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Desrtopa comments on Politics Discussion Thread February 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I support the government acting as a solver of coordination and lack-of-information problems.
To reuse an example I brought up in another discussion, suppose that a company is using a chemical in some manufacturing process which is highly toxic, and that toxic chemical is making its way into the population in harmful quantities. 0.2% of the population knows about this and understands the danger, and of these, all who do not work for the company oppose the practice. The remaining 99.8% of the population has no opinion.
In such a situation, a boycott is highly unlikely to be useful (getting a boycott to work even under favorable conditions is a formidable coordination problem, and it's much worse in a situation where most of the population is unaware of the relevant information, since any attempt to raise awareness has to compete with every other source of information jockeying for the target audience's attention.) However, if the concerned parties can go to the government and say "this is the evidence that this manufacturing process is harmful, we all agree that it's too dangerous to allow," then the government can review the information and decide whether the process should be banned or not. By having a body which can engage in full time review of public concerns, the population can address more issues than if individuals had to research all the issues that might be relevant to them all the time (they have other things to do which put constraints on their time,) with a greatly reduced opportunity cost compared to every member of the public having to address all those issues for themselves.
I do not think that rights, negative or positive, are a particularly useful way of framing what the government should or should not treat as within its purview. I think that there are some ethical injunctions the government should follow against certain actions even if they may seem like good ideas at the time, when we know that there are certain things that tend to appear to be good ideas at the time and then lead to bad consequences anyway, thus warranting a policy based on the outside view. But I think that framing issues in terms of rights is a bad way to sort out what are and aren't good policies to pursue. I'm going to be the second person to reference Yvain's work here, and quote from his Non-Libertarian FAQ (rights and heuristics section)
In general, I think that the government should act according to a decision process of "what, within the ethical injunctions we're restricted by, are the most positive impacts we can make on society, according to our best understanding of the public's preferences should they have the information available to us?"
The problem is that attempting to optimize subject to deontological/ethical restrictions tends to result in finding creative loopholes in said restrictions, i.e., attempting to obey the letter but not the spirit of the ethical injunction.
That is a risk, but some restrictions are easier to find loopholes in than others. Obviously, I think that injunctions where the letter accurately encapsulates the spirit are better than ones where it does not.
The fundamental political question is who does what to whom. Who gets to decide and enforce what on whom? Rights as prerogatives of choice and control that answer that question. How do you answer it?
Positive, according to whom? As decided by whom? I note that people I disagree with on politics like to say "We" and "Us" a lot, but in fact it's still individual whos doing to individual whoms, and they don't like to point out the individuals too often, and certainly don't like to point out the element of force in that relationship.
What are you ethical injunctions? They seem all important to evaluating your view of government, as without them, you're granting unlimited license to the government to make "positive impacts".
One clear difference I'm noting between US libertarian traditions and progressive viewpoints is the null hypothesis on government power, with libertarians holding that government should only do what it is specifically empowered to do, and progressives holding that government is empowered to do whatever isn't specifically prohibited. Progressives want the government to force people to do whatever is good for society, and libertarians want government to protect rights and provide conflict resolution, but otherwise leave people to spend their lives on their own view of what is good.
This doesn't help much in practice, since legal and political disputes virtually always involve conflicting rights. The political answer is that we should find workable compromises and perhaps "deals" involving conflicting rights. Referring to "positive impact we can make on society" is just a way to say that we should evaluate such "deals" and choose optimal ones.
Conversely, a "positive impact" perspective can easily account for constitutional commitments, such as limited government powers, checks-and-balances and upholding individual rights. "Governments" are social institutions, and any institution needs some kinds of grounding rules (and incentives) to channel its actions into desirable directions. Political and government agents are not magically benevolent.
Honestly, I don't think I can answer that off the cuff. I'll try to get back to you on that later, but as Eugine Nier already pointed out, such things are highly susceptible to loophole exploitation. I certainly wouldn't plan to establish a government on a set of restrictions that I've only spent a few minutes formulating (It's not as if I have a ready set worked out in case it comes up in a political discussion, because I don't think there's any realistic way I'll ever be in a position to meaningfully affect the implementation of a new system of government.)
I do think, though, that the usual libertarian conception of rights is not a good way to narrow down issues that I care about (when it comes to protecting our country from attack, for instance, there are government initiatives I would pay for them to stop doing, not just because they're ineffective but because trying to address those issues at all sends a bad message which even the best case outcome of those initiatives doesn't make worthwhile) and I think most people care about some issues which they are not effectively able to address without outside intervention due to coordination problems.
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.
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.
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 improve on our current one has already been done.
It's certainly easier to get people to cooperate with a strong central authority whose goals are in accordance with their own than one which is trying to force them into something they don't think is in their interests. But when we look at examples of coordination problems like depleting fisheries, there's an ample history of people who had a shared vested interest in their resources not being exhausted failing to work out amongst themselves and implement a scheme that would preserve their interests in the long term, whereas governments have had significantly greater success dealing with this sort of problem. Governments have certainly demonstrated a lot of failings, but it seems that the answer to the question of "how good are people at solving coordination problems to improve their shared interests over the long term, without a central authority to arbitrate," is "pretty bad, compared to when they do have such an authority."
To start off briefly, I don't see the FAQ as a serious point of departure for discussion. It is a self conscious attack on a straw man.
Not exactly an instance of Steel Manning.
This is true, but I think that the specific point with respect to the usefulness of "rights" in determining what actions are permissible is still relevant. People's negative rights can easily come into conflict with each other. I'm also not convinced that "positive" and "negative" rights hold up well as a distinction. Is a right to clean water a positive right (some body has to take action to ensure that the water is provided) or a negative right (nobody is allowed to take actions which corrupt the supply)?