Who slipped some sanity-ogenic drug into Joe’s drink? Not saying I fully endorse the idea, but it sounds unusually reasonable, coming from that source. 
Royalty was like dandelions. No matter how many heads you chopped off, the roots were still there underground, waiting to spring up again.
It seemed to be a chronic disease. It was as if even the most intelligent person had this little blank spot in their heads where someone had written: "Kings. What a good idea." Whoever had created humanity had left in a major design flaw. It was its tendency to bend at the knees.
-- Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay
Why do you people all keep trying to steal our word! Is having one word to ourselves really too much to ask?
Comment 12/20/2007
It’s not “your” word, any more than “caucasian” is mine.
Comment 12/20/2007
That article’s been out for some time. My reaction was similar to yours.
However, it’s really only an issue for libertarians. For anyone else, this “soft paternalism” is simply “setting policy to encourage good decisionmaking” - which is a no-brainer . . . unless you’re a libertarian.
The idea that you can set policies so the default is the “healthy” option, but compliance is still voluntary, is hardly earth-shaking, and in most cases not a huge intrusion on liberty. Like anything, it can be abused - and I am almost as keen on autonomy as libertarians, though I’m not as keen on starving the weak and elderly. But, since most policies require decisionmaking, there has to be a default decision one way or another; this “new” plan is, more or less, merely to set those defaults to promote the general welfare, which is not exactly radical. (Again, the details matter fiercely. The problem comes in when people use such policies disingenuously, to create barriers to choices, not merely to indicate a preferred choice. This is a preferred strategy among conservatives - such as with intrusive regulations on abortion access.) What the libertarians and conservatives are up in arms about is the idea that the government should care about the general welfare at all. For them, the scandal is not that the government would take a soft approach to that problem; it’s that it would take any approach.
I was glad to see Joe on board with something aimed in the right direction, but count me underwhelmed.
Comment 12/20/2007
>The idea that you can set policies so the default is
>the “healthy” option, but compliance is still voluntary, is
>hardly earth-shaking, and in most cases not a huge intrusion
>on liberty.
Using punitively high taxes to punish people because you don’t like the purchasing choices they make and have somehow decided it’s your job to judge everyone else’s choices isn’t voluntary. And whatever Joe says, it doesn’t make you a libertarian. It makes you a Wowser.
Comment 12/20/2007
Nobody says it “makes you a Libertarian.” The adjective “libertarian” need not imply full allegiance to the Church of Ayn Rand, you know.
In any case, the punitive tax was just one example. And you’re not using them because you “don’t like” their purchasing choices, but because those choices come with distinct costs to society. As much as most Libertarians don’t want to admit it, some actions do in fact come with costs to society rather than just to the individual taking the action. Even the staunchest Libertarians generally argue that the people engaging in such actions should be the ones to bear the lion’s share (if not ALL) of that cost.
Of course, for the purest Libertarians (who merely lack the cojones to use the word “anarchy,” which is really what they’re after), they’d rather live in a world where there is no “society” in terms of a collective entity that shares costs and makes common decisions. But I don’t think those Libertarians are worth taking seriously, frankly.
Comment 12/21/2007
Whether or not such taxes are a good idea is entirely beside the point; the issue is whether they are in any sense libertarian. And they aren’t.
The problem is that people like Joe have, over the past 10 years, so ruined the reputation of social conservatism that they realize they have no credibility at all if they call themselves what they really are. So they’re trying to corrupt the mean word ‘libertarian’ enough that they can hide under that rock instead.
Comment 12/21/2007
This may come as a shock, if you’re a “libertarian”, but some people think that liberty is about having good choices.
As an absurd counter-example, I’ve had some idiot on LiveJournal claim that we would be more free to use the roads if there we no traffic laws whatsoever, since then there wouldn’t be any rules restricting what you could do. The mind-numbingly obvious thing that he missed was that if you can’t expect the roads to have well-ordered behavior, you can’t safely use them. In whatever sense traffic rules reduce your freedom on roads, anarchy reduces that freedom far more.
The point being, that it increases liberty for there to be less addiction, and better long-term investment in a population. That’s not is some mumbo-jumbo sense that there are fewer rules, but in the very real sense that fewer people are trapped in compulsion and poverty.
We can quibble over why the words ‘liberal’ and ‘libertarian’ aren’t identical, but if you’re going to demand that ‘libertarian’ means ‘taking liberty as a guiding principle’, well-implemented social planning is fundamental to libertarianism. (Conversely, it looks like society has realized this and use the older word, ‘liberal’ to mean this. “Libertarians” are just those who lost sight of the goal but wanted to keep the name.)
Comment 12/21/2007
Stormy:
If you think Joe’s trying to pass himself off as a libertarian, you know nothing at all about Joe. He pretty much holds libertarians in contempt.
And yes, I realize that libertarians hate all taxes, whether or not they’re a good idea. Just reason #436 why libertarianism can’t ever work.
Dan M:
Mostly on point. Modern “libertarians” couldn’t care less about results. Their philosophy has devolved to little more than an unthinking recitation of the “government bad” mantra. If “freedom” means 99.9% of people living in abject poverty and misery, then that’s what it means. To the true believer, the philosophy is more important than its results.
Comment 12/23/2007
“To the true believer, the philosophy is more important than its results.”
Sounds like liberalism.
Comment 12/26/2007