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Well, you've done the Ayn Randian thing here, and distilled a very complex issue into two different polarizing viewpoints. Saying that I, or the previous comme
by macrael 16y ago
Well, you've done the Ayn Randian thing here, and distilled a very complex issue into two different polarizing viewpoints.
Saying that I, or the previous commenter whom I mostly agree with, "would gladly have [our] opinions and preferences imposed [our] neighbours with the threat of force" is wrong, and not very conducive to debate. To say that we "want the gun to solve society's ills" is even more so.
Democracy is supposed to be a grand discussion. I can't have my opinions forced on others, we all have to talk and come to an agreement on how things should be done. So, thinks like jury duty and social security were put into place to attempt to solve problems like "how can we best determine if someone is guilty of a crime?" and "what can we do about old people who have worked their whole lives but are reduced to eating cat food because they have no money and no real ability to make more?"
Now, ideally, these decisions could be made by consensus. Every single person in the country could agree on the right way to do things. But, having participated in a consensus based community for a number of years, I can tell you that it does not scale. So instead, majority rules (with checks and balances, in the US). My understanding is that your viewpoint would be that, while we can all discuss possible solutions to these problems and work on making our country a better place together, no individual should be coerced into supporting the solutions. I certainly see a lot of merit in this view. It seems fundamentally fair and respectful of personal freedoms in a way that our current democracy perhaps doesn't. However, I see it as less fair than our current system in other, important, ways.
Mainly, it is difficult to separate out the ways in which governmental programs benefit you in a useful way that would allow people to not receive some of those benefits. We are all benefited by not having poor people, young and old, dying in our streets. It seems fair to me to say "if you want to be a part of our community, you have to play by our rules" What should be great about democracy as compared to many other forms of government, is that by becoming a part of a community, you are given a path to be a part of shaping those rules.
This is long, so I will stop. I'm still very much in the process of working out what I think about all of this, in fact, writing it here was helpful for me. I'd love to hear what you think.
- cubix 16y agoWe are all benefited by not having poor people, young and old, dying in our streets. I don't want to see people dying on the streets, you don't, presumably, and almost everyone I have had this discussion with has the same concern. Isn't it reasonable to assume that the more educated and productive members of society would be willing to bear this burden without having it squeezed out of them by threat of jail? You hear "I want to make the world a better place" so often it has become cliché. I donate to charities under our current system; I would be more inclined to do so if I weren't deprived of 40 or 50% of my income by the state. Moreover, private charity would be far more accountable than welfare programs since "customers" could take their money elsewhere. Clearly there is a demand for efficient charity services, and it could be readily met on the free market by entrepreneurs. We've seen remarkable generosity this past week on HN. I think it tends to come to the surface when people are interacting in free and voluntary circumstances. A completely free society is not something I expect to see in my life time, but that doesn't mean it is unattainable by future generations. Many Western values we take for granted today would have seemed Utopian just a century or two ago -- the abolition of slavery, women and children's rights, the general decline of racism, and so on. You accuse me of over simplifying, but it's unlikely the abolitionists would have made the progress they did without an unequivocal denunciation of slavery. In response they heard something along the lines of "[you have] distilled a very complex issue into two different polarizing viewpoints".
- magamiako 16y agoI don't, you don't, but that doesn't mean that we could come up with a solution otherwise. And that doesn't mean it wouldn't be a problem. Remember, the people will get violent long before they get close to dying. And so now you're not dealing with dead people clogging up your streets, you're dealing with desperate, live-people, reproducing people, coming after you with the intent of taking what you have. Again, it can be argued that not many people want this to happen--but how many organizations could prevent it from happening? Even as a collection? You can't. We can barely prevent this from happening now even with a government system. But now, you have an organization on top of it that is driven entirely by profit, not by by the good of the people. There's nothing to say that the organization doesn't just take your money and start hunting people down and shooting them to keep them from causing these problems. You could withdraw your money, sure, and so could many others. But not everyone would....