5 ms·

> anti-authoritarians are also anti-liberal The words are overloaded, but liberal and authoritarian are on opposite ends of the same axis on the political comp

> anti-authoritarians are also anti-liberal The words are overloaded, but liberal and authoritarian are on opposite ends of the same axis on the political compass. Classical liberalism stands on the ideas of individualism and laissez-faire economics. Today these ideas are also called "libertarian" but the core desire is expressed in the Latin root word. I want to be free - as in without a master, elected or otherwise, who governs my life. > I find them overly vague I'd be glad to elaborate. I'm positing that it's more important our interactions be consensual than value-maximizing. Would you kill one unwilling person to save a million? a billion? I would not. > China has done quite well China is doing well because it is able to benefit from innovations generated outside its borders. It's not able to generate important innovations on its own. This was also the main problem in the USSR. The Soviets just didn't have as ready of access to innovations born of a liberal society. Where China does use its centralized authority, the results are often catastrophic, eg. its one-child policy or COVID response. > Liberalism also concentrates power Some parts of this paragraph are more true than others. There is nothing in classical liberal thought about eg. patent or copyright law. Also you're broadening the definition of power that I put forward: > Your freedom is a function of your relationship to those who can use legitimate force against you - of how much power is held over you Corporations cannot arrest you for noncompliance with their policy. They cannot fine you. They are fragile structures, existing at the whim of their consumers and competitors. It takes a revolution to overthrow a government. Corporations live one big mistake away from ruin. The main issue with today's corporations is regulatory capture, which is actually an issue of our government. If the government were not so empowered to regulate every aspect of our lives, corporations would not so easily be able to capture that power. > that power is distributed primarily to members of a distinct social class with shared interests No, it actually matters. The wealthy cannot round people up and imprison them. They do not have that kind of power. The importance of this distinction cannot be overstated. > Responsibility is ultimately not an important concept next to outcomes. Responsibility is all that matters in human affairs. All we do in court is ascertain it. All of our organizations are structured around it. A death is only your fault (responsibility) if you had a duty to intervene. A duty that cannot be imposed on a free person without their consent. > The only conception of right and wrong that can ever matter to me, existentially, is my own. Aye, but you can have enough respect for others to draw a principled distinction between your own moral compass, and how far you're willing to it that on other people who disagree. The worst human catastrophes happen when power is concentrated into hands that do not make this distinction. > quashing the private health insurance sector and guaranteeing coverage for the whole public. This is a very successful policy which is associated with massive gains in public well-being, and yet it's anti-freedom This is anti-freedom because it violates the rights of an individual to choose their own level of risk tolerance, and self-organize into pools with different risk tolerances. Health, just like everything else, is a personal responsibility. If you don't take care of it, it fails. The overwhelming majority of healthcare expenses are consumed by a tiny minority of chronically ill people. Many of these people do not make choices that are compatible with good health outcomes. The 80/20 rule applies. Caring for people who cannot care for themselves is the purview of charity, not authority. The concept of freedom is actually much easier to grasp than quantifying harm and well-being. It's pretty simple: Did both parties explicitly agree to the interaction? Can either party opt out without being assaulted or imprisoned? If yes then the interaction is consensual. This is not a hard concept: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZwvrxVavnQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZwvrxVavnQ Using force to impose non-consensual binding agreements is slavery. Slave holders in fact often used utilitarian justifications for their atrocities. You are not any more entitled to the services of a doctor than of a prostitute. The guiding principle of all human interaction must be consent.

bccdee 2y ago
> Would you kill one unwilling person to save a million? a billion? I would not. Yes, in an instant. I find your perspective completely self-defeating here. The cost of your way of thinking is a billion lives, minus one. What is the benefit? A sense of self-righteousness? What thing of value are you preserving here, that is worth more than a billion living people? > [China] is not able to generate important innovations on its own. Can you cite a source on this? China has (for example) a huge and very productive tech industry. I don't accept the unilateral assertion that they're doing all of this without innovation. If you contend that innovation comes from the market, China agrees. That's why their policy, post-Deng, has been very market-forward. You seem to be asserting that the world must conform to your beliefs, rather than conforming your beliefs to the world. China is plenty innovative, as far as I can tell. > If the government were not so empowered to regulate every aspect of our lives, corporations would not so easily be able to capture that power. You've got this backwards. Corporations express their power through regulatory capture. The less government there is, the more that corporations fill the power vacuum left in its absence. A corporation can arrest you. It simply lobbies to have the police do it on their behalf. The only way to prevent this is either for the government to have the backbone to keep corporations in their place, or for the government to dissolve entirely—at which point law enforcement is replaced by independent security contractors, and a corporation really CAN arrest you. > The wealthy cannot round people up and imprison them. They do not have that kind of power. I invite you to revisit the history of the Gilded Age, where Pinkertons brutalized union organizers and robber barons had the US Army drop munitions on striking coal miners. Capital tends to exert power through subtler means today, but don't let it fool you. Capitalists still call the shots. > Aye, but you can have enough respect for others to draw a principled distinction between your own moral compass, and how far you're willing to it that on other people who disagree. Certainly it's worth picking your battles, especially when the stakes are low. However, the stakes are high when it comes to violence, incarceration, social hierarchy, poverty, etc. I won't concede to let evil happen simply out of respect for someone else's belief that evil things are actually good. > This is anti-freedom because it violates the rights of an individual to choose their own level of risk tolerance I feel like you completely missed my spiel about the flexibility of the concept freedom-based rights. Again, what about the right to freedom from treatable illness? You seem to be starting from the position of "single-payer healthcare shouldn't happen" and working back to a set of "natural" rights which will allow you to justify that. > Health, just like everything else, is a personal responsibility. Now, this is a PERFECT example. Consider lung cancer. While, yes, getting lung cancer is a consequence of the personal choice to smoke, let's consider for a moment why people choose to smoke at all. For one, an extensive campaign of misinformation on the part of tobacco companies to suppress evidence of the harm of smoking. For another, high-stress circumstances tend to push people towards substance use. If I were to inject you with a substance that had a 50% chance of making you use drugs, and then you went on to use drugs, it would be absurd of me to blame you for that. Similarly, given that poverty (which can be ameliorated through policy) is a significant cause of substance abuse issues, blaming poor people for using substances is another way to deflect blame in service of promoting public inaction. On top of this, many health issues cannot be prevented at all by lifestyle choices, which in and of itself debunks the idea that health is a "personal responsibility," but we'll set that aside. Even purely through the lens of lifestyle health, the claim that "health is a personal responsibility" is extremely suspect. People ultimately do not always have the power to live a healthy lifestyle. Nobody wants to get sick; everyone tries their best. It's in their best interest, after all. However, corporations and the state do not try their best to ensure people lead health lives. Neither group is nearly so incentivized to look out for the health of individual citizens. In fact, insurance companies profit by withholding treatment, and the insurance lobby is very powerful. So when I see you sculpting a careful set of "freedom-based rights" designed to specifically protect insurance companies and high-bracket taxpayers at the expense of the most vulnerable people in society—the poor and sick—I gotta say, I grow extremely cynical as to the motivations behind your philosophy. As far as I'm concerned, natural rights theory is the purview of sophists. I'm sure there are some Kantians somewhere in the depths of academia who have put together a rigorous and consistent system of rights-based analysis, but I haven't met them. I tend to only see rights invoked as excuses to permit evil and turn a blind eye.

bccdee 2y ago

> Would you kill one unwilling person to save a million? a billion? I would not. Yes, in an instant. I find your perspective completely self-defeating here. The cost of your way of thinking is a billion lives, minus one. What is the benefit? A sense of self-righteousness? What thing of value are you preserving here, that is worth more than a billion living people? > [China] is not able to generate important innovations on its own. Can you cite a source on this? China has (for example) a huge and very productive tech industry. I don't accept the unilateral assertion that they're doing all of this without innovation. If you contend that innovation comes from the market, China agrees. That's why their policy, post-Deng, has been very market-forward. You seem to be asserting that the world must conform to your beliefs, rather than conforming your beliefs to the world. China is plenty innovative, as far as I can tell. > If the government were not so empowered to regulate every aspect of our lives, corporations would not so easily be able to capture that power. You've got this backwards. Corporations express their power through regulatory capture. The less government there is, the more that corporations fill the power vacuum left in its absence. A corporation can arrest you. It simply lobbies to have the police do it on their behalf. The only way to prevent this is either for the government to have the backbone to keep corporations in their place, or for the government to dissolve entirely—at which point law enforcement is replaced by independent security contractors, and a corporation really CAN arrest you. > The wealthy cannot round people up and imprison them. They do not have that kind of power. I invite you to revisit the history of the Gilded Age, where Pinkertons brutalized union organizers and robber barons had the US Army drop munitions on striking coal miners. Capital tends to exert power through subtler means today, but don't let it fool you. Capitalists still call the shots. > Aye, but you can have enough respect for others to draw a principled distinction between your own moral compass, and how far you're willing to it that on other people who disagree. Certainly it's worth picking your battles, especially when the stakes are low. However, the stakes are high when it comes to violence, incarceration, social hierarchy, poverty, etc. I won't concede to let evil happen simply out of respect for someone else's belief that evil things are actually good. > This is anti-freedom because it violates the rights of an individual to choose their own level of risk tolerance I feel like you completely missed my spiel about the flexibility of the concept freedom-based rights. Again, what about the right to freedom from treatable illness? You seem to be starting from the position of "single-payer healthcare shouldn't happen" and working back to a set of "natural" rights which will allow you to justify that. > Health, just like everything else, is a personal responsibility. Now, this is a PERFECT example. Consider lung cancer. While, yes, getting lung cancer is a consequence of the personal choice to smoke, let's consider for a moment why people choose to smoke at all. For one, an extensive campaign of misinformation on the part of tobacco companies to suppress evidence of the harm of smoking. For another, high-stress circumstances tend to push people towards substance use. If I were to inject you with a substance that had a 50% chance of making you use drugs, and then you went on to use drugs, it would be absurd of me to blame you for that. Similarly, given that poverty (which can be ameliorated through policy) is a significant cause of substance abuse issues, blaming poor people for using substances is another way to deflect blame in service of promoting public inaction. On top of this, many health issues cannot be prevented at all by lifestyle choices, which in and of itself debunks the idea that health is a "personal responsibility," but we'll set that aside. Even purely through the lens of lifestyle health, the claim that "health is a personal responsibility" is extremely suspect. People ultimately do not always have the power to live a healthy lifestyle. Nobody wants to get sick; everyone tries their best. It's in their best interest, after all. However, corporations and the state do not try their best to ensure people lead health lives. Neither group is nearly so incentivized to look out for the health of individual citizens. In fact, insurance companies profit by withholding treatment, and the insurance lobby is very powerful. So when I see you sculpting a careful set of "freedom-based rights" designed to specifically protect insurance companies and high-bracket taxpayers at the expense of the most vulnerable people in society—the poor and sick—I gotta say, I grow extremely cynical as to the motivations behind your philosophy. As far as I'm concerned, natural rights theory is the purview of sophists. I'm sure there are some Kantians somewhere in the depths of academia who have put together a rigorous and consistent system of rights-based analysis, but I haven't met them. I tend to only see rights invoked as excuses to permit evil and turn a blind eye.