn5QjaJY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yxonn5QjaJY

pdkl95 10y ago

> libertarians have been saying for a long time that it's best to keep government as local as possible Libertarians have in practice spent far more time trying to remove as much power from government as possible and handing it to corporations[1]. This strategy is either very naive or based on self interest, because it doesn't actually address the concentration of power; it only moves it to a different group of people. The way to manage power is to spread it out as much as possible, subject to as many self interest based checks and balances as possible. Neither governments or corporations[2] can be allowed to "win", because it is the struggle itself that keeps power restrained to a necessary minimum. The system fails without both: corporations need to use their money and influence to push back against government overreach, and governments need to use their various powers to regulate the corporate world. > those written by legislators elected by the people That's what the judges are addressing, because it isn't always clear what those laws actually say, especially in ambiguous situations that didn't exist when the law was written. > we want judges to interpret laws to mean what they ought to have said Yes, which is necessary because the law isn't magically unambiguous. How else do you think we should interpret the law in ambiguous or unforeseen situations? Also, remember that the legislature - the people that were elected by the people - can simply override judicial interpretation at any time. > the laws will be what the political elite want them to be That problem happens anyway. The branch of government used is simply whichever is currently convenient. This is an orthogonal problem (that needs to be addressed). > Liberals responded with a policy of moving as much power to Washington as possible You are seeing what you want to see, which seems to have led to some very creative misinterpretations of how government works. Instead of following the politics of fear and blaming a very large group of your fellow citizens, I suggest trying to find ways we can work together to dilute power away from "the political elite". A lot of people will try to distract from this idea with suggestions that prey on fear and ignorance to simply move power around, so this will require a lot of effort, vigilance, and sometimes a sacrifice. That cost, unfortunately, is the price of liberty, but it's a manageable cost if it keeps power form concentrating in the hands of the few. [1] and the people, but most of the time the capital to actually take advantage of the power vacuum is usually held by corporations. [2] the people (and things that serve the people directly like trade unions and civil rights orgs) are, of course, also involved as a check on the other two groups.

vacri 10y ago

Ah, yes, those evil liberals and their centralising ways. Never mind that conservatives have, in actuality, done more centralising than liberals have. Also, can you give some examples of "deciding how everyone lives"? What have liberals actually put in place in the US that curtail what people can do, that isn't in the name of freeing up part of the population (such as anti-discrimination law). What are some actual examples of federal liberal enforced monoculture in the US?