Vaniver comments on Non-standard politics - Less Wrong

3 Post author: NancyLebovitz 24 October 2014 03:27PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (231)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Vaniver 26 October 2014 08:42:44PM 1 point [-]

Perhaps this is true of some Platonic ideal of libertarianism/statism, but in the real world people who would usually be classified more on the statist side of the spectrum tend to also want the state to hurt people less in various ways.

I think we interpreted that claim differently; I saw "want government to hurt people less" as "oppose any government policy that hurts someone," rather than "oppose at least one government policy that hurts someone." I can't think of a libertarian policy proposal that leads to the government actively hurting someone more (though, of course, many libertarian policy proposals would make people worse off as the government moves from action to inaction).

Comment author: pragmatist 26 October 2014 09:02:50PM *  1 point [-]

Wouldn't you characterize parents who refuse to feed their child as actively hurting the child?

Comment author: Vaniver 26 October 2014 09:52:58PM 2 points [-]

It seems cleaner to characterize that as "not helping." Preventing anyone else from feeding their child seems like hurting.

As a general comment, libertarian policies work better for adults than they do for children, because they assume a level of individual responsibility that seems unreasonable to expect of, say, infants. It's not clear to me how fatal a flaw that is for it as a policy-generating mechanism.