I'm sorry, Ian, this is wayyy too glib. We don't go immediately from a right to a job or an adequate income, a right to a decent education, and so forth to an Orwellian nightmare or a Huxleyian dystopia. To get us onto the slippery slope, you have to show us how the first steps make the slide to the evil reductio plausible, likely, certain. something like that. And to say "one person's positive freedom is another's paternalism" is to suggest that you think, and I know you do not, that any person's view of this is as good as any other. Ayn Rand, Robert Nozick, Richard Epstein find any guarantee of anything more than rights of noninterference in free exchange to be "paternalistic." We disagree. That's why we're on the left and they are on the right.
Btw even that avatar of negative liberty, Isaiah Berlin, agreed that rights without the means to exercise them are hollow. (I quote the passage in several papers I know you have.) But Berlin ran together positive freedom (freedom to, the provision of rightsholders with resources to exercise their rights, with "real" freedom, self-legislation, acting in some mysterious way in accord with one's own will because it is the General Will. Consequently his critique of positive freedom is a mess.
Approach it differently. Understand paternalism as disregarding another person's wishes for their own good. (Parents do this with kids all the time.) How is guaranteeing basic rights to work, income, education, food, housing _disregarding_ the wishes of others for their own good? I'm sure no one is advocating forcing ascetic adults to accept benefits (as we see it) they don't want. You don't want this money, to live in a house, to go to college or trade school, so don't.
Now of course we might be disregarding the wishes of unwilling taxpayers who would rather not pay for others who do want (as most people do) these benefits. But it' sort of incidental that it is for the benefit of the unwilling taxpayers that we provide them; they benefit whether or not they recognize they they do, that's the way public goods problems word (and in this case are solved), but the real point is the benefit the willing recipients of the advantages. So paternalism is not the objection here, and unless you are going to go all Nozick and call taxation of the unwilling equivalent to forced labor, thereby abandoning the left, I don't see your problem.
--- On Fri, 5/16/08, Eubulides <prince.plumples at gmail.com> wrote:
> From: Eubulides <prince.plumples at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] negative freedoms
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Friday, May 16, 2008, 10:10 PM
> On Fri, May 16, 2008 at 2:28 PM, Doug Henwood
> <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> >
> > On May 16, 2008, at 5:15 PM, James Heartfield wrote:
> >
> >> Negative freedoms at least have the virtue of
> creating the room for
> >> you to do what you want to do, whereas
> 'positive freedoms' seem too
> >> often to entail the freedom to do what someone
> else thinks that you
> >> should do.
> >
> > Wait a minute. I thought "positive freedoms"
> were those you could
> > exercise because you're well-nourished,
> well-housed, and well-
> > educated, and so have a lot more of a chance actually
> to do something
> > than you would in the libertarian paradise where
> you're just left alone.
> >
> > Doug
>
> ===============
>
> One person's positive liberty is another's
> paternalism; slippery
> slopes apply with a vengeance.
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