Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:
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And one new rule:
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Christian mentioned having the government constantly redistributing money as a possibly desirable end state. I was pointing out one of the implications of said end state.
Also I'm getting increasingly frustrated at people, yourself included, who keep trying to pass off their false beliefs about the nature of the world as different preferences.
In particular, to use the economic equality example, if you constantly redistributed money to keep everyone equal, as I mentioned it would destroy anything resembling freedom. But suppose you claim to have a utility function that puts no value on freedom. Well, another consequence is that it would destroy the motivation for people to engage in productive work (if the benefits would just get redistributed) so you'd wind up with a bunch of equally starving people. Assuming, that is, that this redistribution was somehow magically enforced, more realistically you'd wind up with everything in the hands of the redistributors.
Rousseau's "The Social Contract" begins with the words:
I don't think that any modern person on the left is as direct as that when it comes to freedom, but in European political thought the idea of the Social Contract is quite central.
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