I think the better question to ask Stip is this: You and I can lay out an America were people like us can live, and where people like Stip can live, and come together on areas where we agree without imposing ourselves upon each other. But Stip really cannot precisely articulate that where divergences exist, that a simple majority has the power to impose their will upon the minority. At what point does this become the better model?

I have come to the conclusion that progressives are really good at pointing out subjective problems, revert to a one size fits all solution, but are cognizant of the free rider problem their solutions create. Which is why as opposed to pursuing states rights, they must impose. It is impossible for them to either compete within a free market as a whole, nor as a union of states. To erase their failures, they monopolize.

Doctors rip us off - impose price controls at the federal government level, don't become doctors and compete.
Pharmaceutical companies rip us off - same deal as above.
Insurance companies rip us off, healthcare shouldn't be "for profit." - Don't try to start non-profits, just create a universal system and impose it.
College is a rip off - don't start competitive private institutions of higher learning, nationalize healthcare, centralize student loans, control loan rates, expropriate taxes and disperse them as we see it.
Banks rip us off, don't start competitive banks, impose draconian regulations upon them, arrest the people who head these banks, "foreclose" upon them.
Mortgages are theft - don't start financial institutions that give away money for housing at zero percent interest, use government as a means of imposing it.

Why is it progressives must monopolize areas in order for us to see the inherent superiority in their ways?
Charity

Beads of sweat coalescing upon a furrowed brow.

That's interesting (unfortunate too) since I think NYC has a reverse relationship with the state of New York, although NYC is a much wealthier city.

I apologize for the soundbyte quality to these answers. I'm making very general points, each of which deserves much longer individual elaboration

And the sense of alienation those people feel make sense. The middle class has largely gotten screwed over the last 30 years or so. This is a quick answer but broadly what was happened is that the white middle class started to vote for republicans, whose economic platform is largely not aligned with their interests. Democrats in turn were more likely to focus on the specific constituencies remaining within their electoral coalition, which was not necessarily middle class white voters.

But more than that, the way the government is set up at a national level (I know nothing about state politics in Maryland) both parties are primarily representing (to greater or lesser degrees) the interest of capital (not the small business local stuff--major corporations, wall street, etc). These are the people who lobby the government. These are the people that fund campaigns. These are the people that write laws. Perhaps more importantly, the economic/ideological worldview that largely informs our national government right now places these groups at the center. And no system like that is going to benefit middle class Americans for very long.

So I get the sense of dislocation and alienation. The problem is that the solution to that is not less government in many cases (in some cases it probably is). It is government that is more aligned to the interests and well being of a larger section of the population. Better government is not a question of getting smarter people into government. Smart people are there now. They are just smart people often representing the interests of an offensively narrow section of the population. That is not a problem that is going to be affected by disengagement, since it either tightens the stranglehold these groups have over American life (which is what has happened given how far to the right American political discourse has shifted over the last 30 years--the practical consequence of this has been the empowerment of economic elites) or, in the unlikely event we actually do shrink and limit the size of government, simply turns that power back to an unregulated economic arena where the powerful will run even more roughshod over middle and working class people since they will lack effective ways to aggregate their mass.


Better government is not just a textbook theory. Perfect government is, of course, as is any expectation that government will always be responsive to a public or broad interest. Government is a piece of machinery that will respond to power. The more organized a great mass of people is the more likely they are to get that government to work in their favor in beneficial (but still imperfect, always imperfect) ways.

Well, not all of them did, for starters. You can't really talk about the 'founders' as a group with a consistent ideology or set of expectations. This was one of the most highly politicized moments in American history, and remained so for the first generation or so afterwards.

As far as the other stuff goes, some of this was necessity (I'm not sure they could have gotten a different amendment. B process to work) . But beyond that I don't think they (at least the branch of the founding that I'm talking about) wanted the CONSTITUTION changed all that much since if you do it all the time it looses its sacred quality. You can't turn the idea of the Constitution into a document that simply reflects the political needs of a particular moment in time.

The way our government evolved (starting in their generation) is also not necessarily what they anticipated either. That's why Washington's farewell address has that desperate quality to it.




Well moral ends are what we need to use to evaluate whether or not the relevant tradeoffs and consequences are worth it. Evaluative standards are normative. And I'm usually pretty good at qualifying that whether or not a particular policy is worth it is an empirical question. I am currently committed to the idea of a min wage (I'd prefer a living wage) because I think it does a better job, empirically, of improving quality of life than not having one. But if there is strong evidence (which I haven't read but this is not a policy area I am any kind of an expert in) that a min. wage isn't going to work and there are other, more effective ways to achieve the same outcome I'd be in favor of that. A min wage is a means to an end, not an end in itself (for me).


Some of it is just posting style. Certain discussions are just more fun for me to have.

I'm not really going to respond too much to your disingenuous stuff above. You should go right on ahead feeling victimized and superior. Whatever gets you through your day.

I will say this. Progressives (who cover a pretty wide range of viewpoints and argue with each other all the time, often pretty viciously--and the further to the left you get the worse this is. Believe it or not, in lefty circles I'm probably a moderate since I'm not a socialist) tend to be suspicious of the profit motive and do not believe that the private pursuit of self-interest automatically leads to either positive or efficient public outcomes (it can, sometimes, but doesn't have to) So in general I am in favor of regulations that allow us to keep a privatized system when possible but establishes rules and frameworks that steer that system in a general direction that benefits the broader public. This might manifest itself differently depending on the issue.

So for instance, I in general favor not for profit colleges (although I teach at a private institution, not a public one), because I think profits should be invested back into students and programs, and unlike selling a TV or a car, there is always more that money can do to enhance the experiences of the people there. I feel the same way about things like nursing homes and prisons. I am not sure insurance companies should be for profit since they have an adversarial relationship with their clients when their clients need them, and at that point the clients can't simply go somewhere else. And the basic infrastructure of our larger economy (communications, transportation, energy) I think should be highly regulated because it is what makes all other commerce possible and in many cases it is hard to have legitimate competition with the benefits this entails in those areas.

Beyond that I don't think private enterprise is necessarily superior to public a priori but in general I don't care how goods are produced as long as they are as cheap and high quality as possible.


I do not have a consistent position on federalism. Most people don't, I think. Certainly states rights is not a sacred cow. When possible I think it is good to let local communities make their own decisions. However, as bad as our national governments can be, local governments are often even more corrupt, more oligarch, more easily controllable, more parochial, and states rights is in practice, I think perhaps more often than not, shorthand for the preservation of local power and privilege.

Which, to bring this back to the discussion at hand, is certainly what many of the founders wanted.

No one can precisely point that out. It is impossible. This always depends on context. It is also a little ironic perhaps, that while Thodoks for sure (probably not LW) see me as motivated by ideology and abstractions my whole political philosophy is so heavily grounded in context and politics, certainly more than LW and probably more than Thodoks).


People living in groups will always be negotiating power between each other. To live together is to impose, and ours is no longer a world where we can live next to, but separate from each other. What controls our lives is not independence but interdependence. Our independence can be aspirational, but in reality it is an illusion. Our society is far too complex for that. Especially when it comes to economic matters.

So the best I think we can do is the liberal democracy that we have. We have a potentially responsive political process that can try and determine the will of the majority. In narrowly divided areas we should have reasonable minority protections to prevent a small majority from railroading a large minority (and Obamacare did run a gauntlet with enormous protections available for minorities). Our system has that. It is important to have rights that can protect small minorities from abuses by large majorities. You lost Obamacare, LW. The courts declared it Constitutional, and I do not think this was even a remotely radical decision, personally. I'm stunned it was 5-4, to be honest. And now, if the country hates Obamacare as much as you think it does, they can elect new leaders to repeal the law, since it isn't enshrined in the Constitution as an amendment.

In order for states to function they need to be able to act and to impose. that sucks when you don't like what it is doing, but that's the way it goes. Whatever threshold I think you would want to impose would make practical governance impossible. And the result of that, historically, has never been a libertarian paradise. It's been anarchy and violence, and something much more authoritarian arising from the ashes. Our Constitution is actually one of the very few exceptions to that. Part of your problem I think is that you really really really want the Constitution to be the Articles of Confederation with the moral weight and legitimacy of the Constitution behind it.


As far as rights go, in practice rights never have a fully fixed meaning. This is just an historical fact. When has there ever been consensus? And in the absence of consensus you cannot make an easily controlling claim for a fixed meaning, especially since the nature of rights is normative and abstract to begin with. And so in practice rights are what we say they are. But because they lack that fixed meaning they can also be what the minority says they are, and that can inspire them to act and grant legitimacy to their dissent, and if they are persuasive enough and well organized enough they can change the practical nature of those rights. That's pretty much the way it works in practice.

the founders tried to turn politics into a science emphasizing institutions. Progressives tried to turn politics into a science by emphasizing administration. But in the end conflict is a symptom of liberty. The best we can do is have a system that is strong enough to endure and dynamic enough to change.

because of all that stuff above, I actually think the most important things that need to happen in our political system are structural process reforms more than policy reforms. Until we do things like address the corrosive and distorting effects of money in our system, address the revovling door problem of interest group capture of the bureaucracy, etc. the process of determining and articulating what the broad public wants is severely weakened. This is why so many people feel alienated from a government that spends so much money and has such potentially far reaching powers. I don't think the problem is the money or the power per se (although it can be), as much as that power and money is being used for such narrow ends.

but corporations are people that speak w/ money, my friend.

oh good. Problem solved then.

Well moral ends are what we need to use to evaluate whether or not the relevant tradeoffs and consequences are worth it. Evaluative standards are normative. And I'm usually pretty good at qualifying that whether or not a particular policy is worth it is an empirical question. I am currently committed to the idea of a min wage (I'd prefer a living wage) because I think it does a better job, empirically, of improving quality of life than not having one. But if there is strong evidence (which I haven't read but this is not a policy area I am any kind of an expert in) that a min. wage isn't going to work and there are other, more effective ways to achieve the same outcome I'd be in favor of that. A min wage is a means to an end, not an end in itself (for me).


Some of it is just posting style. Certain discussions are just more fun for me to have.[/quote]

Morals are relative and completely subjective. The relevance of tradeoffs are also purely subjective. Thus, any evaluative standards that you could hope declare as normative are inherently bias from the outset. Any price that you place upon externalities will vary from person to person. This boils top down government to the nexus of its problem - whoever is in charge thinks that they're usually pretty good at qualifying whether a particular policy is worth it as an empirical question. As if the policies you speak of even boil down to a finite empirical question.

As to the minimum wage, the idea that it does a good job at improving the quality of life than not having one is patently absurd. The minimum wage is nothing more than a psychological modifier that provides no net economic benefit to the people it is purported to help out.

And again, I can't help but stress that it's OPINIONS such as this, coupled with politicians with immense power that all think they are pretty good at qualifying whether or not a particular policy is "worth it" that creates massive problems in western politics.

1. I am victimized. I am forced to labor to the direct benefit of other people via wealth redistribution. The quality of my life is objectively harmed because of this coerced relationship.
2. I have never made any claim that I am superior to anyone else.
3. Here is why I am suspicious of progressives. You state that they eye profit motive with suspicion. Ignoring the ignorance in this position, it's impossible to take these people seriously when they deride profit, but don't seek to compete against it. Profits are a real cost to consumers, after all, this is why they deride it. Why is it that they can identify this as a problem, but are unwilling or unable to undercut the cost of profit to the consumer and provide similar products and services in a more egalitarian fashion in a free market? Why is there always the incessant desire to use the force of government to monopolize?
4. Again, you exemplify how easy progressives are at pointing out problems. Yet, you have no solutions, and make no comments about why you and a group of like minded professors don't start your own egalitarian college. Or start your own egalitarian insurance companies. Or nursing homes, or prisons. Progressives are full of vision, but instead of applying this vision to a pre-existing marketplace, you look to monopolize! Why? Do you not think that a private university that operated on maximizing money to go towards the students and their education wouldn't have market appeal? Why make it "public."
5. I completely disagree with your position on local and state governments. The more localized government becomes, the more engaged the people will become. People will have a vested interest in their government. They will be more participative and attached to what is taking place. They won't feel disconnected because they won't be ruled from a ten mile square on the Potomac River. As a result they will be able to adjust and combat corruption, cronyism, and nepotism.

Impossible because of context? What? I demand some articulation here, It's exceptionally easy for me to explain to you why I don't believe that I should have the power to impose Libertarianism upon you if you don't like it. So explain to me why you think the context matters in the terms of you imposing your progressivism upon us. It's a simple, fundamental, philosophical question.

Why can we not separate from each other? Are you suggesting that the time has come that we impose ourselves upon the Native Americans and the Amish? And if you defend a finite line where the Amish can separate themselves from us insofar as they do, then what right do you have to impose a line upon me and declare that I cannot do as the Amish do? Look at how the Amish coexist within our society. They live independently, they take care of each other, and only join us in the areas where we agree to engage in mutually beneficially free trade. What is offensive about this structure and relationship and what makes it impossible at a national level? To ignore this relationship, while blithely stating that our economics is "too complex" for independence is to decry that we are means to some subject, material, quantitative end, and not end within ourselves - like the Amish for instance. In your economic justification you artificially prioritize economics above all else that a human being is. And I'm sorry, but I find this to be an empty position.

Don't you realize that the larger and larger government gets, that the more unbound it becomes from our constitution, that the less responsive it is to the people? And again, the larger and more power it becomes, the more it is reduced to a finite point, and the more and more people are alienated and disenfranchised from it. And worst of all, they are denied their independence and ability to pursue their own definitions of happiness.

I do not want the constitution to be the articles of the confederation. The constitution is sufficient just the way it is.

I don't think you understand what I mean when I say that rights are fixed. When I say that rights are fixed, I mean in terms that they are written and penned constitutions at various levels of government. We have a right to free speech. We have it because our constitution and state constitutions all say so. Should the time come when the people don't want freedom of speech, they are more than free to amend their respective constitutions and eliminate it. That is how rights work.

First of all, my point was that there was not a single agreed upon view of the Constitution, even back then. So this point is really irrelevant to the discussion. However, I disagree with you here as well. Hamilton was always in favor of a stronger, "energetic" central government. The attempts of consolidating and strengthening that power once he was in office was a logical progression. To be clear, I'm not arguing for Hamilton's view of government, I'm merely claiming that there was no significant shift in his writings and actions between Federalist Hamilton and Secretary Hamilton. He was always a politician based more in pragmatic than philosophical concerns. If you want to give him the benefit of the doubt, you'd say this was because of his experience serving during the Revolutionary War which made clear to him that governments needed to have sufficient ability to get things done when the situation called for it. Or you could agree with Adams and Jefferson and view him as an ambitious, power hungry Napoleon-in-waiting. Regardless, he was those things well before he served in Washington's cabinet.

so opinions and evaluative standards are entirely subjective...



unless they are yours.

are you aware of the existence of something called the non profit sector? it exists primarily as a cautionary tale parents tell their children to get them to major in something outside of the liberal arts.



Are you aware of the existence of something called almost every college



Are you aware of the existence of something called 'the public sector'? It exists mostly as a place we can use your tax dollars to give jobs to people who hate freedom.





Are you aware of the existence of something called 'almost every private college'? Including the one I teach at. To be fair, mine is a pretty small school servicing a regional population, so I would not be insulted if you haven't.



yes, and our country's stellar record of honest and efficient state governments certainly bears this out.

To be fair, I am completely sympathetic to the idea that when it makes sense people should be able to have as much local control as possible to maximize political participation.

I wouldn't qualify the minimum wage as one of these programs. AHA, Medicaid, medicare, regulations on pollution, one size fits all safety standards, one size fits all labor laws and regulations, these are areas that contain QUALITATIVE values that are subjective.

The minimum wage isn't one of those as it's net effects in an economic sense are finite. I made mention of the PSYCHOLOGICAL impact on those who are ignorant about its economic realities. That would be subjective.

Indeed.

Of course I'm aware of the non-profit sector. If the non-profit sector exists, then why the incessant pursuit of monopolization in the sphere of government?
Almost every college!? So almost every college doesn't operate on profit! Good, then we can all just pretty much shut up about the costs of college and how its a racket...
I would argue Nebraska, New Hampshire, and the Dakotas have far more efficient forms of government than our ten mile square does.

Because I think individuals exist in, are formed by, and bounded by, larger communities and that the rights of that individual need to balanced against the needs of that community




The amish are a pretty exceptional case because, for religious reasons, they have largely chosen to turn the backs on much of modernity. Great. We give them that freedom. But if the Amish wanted to engage in some kind of truly reprehensible moral behavior they would probably not be allowed to do so. And when they engage in commerce they are still obligated to follow the same rules as everyone else. But the amish have to give up an awful lot to do that. They make themselves immune to our laws largely by choosing not to engage in activities that have laws and regulations attached to them. Feel free to do the same.

And the native American stuff is much trickier because of territorial sovereignty issues. Plus we were in general much less nice to them than white people, so we feel bad and cut them some slack.



Because they're the Amish? Are you really comparing the Amish economy to ours?

I am not disputing that human beings are ends in themselves, btw. But every self contained end comes into conflict with other self contained ends, and then we need to have ways of mediating those conflicts, as well as recognizing the way forces that exist outside of the individual impact the ability of that individual to create himself. This is only going to make you more upset, but I see my personal philosophy as being absolutely necessary for the achievement of treating human beings as ends in themselves. I don't think that an 18th century political vocabulary designed for a world where economic autonomy was possible and trade was for the most part genuinely local and self sufficient applies to the world of 2012 (or 1912). The end result of your philosophy, in practice, is the constriction of autonomy, agency, and general decrease in the possibilities of people to live like they are ends in themselves. Millions of people lacking the ability to pay for medical care is a FAR FAR FAR FAR FAR FAR FAR greater threat to their human dignity and decency than making you pay a tax.

Last night my wife and I had to bring our daughter to the emergency room due to a high fever and trouble breathing. I have health insurance. What if I didn't? And if something was seriously wrong with her what happens afterwards. With all due respect for the terrible burdens you are forced to endure, I don't think these are even remotely equivalent.




Your desire to not pay taxes is not an issue of fundamental humanity. We are not talking about your freedom of religion here. We are talking about competing economic decisions. Do we want to let people try their best to pay for health care in a private market (or not pay for it at all) or do we want to structure our economic rules to encourage a certain type of outcome and levy taxes to support it. I am focusing on economics here because this is an economic issue. A moral issue insofar as economics is also morality, but still economic.



oh sure, that is always a huge concern. But in this particular case I hardly find the private insurance market (which still exists, btw) to be the realm of pure freedom either. And I feel less alienated by government than I do huge corporations in this case. Once you get past the government label I suspect most americans do as well. Do you think people would feel empowered by granting insurance companies the right to deny people coverage on the basis of preexisting conditions?




What does free speech mean?

Right now congress has the power to regulate interstate commerce. If we decide we don't want to give Congress that power we are more than free to amend the constitution. In the meantime what does interstate commerce mean?

Right now congress has the power to tax in the interest of the general welfare. if we decide we don't want to give Congress that power we are more than free to amend the constitution. In the meantime what does the power to tax in the interest of the general welfare mean?