Politics Discussion Thread February 2013

OrphanWilde

Top-level comments should introduce arguments; responses should be responses to those arguments.
Upvote and downvote based on whether or not you find an argument convincing in the context in which it was raised. This means if it's a good argument against the argument it is responding to, not whether or not there's a good/obvious counterargument to it; if you have a good counterargument, raise it. If it's a convincing argument, and the counterargument is also convincing, upvote both. If both arguments are unconvincing, downvote both.
A single argument per comment would be ideal; as MixedNuts points out here, it's otherwise hard to distinguish between one good and one bad argument, which makes the upvoting/downvoting difficult to evaluate.
In general try to avoid color politics; try to discuss political issues, rather than political parties, wherever possible.

As Multiheaded added, "Personal is Political" stuff like gender relations, etc also may belong here.

Top-level comments should introduce arguments; responses should be responses to those arguments.
Upvote and downvote based on whether or not you find an argument convincing in the context in which it was raised. This means if it's a good argument against the argument it is responding to, not whether or not there's a good/obvious counterargument to it; if you have a good counterargument, raise it. If it's a convincing argument, and the counterargument is also convincing, upvote both. If both arguments are unconvincing, downvote both.
A single argument per comment would be ideal; as MixedNuts points out here, it's otherwise hard to distinguish between one good and one bad argument, which makes the upvoting/downvoting difficult to evaluate.
In general try to avoid color politics; try to discuss political issues, rather than political parties, wherever possible.

As Multiheaded added, "Personal is Political" stuff like gender relations, etc also may belong here.

I hope you do get back to me.

When you have an answer on your ethical injunctions, please elaborate them in terms of "who does what to whom". That's where the rubber meets the road.

The whole Dictatorship of the Proletariat could have been punctured with a simple question - "How exactly is that supposed to work?" When you get down to concrete individuals, you see quickly that individuals have different interests. "We" aren't going to be the Dictator. All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

I certainly wouldn't plan to establish a government on a set of restrictions that I've only spent a few minutes formulating

Can you see how libertarians would find that disturbing? "I want the government to positive impacts, subject to some ethical injunctions, but I haven't really spent any time thinking about the ethical injunctions."

Libertarians have spent more than a few minutes on questions of who does what to whom.

I do think, though, that the usual libertarian conception of rights is not a good way to narrow down issues that I care about

Well, I'll go back to Thomas Sowell, and ask "compared to what?" Compared to what conception is the libertarian concept of right deficient? You don't seem to have alternative conceptions that answer "who does what to whom".

As for coordination problems, it's a lot easier to coordinate people who have the same goals and want to cooperate voluntarily than force those who don't want to cooperate to do what you want. The Libertarian way is to have the government ensure that people are free to cooperate with others to spend their lives as they choose, instead of the dominant paradigm of a government where we fight to control others, and make them spend their lives as we wish they would.

Can you explain what negative rights you think the government needs to protect? That is, a list, such that everyone could agree what are and aren't legitimate negative rights to protect, and no important rights which society would suffer for not having defended are left out?

I'm aware that what I have is only the rough shape of a form of government, which needs a lot of work to convert into something practicable, but I think you overestimate the degree to which the hard work needed to formulate libertarianism as a system that could actually stand to improv... (read more)