Can one be a Rawlsian and a libertarian?

[elfs]

For the past three days, I've had two completely different tabs open in my browser. I've been unwilling and unable to close them, unable to come to a conclusion about them, unable to reconcile them fully. I'm not going to try. Instead, to answer a question I was recently asked about my political position, I'm just going to post them, and explain why neither satisfies me:

The first comes from Eliezer Yudkowsky, who when asked why he's a libertarian:

What makes me a small-'l' libertarian isn't that I believe it's impossible— or easy— to reconfigure human brains using sufficiently advanced technology, or any other method.

What makes me a libertarian is that the prospect of having that reconfiguration done by the same system that managed to ban marijuana while allowing tobacco, subsidize ethanol made from corn, and turn the patent system into a form of legalized bludgeoning, makes me want to run screaming into the night until I fall over from lack of oxygen.

I am completely in sympathy with Eliezer's stance here. He's convinced, as am I, that eventually that technology will fall into human hands. The brain is a physical thing. The vast history of human beings shows a range of behaviors from unconscious, flightly, complete dissolution all the way to deliberate, utter, conscious and self-affirming devotion to a cause, from a pathetic inability to see outside one's monkeysphere all the way to an almost equally pathetic inability to distinguish good from evil-- every last one of these ranges is a knob somewhere in the brain that we will, someday, be able to grasp, turn, and tune.

On the other hand, Ari Kohen writes:

I don't feel less free when I look at the amount of money that comes out of my check every month, even though I'd rather have that money in my pocket. The reason is that I'm actually making a choice too: I choose to live in this country, with its government and tax structure and social safety nets. In fact, I embrace it. We can certainly do better in terms of those safety nets by working to make our government more efficient and effective, but that's not what [Ron] Paul is advocating; instead, he thinks that the vast majority of the government — and the services it provides — should simply be eliminated. To my mind, that would mean we'd be living in a very different political community, one that I wouldn't like nearly as much. I want to live in a political community that chooses to take care of others, one that is committed to the idea that no one should go hungry or be unable to get critical medical attention.

With this, too, I have significant sympathy, and this is why I can't reconcile these two points of view.

Is it possible to craft a system where civil service does not, in Heinlein's immortal phrase, become civil mastery? Where we derive service from our government in the form of safety nets for the ill-lucked, for those who did not inherit the advantages of higher education, stellar health or exquisite beauty?

John Rawls once famously explained his rejection of libertarianism by proposing a veil of ignorance:

Let each person participate in the crafting of a governing system without knowing his place in society, his class or social position, his fortune in distribution of natural assets and abilities.

While not really possible, it is a vastly better approach to justice, to vote on a system as if you did not know whether or for how long you'll be rich or poor, healthy or ill. Better than the current one, still in place, that, as Thucydides wrote 2500 years ago, "The powerful do as they will, and the weak accept as they must."

Is it possible to be both a libertarian, one who seeks freedom from civil mastery, and to be a Rawlsian, one who seeks civil service organized around a universal principle of justice? I doubt it, but just as the essential evidence of human history reveals that civil service inevitably leads to civil mastery continually drags me away from a full-throated defense of Rawls, so to must the principal that to avoid civil mastery we must destroy civil service drags me away from Nozick and libertarianism.

Comments

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

My approach to the safety net would be thus:

Everyone deserves minimal basic medical care. Period. We are better than the 3rd world because we have a medical system. But more and more people cannot get treatment for easily treated problems because they don't have insurance at all, and more and more doctors refuse to see anyone without it.

Thus a simple medical credit plan where every citizen pays 2 dollars a month for their entire life unless they are unemployed. And for that, they get up to 750$ of medical treatment from any doctor in the country. No more kids dying from pneumonia because mom couldn't get 50c of antibiotics. And you won't have people smoking 50 years and then demanding lung transplants. It's a backup plan for when you have nothing else.

Everyone on welfare becomes a temp employee of the state and answers phones, picks up trash, paints low income housing, something. Quadraplegic? A computer and telephone gets put in your home and you are phone support for someone. A number of people have pointed out that this won't work because there is no incentive to actually work. My response is, poor results or no results will equal poor pay or no pay, just like it would in the private sector. Again, this is the fallback plan.

None of these things create a comfortable existance. That's on purpose. While the govt. owes it to the populace to ensure survival (otherwise what's that common defense supposed to accomplish?) it doesn't owe anyone a free ride or a comfortable life. Have the safety net be uncomfortable works for me. Having it gone? That doesn't work for me. I've seen kids die from lack of a few dollars of basic drugs. This, in the greatest nation on Earth?!

The only thing about the rich denying health care to the poor is the historical fact that when plagues come, they kill the rich and the poor indiscriminately. So the fatcats are just cutting their own throats with their platinum cards as well as the poor.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

Everyone on welfare becomes a temp employee of the state and answers phones, picks up trash, paints low income housing, something.

This, actually, is what the late, great Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan proposed back in the mid-1990's. Instead, we got, "Welfare Reform," which treats everyone equally — everyone's treated as a n****r. I've seen it first-hand.

I much prefer what Sen. Moynihan proposed. The criticism that, "… this won't work because there is no incentive to actually work," is based on the assumption that poor==black==lazy+shiftless+insert-19^th-century-horse$h1t-here. Most — I'd say almost all — people aren't like that, and would prefer something as a job to a handout.

[happilymyself.livejournal.com]

I've thought long about this, too. At this point, I call myself a pragmatarian or liberaltarian or David Brin libertarian. Brin seems to have found a happy balance in all this, and I love reading his blog for that reason.

In many ways, libertarians have forgotten their roots, the founding principles, in favor of sticking to conclusions made down the chain. They forget things like the principle of non-initiation of force, i.e. that once an individual or company initiates force or fraud, they lose their rights.

There's a reason libertarians are not anarchists. And this is one of those reasons. Yet modern libertarians seem to think it's ok for everyone to swing their fists around wily nily (and the richer you are, all the better) regardless of whose noses get smashed in. That's not how my Republican father raised me to think, nor why I converted to libertarianism. The medical industry is a great example of a lot of fist swinging, so /of course/ it should be regulated. Regulated the hell out of. (I wrote at length about this in my blog a couple of years ago when Obamacare was being passed. There are several, but here are two: http://cognitiveresurgence.wordpress.com/2009/08/24/the-american-free-market-healthcare-system-is-socialist/ and http://cognitiveresurgence.wordpress.com/2009/08/07/on-tyranny-and-health-care-a-libertarians-plea-for-government-interference/)

Another principle libertarians forget is the idea that reason and facts should always be your guide for making political decisions. Yet they are so caught up in ideology that they cling to outdated facts and outmoded conclusions, never updating their views with new evidence. Of which there is plenty. Like, raising taxes right now, just a little, especially on the super-rich, would be good for the economy and lower the deficit. Again, libertarians aren't supposed to be anarchists, and accept that taxes are necessary, yet the trend is that lower taxes are always best. What is too low then, zero? So are you anarchists?

I think liberals have a great opportunity here to sweep in and make their cases right now based on reason. But they're sticking to emotional arguments. i.e. liberals are not good at rational debate. Yet right now, many liberal stances are the pragmatic, logical, right thing to do. They're just terrible at positioning those ideas.

[atheorist.livejournal.com]

Many of Yudkowsky's points about human irrationality actually undermine simplistic libertarian arguments. For example, it might be reasonable, if humans have a bias that leads to undersaving, to use some commitment mechanism to cause people to save for retirement - which is a sketch of an argument for something like social security.

The specific design that we have is probably awful. Probably there is a better design - perhaps the government provides "hooks" so that structures (like social security) can be built on top of government's monopoly on the use of coercive force, but outside the government proper.

However, you have probably shipped bad-but-workable designs when under time pressure. It's understandable, and sometimes even a reasonable strategy. We just need to refactor. And when you think the government is a nightmarish legacy system that will take a long time to get into some sort of reasonable shape, just imagine the genome.

Of course not

[ideaphile.livejournal.com]

It's logically impossible to have a system in which people are free to live their lives as they choose, and in which people are simultaneously empowered to demand the goods and services of others.

How is this not obvious to everyone?

Good heavens, what's next, a post about why 1 can't be 2?

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Re: Of course not

[elfs.livejournal.com]

So, the basic choice is between 1984 (or Brave New World)... and Somalia?

Re: Of course not

[ideaphile.livejournal.com]

I don't understand. In which of those two situations do you believe the government rigorously defends the human right to self-determination?

The basic choice, obviously, is between self-determination and tyranny. It hardly matters whether the tyrants are called "community organizers" or "warlords."

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Re: Of course not

[mikstera.livejournal.com]

As members of a society, we choose to trade unlimited personal autonomy for the benefits of interdependent, mutually supportive society. As such, we maximize the degree to which we are individually free to live our lives, but with limits so as to maximize everyone's freedom, and support everyone's well-being.

Some claim that taxes are theft, or, as you put it, a demand for the goods and services of others.

Not at all. Taxation is merely the recognition that we all derive benefit from living in a society in which the roads are usable, the water is safe to drink, and public sanitation is maintained, and those benefits need to be paid for.

Now, one could try to have a society with no central State, one in which everyone was free to do as they pleased... and that hasn't tended to work out for anyone but the strongest in such societies (and arguably not very well for even them).

As Justice Thurgood Marshall famously observed "I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization."

I tend to agree. We may argue over the specifics of the tax structure, or the specifics of the legal limitations placed on individual action, but what appears obvious to me, and, I'd wager, to most people, is that there is a balance to be struck between individual freedom of action and the quality of life offered by society as a whole.

Re: Of course not

[ideaphile.livejournal.com]

You're confusing two things: taxes that benefit the taxpayer, and taxes that harm the taxpayer.

This confusion-- often deliberately induced-- is behind some of the greatest evils of history.

Try not to be confused.

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Re: Of course not

[mikstera.livejournal.com]

Here's what you said:

You're confusing two things: taxes that benefit the taxpayer, and taxes that harm the taxpayer.

Perhaps it would help the conversation along if you were specific as to what constituted "taxes that harm the taxpayer", as you see it. Can you share some examples?

I did say this:

We may argue over the specifics of the tax structure, or the specifics of the legal limitations placed on individual action, but what appears obvious to me, and, I'd wager, to most people, is that there is a balance to be struck between individual freedom of action and the quality of life offered by society as a whole.

and I'm well aware that there is plenty of room for honest disagreement as to what is taxed, to what degree, and for what purpose.

You and I may disagree as to the specifics of taxation without either of us being confused.

There are taxes that I disagree with, just as there are tax-funded State actions which I disagree with. Likewise, there are taxes and tax-funded State actions which I enthusiastically, heartily endorse.

Can you not say the same?

Re: Of course not

[ideaphile.livejournal.com]

No, I won't share any examples. If you can't already spend fifteen minutes merely listing government activities funded by your taxes that are harming you, you lack the context to appreciate whatever examples I might point to.

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Re: Of course not

[mikstera.livejournal.com]

If you hadn't stopped reading my post after the first few sentences, you'd have seen that I said this:

There are taxes that I disagree with, just as there are tax-funded State actions which I disagree with.

I'm asking you what taxes you see has being harmful as a means of better understanding your position, with the intent of fostering clearer, more productive conversation.

You appear to have different priorities. So be it.

[http://www.flutterby.net/User:DanLyke (from livejournal.com)]

A couple of things led to my fall from libertarian. One of those was the realization that with real estate ownership, especially at the "property rights and damn the externalities" level that many libertarians seem to espouse, I could choose to live in a libertarian state, but that'd mean moving to some place that's a monarchy: their ancestors owned the land, people chose to settle on it, even when there's exchange of ownership of some portion of the rights to that land the CCRs maintain the monarchy

So from that level, I think that some of the notions of justice are incompatible with what libertarian practices would turn into long-term: at some point it becomes a world of privileged children and serfs.

Having said that, I'm still a fan of encouraging a lot of self-determination, I'm still of the belief that the primary thing I should be doing for society is not being a drain on it. But I think that when we are able to step back from the ideological notions of right and wrong and examine those beliefs in a larger pragmatic context, your conclusion is a reasonable one.