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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   28027 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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Since no one has posted yet, I figured that instead of culture war ephemera, we can indulge in a bit of a discussion on first principles.

The axioms of the liberal west (namely, private property and individual rights) have the emergent property of inequality, for the following reasons.

A) Man is possessed of inalienable rights (let's assume that Locke is correct.) of life, liberty, and private property.

B) He has the right to improve what nature provides (so as long as he does not impunge on the commons.) Therefore.

C) He has the freedom to enjoy the benefits of his good decisions, and endure his bad ones.

But...

A) Men are not born with equal talent and ability. Therefore

B) The choices they make with their capital are not equally wise. Over time...

C) Men are not born into equal prosperity and circumstance, compounding with the effects of A.

This statement seems trivially true. Everyone knows someone in their lives who makes smart decisions with their money and someone who makes dumb decisions with them. But the very notion that this over time will lead to a hierarchal and oligarchic character of their society is viscerally offensive to many. The reaction to this dilemma is the underlying problem of all modern political ideologies.

The communists see it as a bad thing. (Obviously.) They want a non-hierarchal society with no capitalists. But in this endeavor they have historically failed, creating new hierarchies and new party oligarchs with control over state industries. And it is not clear that collective bodies are better or wiser at allocating capital: real-world performance says no.

The fascists see it as a good thing. In this, they are at least consistent with their own ideology. But in terms of performance, it has also been a non-winner, inflicting great amounts of human misery on the species before collapsing under the strain of expansionist wars. Fully metabolizing the inequality of man doesn't seem to lead to good results either.

A canny reader may go, 'ah, but you haven't mentioned liberalism! are you an enlightened centrist?' I'm sorry to say, but no. Liberalism is strategically ambiguous: or, in other words, it pretends that the problem doesn't exist. By patching up the most obvious inequalities with welfare programs and other forms of redistributionism, the proponents of liberalism can carry on with the pretense of equality married to a free market system. But because they are ideologically restricted by private property and individual rights, they can only work on the margins, and never truly solve the problem of equality.

Perhaps if we lived in the boundaries of ethnic nation-states, it wouldn't be a problem, but we live in the age of bourgeoise republics, bohemian in character. What that means is that political equality is converging on economic equality, and vis versa. Beside the obvious assabiyah problems this creates, it also perpetuates the seed of fascism and communism by perpetuating the critique of the liberal society. The hypocrisy and self-contradiction creates a constant fear of revolution in its ruling classes, which only increases the hypocrisy until the liberals are too weak and enervated to present a proper opposition to their illiberal enemies.

Rather than blaming the evilness on illusory phantoms as certain explanatory narratives do (CRT, globalists, da joos) it seems clear that the notion of natural rights itself is the cause of it all. Nature is many things, but it is not equal. What is the solution, then? Do we change the natural condition of man and refine our species successor, or do we return to obedience to supernatural emanations of God?

I don't know. I like natural rights. I like having them. But I can't justify keeping them.

i have never actually seen communists advocate for everyone to have the exact same standards of living, that always felt to me like a strawman from capitalists pretending to explain what communists believe to other capitalists

A) Men are not born with equal talent and ability. Therefore

B) The choices they make with their capital are not equally wise. Over time...>

C) Men are not born into equal prosperity and circumstance, compounding with the effects of A.

This statement seems trivially true. Everyone knows someone in their lives who makes smart decisions with their money and someone who makes dumb decisions with them. But the very notion that this over time will lead to a hierarchal and oligarchic character of their society is viscerally offensive to many. The reaction to this dilemma is the underlying problem of all modern political ideologies.

you gloss over C, but that is the only problem communists see with capitalism, because "make your money work for you" is a thing in capitalism, where if you inherit enough money it takes no talent to then hire an advisor and let him invest your money, giving you free capital for 0 work or talent

in communism, people have different standards of living as well as authority depending on their credentials, track record etc., it is a real attempt at meritocracy, the only thing they get rid of is the feedback loop of rich getting richer for no reason than that they were already rich to begin with

You cannot deduce that people are not born equal from the fact their parents are not equal, it's a mistake. There is a missing argument here. Indeed, assume that A is 10 times richer than B, but A has 10 children and B only has 1. Then the children are born equal, aren't they?

And also, the richest are only rich because everyone else is somewhat rich. You can only sell iphones or cars to people that are somewhat rich. Even amazon needs people to have phones or computers. So it regulates itself a little bit. I suspect the richest become relatively richer because the population grows. If you take 0.1 cent by product sold, it helps that there are more people.

There is some marginal benefit to being the child of a rich person. (Otherwise, there would be no mechanisms to preserve elite status over generations other than by gene transfer.) I think if people were given the choice of being the only child of a Sub-Saharan African or the hundredth (thousandth?) child of Elon Musk, they'd choose the latter every time.

My point being is that it doesn't matter how affluent the society as a whole is: so as long as hedonic escalation is a thing, people will always resent and have jealousy for people more well off then them (even if, relative to everyone else, they are wealthier than everyone on the planet.) We are nowhere near that state in the modern day: the ones with the greatest chip in their shoulders against the 1% are the fantastically wealthy American underclass.

The Musk example is bad, because Musk is more than thousand times richer than a subsaharan african, children cannot choose their parents, and Musk does not have 1000 children so it's particularly meaningless. And no, it's not better to be the billionth child of Musk than the child of an average american.

But anyway that wasn't my point. My point was that you cannot deduce your conclusion from your hypothesis. Maybe your conclusion is still right, but it remains to prove.

I feel like social contract theory gets at a lot of this.

The 'so long as he does not impunge on the commons' part of B is where a lot of the practical considerations are hidden, given that there's essentially zero land on the planet that isn't claimed by some person or entity already. Natural rights make a lot of sense if you are talking about an unclaimed frontier, but once everything is already claimed, the whole 'what nature provides' thing stops being practically relevant, and all your discussions are about the relationships between people and the things they own.

And when we're talking about that, I'm pretty happy saying something like: No, people do not have the natural right to be protected from the consequences of their bad decisions, nor even from the slings and arrow of outrageous fortune. that they had no control over.

But people do have the natural right to cooperate on projects, and one of those projects can be something like 'a democratic government concerned with the general welfare of the people inside it, including shielding them from suffering and harm whatever the origin'.

And it turns out that's a pretty popular project that a lot of people like and want to get on board with.

And once a project like that has laid claim to a certain plot of land, it has the natural right to use that land however it wants, including saying 'anyone who lives on our land has to pay such-and-such taxes to be used for such-and-such purposes, and will get one vote to influence everything the project does including those taxes and that spending'.

At that point, I feel like natural rights have pretty much been satisfied and are not very relevant to the everyday questions about what the people in that project decide to do anymore. Aside form ensuring exit rights, which the US at least has.

If someone imagined that such a project did not exist and that the land they lived on was not owned by such a project, then they might think that they were still in the state of nature where their natural rights predominated. But they'd simply be mistaken.

There is only one natural right in man, and that is the ability to do violence.

All other rights spring from this basic fact. We have social and political rights because someone in history stuck a bayonet in someone else who was trying to deny those. Any right not backed by violence will wither and disappear in short order.

The last argument of kings is the final right of every man.

Thanks, Mao.

I think you’re overlooking something. Violence is uncertainty. Both about who will prevail and who expects to prevail. We have social and political rights because someone decided to stack the odds in his favor by bringing a friend.

Individual violence is nothing compared to coordinated violence. Cultivating and expending credibility such that other people are your friends and not your enemies’. Or, better yet, to extend the uncertainty in your favor, and let you bluff more strength than you might truly be able to draw. This is where @vorpa_glavo’s status games come in: does that chief command fifty spears or just ten? Will his sons move heaven and earth to avenge him, or let old insults lie?

Social bonds are the fundamental right of humanity. And thanks to the unreliability of people, they supersede any individual capacity for violence.

Social bonds are the fundamental right of humanity.

...I don't think I'd fully agree with this statement, but it is one of the most interesting insights I've seen here in quite some time. It crystalizes some of the serious doubts I've had about my understanding of Hobbes' argument in Leviathan: is the state of nature, the war of all against all that founds his argument, something that does or has ever actually existed? Has there ever been a moment when alliances did not exist?

I’m inclined to agree with @Southkraut and say that “all vs. all” is a figure of speech. While I don’t know where Hobbes would draw the line, I doubt he denied kinship bonds; they’re just categorically different than larger organizations. I’d put the transition around Dunbar’s number.

But then, I’m not sure I’ve fully internalized Unflattening Hobbes.

Isn't it a war of subsets of all against subsets of all, and Hobbes was just being concise?

Isn't it a war of subsets of all against subsets of all, and Hobbes was just being concise?

In that case, how can we ever be said to have escaped the state of nature? There's never been a time when there was no conflict between subsets of all either. It's entirely possible that I'm misunderstanding his theory, but the above post has me curious if this is another example of false knowledge, something we all sort of assumed was accurate because it sounded plausible.

Violence is uncertainty. Both about who will prevail and who expects to prevail.

I most certainly do not overlook this, it's what makes the system as fair as anything else that exists.

The rest of your comment seems to think that I said violence was the best political system, but that is not my argument. How power is produced from violence is a corrupt and despicable business, but we call it politics. None of that impacts my argument that violence is the only inherent human right.

It is the only method by which the truly disadvantaged can inject some uncertainty into their otherwise certain outcomes.

Sorry, I wasn’t clear. I didn’t read you as claiming violence was the best political system. My point was that social games—scheming and alliances—are a more effective method for achieving goals than mere violence. They scale better, and leverage the uncertainty of violence. They also carry much less opportunity cost. I think this makes socialization, or perhaps simply speech, an inherent human right. Political power comes from the barrel of a gun, but it doesn’t have to be your gun.

It is the only method by which the truly disadvantaged can inject some uncertainty into their otherwise certain outcomes.

This is true, but only for what I think is a vanishingly narrow definition. It is a rare outlaw indeed who can’t leverage social ties. Even if he only does so to amplify his violence, he will get more with cooperation and threats than with the acts themselves.

a more effective method for achieving goals

the only truly unalienable right

I think you're arguing something I'm not arguing against.

Well, of course. It is implicit.

But bringing up this fact ignores the past thousand years of political development, namely, that we live in the era that states have monopolies on force. It brings to mind the sort of self-representing lawsuit maker who smugly brings up the Magna Carta at his trial for tax evasion. Yes, we understand the principle, but it's not very useful for our purposes.

Your formulation is incorrect, however. Men have a right to self-defense in the preservation of their own lives, not murder. And through this lense we extend this sense of self to the material (private property) and the abstract (autonomy of action.) Unless you are so radical that you say you have the right to kill anyone you please.

Which, of course, is fine. But then I'd have to report you for strange notions.

we live in the era that states have monopolies on force.

No, we don't. From Prigozhin to Weaver to Rittenhouse, our modern states have long lost (if they ever had) any sort of monopoly on violence.

Your formulation is incorrect, however. Men have a right to self-defense in the preservation of their own lives, not murder.

Obviously I disagree. All rights can be misused, but the right is underlying, ineradicable. A right means nothing if it is only the right to do something in a manner prescribed by society in a given time and place. Violence is always an option, if not always the smart or moral one. Point is, the right is "unalienable" in a very real sense. Nobody can take it from you. Because of this, it underwrites all other rights, because if they are trampled far enough, we can activate the most ancient and powerful of all rights.

While I believe there is a lot of truth in what you say, I think there is one other wellspring of "natural rights": social status games.

Sure, sometimes social status games are backed by violence, or the threat of violence, but consider something like accessibility laws for disabled people. There is no risk of disabled people violently uprising against the state, and the vast majority of people would not raise arms against the government if the government got rid of wheelchair ramps, etc.

So, why do we have accesibility laws in most of the developed world? It is because throwing a bone to disabled people imposes a small enough dead weight loss on the economy, and a large enough increase in the prestige of Western institutions among Western elites that the ruling party is willing to use political capital to do it. (Or the reputation and prestige lost for undoing it is too large to truly contemplate.)

Violence is important, but it isn't everything.

Social status games are just violence with extra steps.

Also, the ADA is not about disabled people, disabled people are a McGuffin to let big capitalism strangle small capitalism.

Disabled access laws are class warfare intended to enrich trial lawyers and bankrupt small businesses.

It's using the violence of the state to enrich the parts of the economy who will not miss the "dead weight loss" because they build a new store every week, rather than the parts which have a legacy building which is harder and more expensive to retrofit.

There's no status here, no morals and no ideology. Just violence and money. Status is what gets sold to the rubes.

A canny reader may go, 'ah, but you haven't mentioned liberalism! are you an enlightened centrist?' I'm sorry to say, but no. Liberalism is strategically ambiguous: or, in other words, it pretends that the problem doesn't exist. By patching up the most obvious inequalities with welfare programs and other forms of redistributionism, the proponents of liberalism can carry on with the pretense of equality married to a free market system. But because they are ideologically restricted by private property and individual rights, they can only work on the margins, and never truly solve the problem of equality.

What do you mean by "solve the problem of equality"? A system that tries to achieve the massive material gains of the free market while minimizing the economic inequality it necessitates seems like a fine solution to me.

But it is hypocrisy. What Marxists call attempting to resolve the contradictions of capitalism, and what fascists of every stripe call parasitism. And they are correct in their critique that it solves nothing: there is still inequality and no amount of welfarism will remove it.

Now, you can see this as necessary process of the churn of liberal democracy. That's a kind way to look at it. But, and correct me if I misrepresent you, the essence of your response (and what many liberals would also say) is that "I am okay with a permanently unequal society, so as long as it makes token efforts to make me more comfortable living in it."

Which is a... worldview.

As an aside, if this isn't too off-topic, in fifteen minutes of Motte browsing I have now encountered the word assabiyah twice, having never seen it before. What's the pronunciation? And from whence the apparently now popular usage?

And from whence the apparently now popular usage?

There was one guy who loved using it in every post he could. Coming back several times on different alts after being banned for one reason or another. I'm still not sure if it's him again or if finally the word has "memed itself over" into other people's heads.

I assume it's pronounced "ah-sah-bee-yah," but I wouldn't know for sure and I have zero connection to the culture it came from.

Thanks. I assume the same just following ingrained rules of reading, but apparently it's also spelled asabiyya which would make me want to extend that Y sound. Unless your bee is more of a beee than mine.

Ibn Kaldun was an Arab sociologist (the first of his field) and, exceptionally for a man of his time, did not accept the 'god willed it' explanation for why the Rashidun Caliphate collapsed. He came up with a term to describe the social cohesiveness and trust of society that degraded over time (of which I would call social capital).

It serves as a warning to elites who assume a high-trust society is a given: that abusing one's legitimacy by acting in arbitrary ways will lead to the decline and decay of one's empire, no matter how divinely guided. A bourgeoise state is reliant on high societal trust for contract enforcement and stability for business. It is the exceptional malefactor that would burn this trust for a temporary boost to quarterly figures.

A fantastically informative post, but you didn't answer either of his questions!

Others had already answered the question, so I felt that adding the historical content would be more helpful than digging up the old SSC post that introduced the concept to the rat sphere in the first place.

no clue on pronunciation, but the popularity comes from it being introduced to the rationalist lexicon by (I believe) Talib, and then absolutely run into the ground by an extremely prolific single-issue poster back in the reddit days. This guy would post between three and five very large top-level comments and a whole host of replies each week, all of them centering on "assabiyah", to the point that every poster unfortunate enough to have been here at the time has the word carved indelibly into their forebrain. It's sort of a meme for the old-timers now.

I must have missed it; thanks very much for the clarification.

I'm going to say that the United States as originally instantiated had an elegant theoretical solution to most of the issues facing liberalism.

There was a document which prescribed those few natural/inalienable/fundamental rights that everyone was assumed to have 'from birth.' This document also provided for the creation of a unified entity which would assist in ensuring the 'commons' was preserved and ameliorating disputes between the states without violence.

This setup was based on the 'state' as the basic unit of political authority. The 'states' which ultimately all threw their influence together to form a supervisory entity are kind of arbitrarily defined in terms of population, size of territory, and the actual rights granted to those they exercised control over (the big one being whether slavery was abolished or not), but at least they could say they were the generally accepted sovereign that the people in their governed territory had more-or-less consented to.

So the aforementioned document laying out the basic inalienable rights everyone was entitled to invoke which helped define the baseline expectations for each citizen so they wouldn't accidentally cross a given state border and find all their property confiscated without warning and themselves thrown into jail without getting due process.

Outside of that, each state was given substantial leeway in how it conducted affairs, raised money, punished crimes, and facilitated the so-called 'common good.' You could call it 'laboratories of Democracy' but I think it just made sense to allow people to sort themselves according to their own preferences and people who found themselves governed by a body that was hostile to their interests could uproot to somewhere more favorable rather than having to attempt a coup, bloodless or otherwise, of their state's governing body.

Federalism made it difficult (and continues to make it difficult, to be fair) for any wannabe fascists or communists to bring the entire country under their thumb because the necessary authority to rule everything was dispersed and decentralized such that you couldn't just win one election and then seize control, sweeping your enemies away in one fell swoop.

Of course, Lysander Spooner took the theoretical foundation of Constitutional Law to task shortly after the Civil War.

There was no point, admittedly, where the whole U.S. was operating as a harmonious whole sans internal strife and pockets of violence. Still, the structure proved resilient.

What really makes the Federalist project crumble was the elision of 'civil rights' with 'natural rights' and the elevation of the former to higher status than the latter.

In my utopia, I can imagine a Federal Government that maintains an army and navy solely for the defense of the actual borders of the United States, and has a stable cadre of agents tasked with intervening in disputes between states and directly protecting the enumerated rights of citizens when infringed. The states have control of economic affairs in their borders and can establish legal regimes that pursue goals other than the pure protection of natural rights, so long as those basic enumerated rights took precedence when invoked, and citizens were ensured the basic 'freedom' to uproot and move as needed.

But as soon as the world of rights which are to be protected gets away from the basic "Life, Liberty, Property" core concept and starts invoking protection of 'equality' or vaguely defined 'justice' or, worse, the right to 'FEEL safe,' the mandate can grow almost unfettered.

To be clear, what I'm saying is that in my utopia if an individual state decided to, e.g. engage in widespread wealth redistribution, or slavery reparations, or wanted to provide 'free' healthcare to all citizens then this would be fine! Or if it wanted to become a draconian police state when it comes to enforcing 'law and order,' that would also be permissible. Hell, if they decided to grant full personhood rights to Corporations and turn over control of most governmental functions to private entities controlled by international mega-corporations, that could probably be done as well. Federal Government need not intervene unless there was pending conflict with another state.

But if the Federal government suddenly decides to pursue 'equality' as a goal, it would find endless justifications to intervene in state's affairs and overrule almost any action that a state might take that didn't adhere strictly to that goal, with an increasingly aggressive set of agencies tasked with overseeing and enforcing the rules.

...which is effectively what has happened over the past 100 years or so.

Still, I see a lot of merit to the experiment as it was originally designed, and rather wish we hadn't run out of frontier space with which to create new polities to test different approaches to governance.

I would point to Jefferson and the anti-Federalist papers as to a non-progressive ideation of equality. Namely, that if we're going to have a republic, it'd be better if everyone was a gentleman-farmer. If the height of American society was somewhere around the wealth and property of the English landed gentry then the distortions that come with the hyperaccumulation of capital would not occur.

But that didn't happen, and if it ever was real then it was definitely squashed after the civil war. The bourgeois won, and with it, the idea of independent democratic experiment-making died too. The American federal government made very sure that landholding elite classes could not resist industrial capital for a reason. And once you have carpetbaggers funded by out of state capital to run for offices everywhere, you no longer have local government, or local politics.

Obama and McCain's electoral contest was the ultimate contest of carpetbagging, neither of them being born in the United States proper. If you want local government, you want local elites.

I tend to be much more enamored with the idea of interlocking relationships with duties for each person as a better model. If I want more power and more freedoms, I must find a way to climb the dominance hierarchy. I must do so by doing things other people find useful in some way, and I’d have some responsibility to those beneath me. And on the other hand, if I simply wish to do as little as possible, that’s fine, but I would have to give up privileges to do that, and one of those is that I’d have to obey those above me.

Honestly, social structures like this show up everywhere, or at least often enough, that I suspect this is simply how natural human society works. You obey those above you and protect and teach those below you, and for the most part you end up with a fairly stable and functional society. And I don’t see this being completely incompatible with the concept of those natural rights that simply constrain the government from interfering in them.

I think this requires noblesse oblige from the people higher up, which mostly only happens if there is accountability for people at the top via skin in the game. If you are a feudal lord with lands that your famils has held for generations and peasants under you whose families have worked for your for generations, you are incentivized to take care of them because their thriving is your thriving. If you mistreat them too terribly they will rebel and chop your head off. If you mismanage the lands you will go bankrupt and be reduced to poverty. If you do a good job you will be wealthy and loved.

If you are the patriarch of a family and you mistreat your wife and/or children they will hate you and leave.

If you are a modern high level bureaucrat or government official in charge of millions/billions of dollars of someone else's money and mismanagement is rewarded with a transfer or a golden parachute, there's none of this. There's no incentive to behave responsibly to those below you, and there's no incentive for people trying to climb their way up to do so gracefully when a momentary clawhold can be cemented with the powers obtained along the way.

If SBF, or the bankers who caused the housing crisis, or the politicians who ruined the economy during Covid faced the ruin of their families into longterm poverty, or beheading by angry mobs, those issues probably wouldn't have happened in the first place because they would have been more careful. If every politician who voted for war was required to lead on the front lines, we'd have a lot fewer wars. But because many (most?) hierarchies allow people high to foist the consequences of their decisions onto people lower down, we typically don't get the nice scale of risk/reward that you envision here, though it sometimes does work like that.

I don't know if SBF is the best example to use considering he is likely going to spend a considerable amount of time in prison and will almost certainly not be allowed to work in any banking/stock market capacity or otherwise manage anyone's money but his own when released. I don't see his job prospects being too great other than as a speaker at banking ethics seminars where he tells everybody about how he was a billionaire who lost everything due to his own poor decisions. Some day I'll do a full writeup on the mortgage crisis and what caused it, but for now suffice it to say that it wasn't the kind of thing that could have been prevented by more personal accountability, unless you want to go so far as to make any financial innovation so risky that we're still operating on a barter system.

Tanking your own career and losing money that you yourself earned (or had "earned" via fraud) is not the same as bankrupting your entire family estate which had been passed down for generations and shared with your family. If SBF was managing the funds of a few dozen siblings/cousins/aunts/uncles/nieces/nephews instead of random strangers, he simultaneously would have been more careful and would have had more oversight from them.

As for the mortgage crisis, my understanding of it was that bad mortgages were packaged up and misleadingy labeled and sold as if they were better than they actually were. Which means when they failed the people who created the bad mortgages in the first place were not the ones who suffered for it, which is another form of lack of skin in the game. If mortgages could not be resold, the people who made them would have lost their own money, or more likely would have recognized the danger to themselves and not made bad mortgages in the first place. I'm not saying "make it illegal to resell mortgages" is actually a good solution, there are an awful lot of benefits to modern economies that maybe make up for the costs of losing skin in the game in many places, but it is a huge cost and an awful lot of the problems we see in the modern economy are those costs.

True, but the thing is that feudalism has been tried in lots of different civilizations and has proven pretty stable overall. And I don’t see how such accountability is hard to conjure up.

If the plebes want noblesse oblige they better start showing some obeiscence. The UMC class is already funding your continued existence, start showing some gratitude instead of "Eat the rich" (sidenote: it's much more efficient to eat the poor instead, but that's a digestion digression for a different day) and then we can talk.

Too much boo-outgroup. Too close to waging the culture war rather than discussing it.

You've had 9 Mod actions against you, and have been a consistently bad poster. I'm not sure there is any point in trying to "reform" your posting habits at this point. I'm gonna start with a perma ban, but if some quality posters or mods want to speak up on your behalf then I'm open to just making this a temp ban.

Edit: bolido_sentimental Spoke up in favor, changing to a twenty day ban.

I will also come down asking for a temp ban - Count often toes the line but I think he adds a quite unique perspective here. I would hate to see him perma-banned.

I do not like the poster you banned, in fact I have him blocked. But from my logged-out browsing, his values are less inimical to the existence of themotte than many posters with cleaner records. Perhaps he is sometimes too blunt in expressing his views, but they are unique and according to Toltecs vs Olmecs doctrine deserve special protection.

I also realize that my reputation isn't strong enough for my words to count.

I also realize that my reputation isn't strong enough for my words to count.

I guess I didn't make that part clear. I didn't want other troublemakers speaking up. But someone like you that has ~300 comments and no mod notes is someone with a good reputation in my mind. Having quality contributions is great, but not at all required for a good reputation. Contributing and not getting much mod attention is enough to make someone a net-positive in my book.

I also wasn't going to give my opinion on this ban because I don't consider myself a high-quality contributor. But if no mod notes is indeed the bar, I'll chime in (I have 842 comments here and on the subreddit with no warnings/bans and, to my knowledge, no mod notes).

I'm in favor of the ban and think way more banning should be done in general. I think way too many people treat warnings and bans like it's a fee they get to pay in exchange for getting to be rude to someone they disagree with. They know exactly what they're doing - they know it's against the rules when they submit their comment. They just don't care. They think the other guy deserves it, so they'll pay the ban tax and take a day off.

I think most of these people would bite their tongue if there were real, significant consequences.

I'm in favor of the ban and think way more banning should be done in general. I think way too many people treat warnings and bans like it's a fee they get to pay in exchange for getting to be rude to someone they disagree with. They know exactly what they're doing - they know it's against the rules when they submit their comment. They just don't care. They think the other guy deserves it, so they'll pay the ban tax and take a day off.

This is pretty close to my views on the subject. Out of all the active moderators I think I am usually the one that is most in favor of more bans, longer bans, and fewer warnings.

There are some people that try to follow the rules, if they get a warning they will correct and be more careful in the future. We have plenty of accounts with just one or two warnings, and then otherwise great behavior.

There are others that seem closer to what you describe, they will happily pay the ban tax (or evade it altogether through alts), and then come back and make trouble again. For all I know I might've been banning the same 5-10 people for my last decade of moderation.

When I see accounts with nine mod notes about bad behavior I feel like I know which category they fall into.

I think most of these people would bite their tongue if there were real, significant consequences.

This part I disagree with, from experience what happens is those people become crusaders for "the mods are terrible/evil oppressors". They just turn most of their rudeness on us, and put us in the position of having to ban people for attacking the moderators. Making us look like petty dictators.

Speaking of consequences, I am curious if the people against a ban would be willing to suffer any consequences for the behavior of BurdensomeCount. @TheDag @some @bolido_sentimental

Treat this fully as a hypothetical, but what if the next time BurdensomeCount got banned, you also received a one day ban? Would it still be worth it to keep them around?

I ask, because for the moderators there are consequences to keeping around troublesome users. This interaction takes up my time and energy. And for every mod action on a user, there are usually about 5 posts from that same user that were on the edge and we let slide. When I go through the mod queue I usually try and carefully read posts and their context. This is all work I've volunteered for, but I also don't have unlimited time in my day.

More comments

I would advocate for a temp ban here. I agree that he goes too far sometimes, but BC often posts well-considered or interesting/unusual takes. In general, I feel like the benefits from his posts outweigh the demerits of his occasional blow-up.

This is just my opinion.

Done, I've changed the ban length.

If truck drivers stop working it's all over by the end of the week. If soldiers refuse to join/fight in the US military, then the Pentagon and State Department are irrelevant nobodies. If port workers down tools, good luck importing food. That's where your trade argument breaks down. Without these people, there is no trade, no transport, no nothing.

Consider 'essential workers' in COVID. Now there are some PMCs that were essential - judges for instance. But the vast vast majority are working class or poorly paid. And even judges are not nearly as essential as truck drivers. You can have a long backlog of cases but a backlog of food supply is called a famine. This will change with automation but I'm just concerned with the present.

it's with the western lower classes who think that being born on a specific piece of rock grants them privileges denied to other humans with a greater capacity to contribute to the world

They're not merely privileged, they have the power to vaporize the whole system instantly, even though they're not organized or motivated to wield that power. The top of a pyramid can't exist without a sturdy foundation.

If truck drivers stop working it's all over by the end of the week.

If this happens we import new people over from the third world who're going to do this cheaper and won't stop working because they know what is good for them and know the meaning of being thankful. Trade doesn't just apply to goods, it also applies to humans. Your statement is no different from saying water should be the most valuable thing in the world because without it we die in 3 days. I'm going to make a top level on this soon where I delve deeper.

You assume those third worlders already have trucks, know road rules, know standards for cargo loading and unloading, know how to read a GPS... Last but not least do you want to spend your time in a retirement home being looked after by some Haitian migrant who wants to do the absolute minimum to get paid and couldn't care less about your welfare because you're totally foreign to her? The quality of work is not identical.

know the meaning of being thankful

We are the ones who should be thankful for the food, goods and security that they provide. Society works smoothly when classes work together, not when they are divided. The elite can replace workers by mass immigration. The workers can also replace the elite by massacre. What you're advocating is top-tier fragilista stuff, reneging on the social contract, the equivalent of proposing to replace the citizen-soldiers with foreign mercenaries. Do you not see any flaws in this proposal? What if we suddenly need the whole population to do important war work - and you just spent decades demeaning, undermining and threatening to replace them? What if we need the consent of the masses to govern? What if we don't want electric substations being blown up, cities paralyzed by riots... Majorities can oppress minorities but it's very hard for a minority to oppress a majority.

water should be the most valuable thing in the world

It is the most important thing in the world, perhaps behind oxygen. The supply is very high though, reducing its value. But that doesn't mean we can scorn the suppliers!

The UMC class is already funding your continued existence,

Is it? What real work are they doing to keep people fed, clothed and sheltered? I don't see them working on farms or getting involved in the actual distribution of tangible and meaningful resources. In actuality they're simply skimming off the top, and providing anti-services in the form of hostile doctrines and policies which make life worse for the people underneath them. The people in charge of Goldman Sachs while it looted and torched the societal commons deserve a guillotine more than they do any kind of respect, and I don't think they'd like what would happen if they tried to force the issue on the rest of the populace.

Is it? What real work are they doing to keep people fed, clothed and sheltered?

Just because the UMC class don't physically partake in creating food, clothes and shelter doesn't mean they aren't integral to it's production at the levels we have today. Norman Borlaug's invention of more hardy wheat strains etc. led to a massive increase in the capacity of the world to reliably feed itself, he has done far more for the world's net food production than any random two bit farmer in a tractor (which I must add was envisaged, designed and continues to be iteratively improved on by UMC level engineers).

The people in charge of Goldman Sachs while it looted and torched the societal commons deserve a guillotine more than they do any kind of respect, and I don't think they'd like what would happen if they tried to force the issue on the rest of the populace.

I work in finance (though not in IB) I assure you your food in the shop where you buy it from would be 20+% more expensive if investment bankers who broker deals in the background didn't exist, as well as your life being generally shittier, no different to it being shittier if you had to live with the computing power we had in the 1990s, which is yet another thing the PMC provides (technological progress).

But all this is moot, I was talking about their net tax contributions that end up getting spent by the lower classes. It doesn't matter one whit whether the UMC produces a single grain of wheat, a single strand of silk or a single beam of lumber if they can trade their money (which they by and large got because someone was willing to give it to them for something in exchange) for it. On a countrywide level that's no different to producing the item indigenously, the end result in both cases is you got yourself some grain, cloth or shelter that wasn't present before in your borders, and they can do this trade easily with a farmer in Ukraine or a grower in China. The terminal problem is not with the worldwide lower classes who by and large know their place, it's with the western lower classes who think that being born on a specific piece of rock grants them privileges denied to other humans with a greater capacity to contribute to the world whose only crime is being born somewhere without a sizable highly earning UMC they can extort money from.

Oh, my apologies! I thought you'd just made a typo while referring to the PMC. I'm actually legitimately unsure what you are referring to when you say UMC class - Upper middle class class? I wasn't thinking of people like Norman Borlaug, but people like Robin DiAngelo, Sheryl Sandberg or Ibram Kendi who largely produce nothing but toxic culture war effluvia. I have some more substantive things I want to say in response to your other points, but I'd rather clear this up first because I'm not sure I ultimately disagree with you.

Oh I absolutely agree people like Kendi are a net negative. I was meaning UMC to refer to roughly people in the top 4-5% of the income distribution. Yeah I agree I was basically using UMC and PMC interchangeably here, should have been more precise. This group probably does include some unsavory characters like Kendi, especially those who can set themselves up a good grift to extract resources from their followers but I would say the lower classes who net consume government spending have an even higher proportion of unsavory characters relative to those who do productive work like making food or clothes.

It's a prisoner's dilemma. Both sides are currently caught in a defect-defect equilibrium, in which case it's in the interest of neither side to unilaterally start cooperating. In cases where there is sustained contact between the same individuals, ie a repeated prisoner's dilemma, there is some hope. But in cases where everyone just hops from job to job, town to town, country to country, there's little reward for an individual who sacrifices their own interests for the sake of an employer/employee only to be shown no gratitude because their next interaction will be with a completely different individual of that class who is used to defect-defect.

Hierarchy doesn't actually work that way. As you move higher you get more power and less accountability, whereas if you are at the bottom you're worked like a slave (often literally) and accountable for every moment of your time.

Taps Sign

If responsibilities/consequences for failure don't scale proportional to one's authority and power, asymmetries will come to threaten the whole system.

The system can remain asymmetric for longer than you remain viable.

Challenge accepted.

And it's less about me and more about designing systems (subsystems, if you like) that are robust and are likely to survive the supersystem's collapse and possibly supplant it. Whether I'm there to see it or not.

I like natural rights. I like having them. But I can't justify keeping them.

I see no need to jettison natural rights. Even as Liberalism is now a dead ideology. Natural law existed before Liberalism and it will exist after Liberalism.

The one thing that such contradictions require is the rejection of equality as a first principle, and universal democracy as a consequence. Both of which have always been dubious propositions anyway.

  • But in terms of performance, it has also been a non-winner,

It took half the planet to stop two fascist countries. Had the US had the land Germany had and the Germans had had the British empire, US, Canada, Australia, France etc the war would have lasted a week.

inflicting great amounts of human misery on the species before collapsing under the strain of expansionist wars

It was the least expansionist of the ideologies. While liberal states continue on a rampage of expansionism across the middle east, latin America and eastern Europe fascist states were more non interventionist. Their focus was on building the homeland rather than trying to expand into Nepal.

Liberalism is a way for the elite to claim that they have no responsibility or noblesse oblige. They are just people and world citizens who happen to be richer. Liberalism was the merchant class wanting the privilege of the nobility without having the responsibility or the discipline of it. The current elite want to live like kings, yet they don't want to live like knights. The way forward is to replace natural rights (defined by who? enforced by who?) with natural order. Some people naturally fill certain rolls. Humans are a tribal species.

Liberalism's has an equivalent to communism's labour value of theory, aka the false axiom. For liberalism, it is the idea that humans randomly spawn on Earth. We didn't live in the garden of Eve and then decide to create society, we lived in tribes long before our species existed. There is no social contract, there are no free independent individuals and existing in a social structure isn't oppressive. A human in a social hierarchy isn't more oppressed than a zebra in a herd on the Savannah. The oppressed zebra is the lonely one.

I like the idea of liberalism as a utilitarian balance between the competing concerns of “men have a right to reap the fruit of their labor” and ”no one should hoard and abuse resources which are not integral to their pursuit of happiness”. I don’t see the philosophy of natural rights as having any direct influence on people’s political beliefs today; it hardly ever comes up. Instead, in terms of the capitalism vs redistribution debate, I see two camps separated by two intuitions regarding justice. One is that people deserve the resources which they fairly obtain, one is that people do not deserve to hoard 100x the resources of their employees. The idea that there is a universal principle that someone necessarily deserves their income if they make it is nonsensical superstition, it’s magical thinking, a dogma of mammon. Someone can argue that this is the best dogma to establish social stability, but it can’t be a self-evident fact.

I think the most realistic points of disagreement in mainstream America are that conservatives fear redistribution will go to the wrong people (demotivating and harming the status of the middle class), and liberals fear that the wealthy waste resources frivolously that could go to the greater social good. At root, I think these are utilitarian intuitions.

I attribute the absence of natural rights from the discussion as the appalling dearth of political education in the modern demos rather than its irrelevancy. Ask the average voter where their rights come from and you'll get unhelpful answers (God? the State? being a 'decent' human being?). The degradation of rights into entitlements given by governmental fiat is something to be fought against.

Although it may be irrelevant in people's day to day lives it is of the greatest importance to the philosophy of government, and therefore its character.

The conservative impulse is that welfare creates a poorly-behaved underclass governed by bad incentives that compound over generations. They are in large part correct. The progessive impulse is that capitalism creates a class of elites that will inevitably interfere in the democratic process both to preserve their wealth and status and to further their own politics (regardless of whether these are shared by the majority of people). They are also in large part correct.

The question is whether both problems are actually worse than the alternatives. Modern developed countries are now so materially prosperous that allowing poor people to starve, or freeze, or die of easily treated illness really does seem inhumane (in the sense that it is an easily preventable tragedy, and that preventing it does not cripplingly burden wider society). And as for the effects of great wealth inequality, hierarchy is a natural part of all human civilization, as you note, and elites will always use their influence to serve themselves and their ideas, so it's hard to see how this too is preventable without attempting damaging forms of economic leveling.

Welfare is one iota of a large group of policies, some of which are prosocial and some of which are antisocial. If we want a “well-behaved lower class”, we would be making shift work illegal and enforcing rules on maternity leave and company-provided healthy meals. And banning children from accessing certain media. This would be a great boon to mental and physical health. Alas, we don’t do this, and so the middle class pays a disproportionate amount of their income on the consequences of our antisocial society, via healthcare and police services and jails. So in addition to welfare and unemployment checks, we also have other policies: unions, capping C-Suite pay at a percent of employee pay, domestic protection from foreign immigrant workers… there’s a lot.

the progressive impulse is that capitalism creates a class of elites that will inevitably interfere in the democratic process both to preserve their wealth and status and to further their own politics

I don’t think this is the root of the progressive impulse. The root is that they feel their quality of life is not proportional to what they deserve, given the vast mass of wealth that is wasted by the 1%. Interference in democracy and self-serving tendencies are secondary concerns. Progressives see the social policies of other countries and find them desirable, and they can also imagine better conditions in the US.

Modern developed countries are now so materially prosperous that allowing poor people to starve, or freeze, or die of easily treated illness really does seem inhumane

If we disperse more of the funds that the mega-wealthy waste, and lobby for better employee conditions, then people will be healthier and live longer. So progressives are merely asserting that there is a superior possibility for America, instead of the steadily decreasing health and purchasing power and increasing debt the middle class. I think that the way they go about this is wrong but that’s the impulse.

Wang Huning, the court philosopher of the CCP, diagnosed the fundamental American contradiction in "America against America":

Americans believe they are free and equal, but free men will not be equal, and equal men are not free.

This caused less problems in the past, when America had a shared culture - the draft, Christianity, nuclear families, the three TV channels, etc. We could be equal because we were only pretending to be free, and so much of life was actually constrained.

Today, everyone gets to choose their life path, and divergent paths yield divergent results. There are those (broadly on the left) who would sacrifice freedom for equality, and those (broadly on the right) who would sacrifice equality for freedom. Most of the culture war comes from people not realizing that you can't have both. The left thinks the right hates equality, the right thinks the left hates freedom.

I'm not quite so inclined to let my enemies redefine my values for me. When I say that Americans should be free and equal, I do not mean to say that we need some Harrison Bergeron weights to make sure that no one can run too fast, but to say that we should all receive equal treatment before the law and be treated with some measure of égalité by our peers. I expect that the result of this will be rather unequal outcomes, I am not surprised or affronted by that outcome and I do not see any conflict of values in striving for equal justice while having unequal abilities, desires, and luck.

I expect that the result of this will be rather unequal outcomes, I am not surprised or affronted by that outcome and I do not see any conflict of values in striving for equal justice while having unequal abilities, desires, and luck.

Problem is, it's too tough a bullet to bite that people who make bad choices get bad outcomes. There's always going to be a drumbeat to save them from their choices, both from the right (ban those choices) and from the left (take from the people who made better choices to help those who made bad ones). The first goes against freedom, the second for equality, and the argument that the wealthy can afford to support the self-destructive in their freedom without limit will never sound as mean as biting that bullet.

When I say that Americans should be free and equal, I do not mean to say that we need some Harrison Bergeron weights to make sure that no one can run too fast

But crucially, and assuming you're a Liberal, you have no possible convincing argument to someone who would propose such a thing , or going in the direction of such a thing.

We all saw what happened to Affirmative Action and other various spoils policy the US has seen fit to implement. Equality of opportunity has always and will always just be a canard. So long as we don't live in a totalitarian state where children are taken from their parents, educated the same and cloned with the same genetics, no such thing is possible, and therefore any push in that direction (such as taxing inheritance harshly or enacting redistributive policies) cannot be successfully opposed by Liberals in principle.

Rawls always comes in to use the underlying philosophy to justify unsustainable expansions beyond political liberalism.

assabiyah

God it's been so long I had to look up the definition of that word again. How time flies...

Very few people actually have a problem with talented people earning lots of money and then spending their own money on personal consumption, even if this is "unequal" compared to untalented people who have less money. Nonzero, but very few. Most people complaining about rich people are actually upset at some combination of

1: Rentseeking. Big company gets a stranglehold on some sort of niche or patent, ousts/regulates/threatens out their competition, and earns tons of money disproportionate to their actual economic contribution. CEO/executives/shareholders get rich on economic surplus that they didn't rightfully earn.

2: Inherited wealth. If John is talented and earns a ton of money, as his private property he can do whatever he wants with it. One of the things people like to do with their money is give it to their children, especially when they die and can't use it any more. So John gives his earned wealth to his son Jim, who is a spoiled talentless loser, and gets all of the benefits of massive wealth with none of the personal contribution to society or perceived merit. Everyone hates Jim.

3: Interest. Capital is incredibly valuable to the economy. Therefore people who invest their money in capital can earn lots of money from their money. Therefore their wealth grows exponentially even without them having talent or contributing labor. Talentless losers like Jim can invest the wealth they inherited and continue to become increasingly wealthy without actually having any talent whatsoever. They're still contributing to the economy in the sense that the wealth they invest is useful, but they themselves have done nothing to earn it other than inheriting the legacy of their parents who did earn it (or stole it via rentseeking, or literal theft in the distant past)

These are all really hard problems to solve. I'm not entirely convinced that 2 and 3 are actually problems in their own right rather than just discomforting rights people have. Like, someone has the right to masturbate while smearing poop on their chest, but I find it disgusting and would rather wish they didn't even though technically I would agree they are free to do that in the privacy of their own home and I won't argue that the government should make it illegal. It's still disgusting to my sensibilities.

In my opinion, 1 is a genuine problem that definitely needs to be solved. 2 is probably fine if we can address 3, and 3 is only solvable by economic stagnation or post-scarcity. Basically, as long as the economy is growing, and capital investment is an important component of that growth, then the people driving the growth via investment will capture the growth. If the economy stops growing, or labor becomes a more important part of growth rather than capital, then capital is no longer so ridiculously valuable and interest rates will plummet. Until then, I think we're stuck with Jims getting richer.

Very few people actually have a problem with talented people earning lots of money and then spending their own money on personal consumption, even if this is "unequal" compared to untalented people who have less money.

This doesn't feel quite right to me. The Musks and Bezoses of the world get a lot of hate. The more civilized inheritors of wealth get a pass,.

People are much more likely to accept generational wealth then they are to accept that some people are just literally better than them. And, in fact, you see a lot of cope. People bend over backwards to claim that Bill Gates or Elon Musk got where they did because of their semi-rich fathers. Anything to deny the reality that some who excel do so because of superior ability, or that others fail because of their own lack.

I think this is a matter of degree, and also that while talent is important, luck is also.

So I think most would be okay with Musk / Gates / Bezos having 100x the median wealth, maybe even 1000x, there is a problem with them having 100000x the median wealth. They may be talented, but they aren't that talented.

I may just be projecting -- I'm generally a big fan of capitalism, but I think the differences between the 0.01% and the 70% in the US are just too big -- and it's hurting overall society. I'm generally for fairly mild adjustments to redistribution (small bumps to, e.g., income tax, inheritance tax, maybe capital gains) to reduce the skew at the extreme edges.

The thing is, Musk/Gates/Bezos/etc. don't actually "have" 100000x the median wealth. Their "wealth" is simplistically calculated from the stocks they own in their companies. But they couldn't just cash out those stocks and dive into their wealth like Scrooge McDuck. First of all, they would have to find buyers. There's no one alive who would buy $200b in one stock, which means you'd need multiple buyers. But there also aren't $200b worth of multiple buyers waiting around for any one of these stocks at their current price.

Which brings us to the second problem: they'd have to substantially lower the amount they're willing to sell their stocks for, in order to find enough buyers. First, this would substantially lower their net worth (which, recall, is crudely calculated by stock value times quantity of stocks). More importantly, if they were to attempt to sell all their stocks in this way, the market would immediately assume they know something dire about their companies' prospects and the value of the stock would plummet.

So, the mega wealthy like Musk/Gates/Bezos have their wealth locked into their companies and can't unlock it to any substantial degree - they're going down with the ship if they try.

That's not to say they aren't very wealthy - they are. They can leverage their tremendous stock assets to essentially get huge loans to fund a lavish lifestyle ("Hey, loaner, I have a gazillion dollars in stock. Wanna lend me a tiny percentage of that in cash? I'm a low-risk borrower because, if I default, well, here's all this collateral!"). But it's not, like, a hundred billion lavish.

I see that as lining up with my claims rather than contradicting them. Most people think that talent-earned wealth is okay, but generational wealth is unearned, and therefore consider only the latter to be an insult and grounds for an attack. The vocal minority who hate all rich people are forced to frame their arguments in terms of unearned wealth because claims that "Musk is talented and therefore capable of generating tons of money and this is unfair so he should share the fruits of his labor with us less talented people" fall on deaf ears.

Something tells me the idle rich don't get a pass, per se, though they are definitely far less scrutinized than "active" billionaires.

Very few people actually have a problem with talented people earning lots of money and then spending their own money on personal consumption, even if this is "unequal" compared to untalented people who have less money.

If I had a dollar for every time these types have complained about tech millionaires, I'd be a tech billionaire. They absolutely do have a problem with talented people earning lots of money and then spending it on their own personal consumption. As you can see by their complaining about Bezos and Zuckerberg and Musk.

Their complaints about inherited wealth amount to a motte-and-bailey, where the motte contains the Walmart heirs and the bailey extends out to anyone whose parents were wealthy enough that they grew up in a better place than East Baltimore. Somewhere in the middle they use this as an excuse to bash Musk, for instance, claiming he's only rich because his father owned a share in an emerald mine.

Rent seeking is a real issue, but they tend to apply that to things which aren't rent-seeking either, like taking advantage of existing tax deductions and government incentives.

If I had a dollar for every time these types have complained about tech millionaires, I'd be a tech billionaire. They absolutely do have a problem with talented people earning lots of money and then spending it on their own personal consumption. As you can see by their complaining about Bezos and Zuckerberg and Musk.

They dislike those people because they're perceived (in Zuckerberg's case because of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in Musk's case because of his culture war views, and in Bezos' case because of alleged mistreatment of warehouse workers) as culture war enemies for the mainstream left.

They don't (outside of a tiny minority of actual anti-capitalists) have a problem with Beyoncé or Michael Jordan or George Clooney or Tom Hanks or the Obamas being extremely rich. They didn't have a problem with Rowling being very rich until she became a TERF.

CEOs, executives and "the rich" in general get a lot of hate. I think the default position is that people with a lot of money are bad but they get a pass if they're part of the in-group. Kind of like the fact that they support Bill Clinton doesn't mean they're ok with powerful men banging their interns as a general principle.

In Bezos case it is about his wealth being locked in amazon stock and general fiduciary duty towards stockholders. So he both has interests aligned with stockholders and is obligated to take their best interests at heart. Unfortunately this means that labor gets the shaft. Paying the labor (especially the easily replaceable, low leverage, low wage, living paycheck to paycheck labor) the minimum and working them to the max.

That is why usually it is the state's job to put a floor on how low can you push that kind of labor.

Rent seeking is a real issue, but they tend to apply that to things which aren't rent-seeking either, like taking advantage of existing tax deductions and government incentives.

Many people seem to think that "rent-seeking" refers to any business that collects rent from tenants. I suppose this is a product of the linguistic similarity, but it has the unfortunate effect of giving people a belief that disliking their landlord is motivated by some serious political principle.

And what alternative do you see? The children of the Scottish enlightenment seem to have done far better than those children who kept to Rome.

Cleave to the, actual capital C, Calvinism that the Scottish enlightenment was born from? Reject it as the French enlightenment did? Cleave instead to Rome, with all its flaws coming to bear?

Some weaker tradition of Paganism like the reactionaries profess?

Collapse seems the natural outcome. And then a return to decentralized experiments in government.

I honestly don't know. I admit that although I am anti-liberal, I am aware that being able to critique a system by no means gives you the expertise or authority to suggest a replacement. It may be indeed that liberalism is the best performant system human beings have come up so far while simultaneously incubating authoritarianism within its ideological framework because of its contradictions. If there's a formulation of liberalism that can square the circle, I would like to learn of it, because I like having liberal rights in general.

By this argument, the chief downside of fascism is bounded in the age of MAD.

I don't really see the contradiction. Nothing about ex-post or even ex-ante equality is baked into liberalism's concept of natural right. We basically just want institutions to not interfere too much and to treat everybody the same when they do. And if there's a really huge liberal commitment to ex-ante equality (e.g., everyone is born into the same amount of wealth) then taxes and transfers can get us there.

I disagree!

Although the Declaration of Independence is not a document with any legal force nowadays, I deem it a good marker of what the best Enlightenment thinking of the time was going for. They really did believe that God made man equal. But God has evaporated from the public commons, and we're left with the equality.

I have met many liberals who say that if we only committed more national resources to welfarism, we'd emerge in the promised land. Are you of the personal belief that reparations on the scale of what is suggested in California necessary? Is that the 'huge effort' you refer to? If not, then how much money exactly should go into patching up the liberal project, into perpetuity?

They really did believe that God made man equal

All of my mainstream American education growing up never conceived of equality in the way you’re suggesting. It was always in the sense of “equally subject to and deserving of the protections of the rule of law” or something along those lines. Maybe they actually meant something else but I’m pretty faithfully representing how American Liberalism is explained in mainstream American primary education.

Are you of the personal belief that reparations on the scale of what is suggested in California necessary?

No, because I am not committed to the notion of equality you are putting forward. And my views are pretty representative of American liberals (not progressives, who are the ones pushing for reparations). However if, counterfactually, liberals were more committed to the kind of equality you’re describing, then sure, it seems like big enough reparations would definitionally be big enough lol

They really did believe that God made man equal.

I'm fairly sure they did not mean "equal in ability".

You and Teddy Roosevelt, in his famous "Man in the Arena" speech (although that might have been the part where he was quoting ol' Honest Abe).

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If in doubt, please post it!


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