Oh,... the things which pass for reason
Feb. 23rd, 2011 06:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pecuniumSasha Volokh (whom I know, though we've not been in regular contact in something like 15 years) is, if nothing else, intellectually consistent.
Daft as a brush, but consistent. His consistency shows the major flaw in Libertarian logic.
at the risk of confirming Mark Kleiman in his belief that libertarians are loopy — I don’t speak for all libertarians, but I think there’s a good case to be made that taxing people to protect the Earth from an asteroid, while within Congress’s powers, is an illegitimate function of government from a moral perspective.
I have to say, I don't think it's a question of risk, of one says that using the power of the gov't to prevent large scale death and destruction is immoral, you are loopy.
The crux of his argument is that the only legitimate function of gov't is to protect individual rights. Since natural forces have no intentional volition, they aren't violating rights, and so the governments power to tax isn't legitimately spent to react to them.
The problem with this absurdum isn't that asteroids are absurd, it's that much lesser events are in the same vein, and Sasha would argue the gov't in't withing its legitimate scope to deal with them. By this reasoning a collapsed building isn't violating anyone's rights, and while a government might choose to spend money to save people (say in Christchurch, or New Orleans, or New York) should some natural disaster cause them to have collapsed buildings, or fires, or some other threat to the present order of things; such threat being such that people will die if nothing is done.
Sasha says he's willing to bite the bullet on this, but I wonder. If lightening struck his house would he be of the opinion the fire dept. ought not come to his aid?
This is one of those things where Libertarians get to have the benefit of not living in their Libertopia. Apart from something as reductio as his asteroid postuate, Sasha will never have to face this (well, had he been living in New Orleans in 2005 he would, but he didn't, do he wasn't faced with his theory being put into practice).
Tsunami alerts... illegitimate. Hurricane alerts, illegitimate (though most Libertarians are in favor of them, because they benefit business).
The mind reels at the love of money this shows. A provable public good is only to be allowed if it prevents unrest in the streets, On the other hand, if you could show that, once the impending asteroid impact became known, all hell would break loose and lots of rights be violated by looters et al. during the ensuing anarchy, I could justify the taxation as a way of preventing those rights violations; but this wouldn’t apply if, say, the asteroid impact were unknown to the public.
Got it... if you don't tell people about it, so they can't clamor for protection, then it's unreasonable to protect them from catastrophe.
This does make me uncomfortable, much like my view that patents are highly useful but morally unjustifiable, so I’m open to persuasion.
I wish, all things being equal I thought the last was the case, but I've argued with him on things which would seem to be just this sort of issue. We once had a warm discussion of the question of allowing gays to openly serve in the military. He said that there was no reason to change the situation, because it was working and the infringement wasn't "harming" them. To change the present law would be, on the other hand, disruptive. We should just wait until the society was overwhelmingly in favor of allowing it before we changed things.
Which confused me, because I figured that infringing on someone's right to do something which was based on some other thing that person did, a thing which was a private activity, was taking away one group's rights for no good purpose. As I recall the conversation (it was going on 20 years ago) the system as it worked was working well enough, so why change it.
It wasn't a legitimate use of gov't to make the people who didn't like serving with homosexuals put up with it. The flip side, that it was an illegitimate use of gov't force to deny a group the right to do something didn't seem to carry any weight.
In short, mob rule carried more weight; just as it does in this example.
That conversation was pretty much my last attachment to Libertarian Philosophy: it was bankrupt. At root it is selfish, personal, and fails to accept any duty to the community.
It seems it still is.
Daft as a brush, but consistent. His consistency shows the major flaw in Libertarian logic.
at the risk of confirming Mark Kleiman in his belief that libertarians are loopy — I don’t speak for all libertarians, but I think there’s a good case to be made that taxing people to protect the Earth from an asteroid, while within Congress’s powers, is an illegitimate function of government from a moral perspective.
I have to say, I don't think it's a question of risk, of one says that using the power of the gov't to prevent large scale death and destruction is immoral, you are loopy.
The crux of his argument is that the only legitimate function of gov't is to protect individual rights. Since natural forces have no intentional volition, they aren't violating rights, and so the governments power to tax isn't legitimately spent to react to them.
The problem with this absurdum isn't that asteroids are absurd, it's that much lesser events are in the same vein, and Sasha would argue the gov't in't withing its legitimate scope to deal with them. By this reasoning a collapsed building isn't violating anyone's rights, and while a government might choose to spend money to save people (say in Christchurch, or New Orleans, or New York) should some natural disaster cause them to have collapsed buildings, or fires, or some other threat to the present order of things; such threat being such that people will die if nothing is done.
Sasha says he's willing to bite the bullet on this, but I wonder. If lightening struck his house would he be of the opinion the fire dept. ought not come to his aid?
This is one of those things where Libertarians get to have the benefit of not living in their Libertopia. Apart from something as reductio as his asteroid postuate, Sasha will never have to face this (well, had he been living in New Orleans in 2005 he would, but he didn't, do he wasn't faced with his theory being put into practice).
Tsunami alerts... illegitimate. Hurricane alerts, illegitimate (though most Libertarians are in favor of them, because they benefit business).
The mind reels at the love of money this shows. A provable public good is only to be allowed if it prevents unrest in the streets, On the other hand, if you could show that, once the impending asteroid impact became known, all hell would break loose and lots of rights be violated by looters et al. during the ensuing anarchy, I could justify the taxation as a way of preventing those rights violations; but this wouldn’t apply if, say, the asteroid impact were unknown to the public.
Got it... if you don't tell people about it, so they can't clamor for protection, then it's unreasonable to protect them from catastrophe.
This does make me uncomfortable, much like my view that patents are highly useful but morally unjustifiable, so I’m open to persuasion.
I wish, all things being equal I thought the last was the case, but I've argued with him on things which would seem to be just this sort of issue. We once had a warm discussion of the question of allowing gays to openly serve in the military. He said that there was no reason to change the situation, because it was working and the infringement wasn't "harming" them. To change the present law would be, on the other hand, disruptive. We should just wait until the society was overwhelmingly in favor of allowing it before we changed things.
Which confused me, because I figured that infringing on someone's right to do something which was based on some other thing that person did, a thing which was a private activity, was taking away one group's rights for no good purpose. As I recall the conversation (it was going on 20 years ago) the system as it worked was working well enough, so why change it.
It wasn't a legitimate use of gov't to make the people who didn't like serving with homosexuals put up with it. The flip side, that it was an illegitimate use of gov't force to deny a group the right to do something didn't seem to carry any weight.
In short, mob rule carried more weight; just as it does in this example.
That conversation was pretty much my last attachment to Libertarian Philosophy: it was bankrupt. At root it is selfish, personal, and fails to accept any duty to the community.
It seems it still is.
