jptm wrote:hokahey wrote:How in the holy fuck can a reasonable, rational, logical human being not see how entirely fucking broken government is and demand it get the fuck out of every possible thing it can except for basic services at the state level?
best line out of all of this thread.
Because it supports a pre-existing bias but is less than informative,doesn't provide any reason to accept it, and tacitly insults people who don't agree?
Here's how in the holy fuck a reasonable, rational, logical human being can do that:
1. Read, at the very least, something more than popular books about economics before forming an opinion. Read more than Hayek and Rand. If you're going to be a political libertarian at the very least you need to also read Nozick. Read them, but also read Rawls and Cohen. (Kafka famously said we should only read things we disagree with...)
2. Determine, on the basis of some sound background assumptions (about human beings, about social organization, etc), whether institutional and procedural justice can be determined without recourse to consequences (as Rawls thinks... the justice of the resultant state of affairs derives from the justice of the institutions), or whether some normative theory has to inform us about some external level of justice in possible states of affairs such that the institutions and procedures can only be determined to be just after the fact. One possible issue here boils down to how one thinks of individuals -- Hayek thinks there can't be social justice (infamously: 'the mirage of social justice') because justice only operates at the level of individual acts. We could argue about this, but I think it's clearly false. Institutions can be unjust, and, in fact, the libertarians tacitly admit this every time they claim things would be better if we got rid of centralized institutions. They're wrong about this precisely because overall social justice can best be determined by centralized procedural rules. It can't be that local governments generate the most just state, if they and the markets are left unfettered -- it's pretty obvious how quickly exploitation based on regional interests would occur, and how quickly minimum standards of health, welfare, and education would go completely out the window. The fact that it's difficult to enforce these on a national level doesn't mean we shouldn't be doing it.
3. Who the hell gets to decide what 'basic services' are? You? Fuck no. If a bunch of idiot Christian Scientists move to Delaware and become the majority, they can democratically decide (by electing one of their own) not to pay for any emergency services locally because they believe they can pray away everything bad... and the minority will just have to suck it up or move to a better state (but this is CLEARLY unjust -- if you think it's fair, you're wrong).
Here's one place to start, actually reading something worth reading (that should be fair to all sides):
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justice-distributive/
I think claims like the following from that link are helpful:
Empirical data on the beliefs of the population about distributive justice was not available when Rawls published A Theory of Justice (Rawls 1971) but much empirical work has since been completed. Swift (1995, 1999) and Miller (1999, chaps. 3-4) have provided surveys of this literature and arguments for why those committed to the method of reflective equilibrium in distributive justice literature should take the beliefs of the population seriously, though not uncritically. Indeed, some go even further, arguing that the distributive decisions arising through the legitimate application of particular democratic processes might even, at least in part, constitute distributive justice.(Walzer 1984) Data on people's beliefs about distributive justice is also useful for addressing the necessary intersection between philosophical and political processes. Such beliefs put constraints on what institutional and policy reforms are practically achievable in any generation — especially when the society is committed to democratic processes.
... As noted above, the overarching methodological concern of the distributive justice literature must be, in the first instance, the pressing choice of how the benefits and burdens of economic activity should be distributed, rather than the mere uncovering of abstract truth. Principles are to be implemented in real societies with the problems and constraints inherent in such application. Given this, pointing out that the application of any particular principle will have some, perhaps many, immoral results will not by itself constitute a fatal counterexample to any distributive theory. Such counter-evidence to a theory would only be fatal if there were an alternative, or improved, version of the theory, which, if fully implemented, would yield a morally preferable society overall. So, it is at least possible that the best distributive theory, when implemented, might yield a system which still has many injustices and/or negative consequences. This practical aspect partly distinguishes the role of counterexamples in distributive justice theory from many other philosophical areas. Given that distributive justice is about what to do now, not just what to think, alternate distributive theories must, in part, compete as comprehensive systems which take into account the practical constraints we face.