P-Necromancer
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User ID: 3278
P-Necromancer
6d ago
For Alice it's no less of an imposition, but there ought to be fewer dissatisfied Alices and Bobs. Handling things on a more local level means that more people live in localities where their preferences are law, and that, if the current state of the law is intolerable to you, it's easier to move somewhere where it isn't. Abortion is something of an odd case here: There's little reason to care whether shoplifting is de-facto legal in California if you don't live in California, but pro-life people care very much whether 'baby murder' is permitted anywhere. But on the margin I still think they'd rather it happen somewhere else than right next door, so Federalism does increase satisfaction of preferences.
Huh, interesting thought. My intuition is that the evolutionary basis for jealousy is that it's a lot easier to steal someone else's stuff than to make your own, and the richer they are, the better the risk-reward ratio. But yeah, if most wealth disparity in the ancestral environment came down to monopolization of scarce resources, that would do it too.
But I don't think that's the case. It's certainly true that wealth disparities were far more compressed for hunter-gatherers, but there still was such a thing as capital. Fruit isn't capital, but, for example, a quantity of well-made spears or baskets or arrowheads would be. And creating those things takes effort and skill and in no way diminishes your access to them. Would you be more jealous of the guy with a lot of fruit or the guy with the nicest tent and finest weapons and best tools? The latter, I would think. Nomads can't have a lot of stuff, but the stuff they do have is all the more important for that reason.
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