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Luke_A_Somers comments on Open thread, September 15-21, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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No, that's not it. It doesn't mean you can't have new things happen that are bad. It does refer to a time derivative, but it's more of a goal than a statement of fact: government and society are not as good as they could be, and we can engineer the government to improve both. That's 'progress'. (Note: this summary is not an endorsement)
Progressive tax structures are not named so due to this time derivative. They are named so due to the derivative in income. Regressive tax structures exist, but they aren't named so due to being more like the past.
That is progress, but that is not what is meant by "progressive" in the political sense. The belief that government can be engineered to improve things is shared by everyone except those in despair of it ever happening. Moldbug has proposals to do that -- is he a "progressive"?
No, "progressive" means certain specific views about what is valued as an improvement, and specific beliefs about what policies will make those improvements. These values and views are accurately summarised as "left-leaning".
A lot of libertarians would beg to disagree there.
I thought about that, but I decided that reducing the government and doing away with it counted as engineering the government. For the libertarian, the task is complete not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away.
Yes, there are specific things it's aiming at. I was justifying the word choice. And either way we've moved past the ridiculous notion that it is good because it's new. If you're going to try to correct me for being overly general you can at least own up to having been far more overly general just a few hours previously.