Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: Lane3 who wrote (26785)	8/18/2006 9:34:29 AM
From: epicure	Respond to of 543215

It all depends on how you see liberty. If you are a poor child, whose parents cannot possibly feed your properly, or educate you properly, you have no "liberty". You are restricted and controlled by your environment much more than most people are by the state. You have no "choice". The problem with circumstances, as they intersect liberty, is that some types of poverty, and some events, not only constrain liberty, but they cripple people, so they are permanently constrained, whether physically or economically. If you think about it the way a liberal does, than the state is actually increasing liberty when it helps people in a sensible way to overcome the imprisonment of their circumstances. The "freedom" to sink without a net is highly over rated, I think.

To: Lane3 who wrote (26785)	8/18/2006 12:13:37 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 543215

I said: Sounds like 19th century liberalism to me. And with the same philosophical problems. You said: Dunno what problems you have in mind. Seems pretty straightforward to me. The biggest, largest, most fundamental is that it starts in the wrong place. We are fundamentally connected to others: we are born that way, our wellbeing or lack thereof is largely a function of that. It's something we have no choice about. As we grow older, we can, to some degree, select the contexts in which that plays out. But its fact is simply one of the givens of the human condition. Nineteenth century liberalism starts with our disconnect from others and makes a non-existent into a virtue. When it becomes the reigning and sole ideology in economics, you get, of course, great disasters: the worst sort of booms and busts. The nineteenth and early twentieth century saw more than their share of such. And we may get one or two or three given the changing fortunes of that economic ideology at the moment.