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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (26784)	8/18/2006 9:19:59 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 543207

And some liberties are more important than other liberties. It's not a matter of which liberties are more important than others, it's who is restricting the liberty. The worst case is for the state to do so, whether through brutal tyranny or nannyism. If you think like a statist, then it's the job of the state to weigh the relative importance of various liberties and to establish criteria and mechanisms. If you think like a libertarian, the state just stays out of it other than to protect the state from outsiders and to protect citizens from loss of life, limb, and property at the hands of each other. So it's not about rank ordering liberties but rank ordering values to put liberty at the top. A majority of people would not put liberty at the top. Those that have other rankings fight among themselves to get government to weigh in their favor. Thata produces a vast and myriad-tentacled weight but little liberty. Sounds like 19th century liberalism to me. And with the same philosophical problems. Dunno what problems you have in mind. Seems pretty straightforward to me.

To: JohnM who wrote (26784)	8/18/2006 10:57:49 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 543207

While I was off at Safeway trying to select avocados without squeezing them, I thought of an analogy. Analogies on SI often run off on tangents and result in more fog than light but I'll try anyway. It's worth the risk to disabuse you of your conflation of current Republican conservatism and libertarianism. Say the Democrats were upset by the collateral loss of life in some Bush war and recommended using special forces rather than daisy cutters. Then say that someone claimed that sending special forces to wherever is a Democratic principle. You'd easily see how inapt that was. Democrats are reluctant to send troops anywhere. Sending special forces is intended to mitigate an extant scenario, not stand as a core principle. It's better than the mess we're in, not something they advocate. So it is with privatizing Social Security. It's marginally better from a libertarian perspective than the mess we're in. But it's hardly libertarian.