andie nachgeborenen wrote:
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> 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.
It occurs to me that one of Guthrie's songs that I never particularly cared for is in fact pretty good, and relevant to this discussion. (It is almost always an error to see Guthrie as simple as he makes out to be.) It's a WW2 song for children, "My daddy ...." The first child's father is flying a bomber, then it turns out it takes a lot of other daddies to keep him in the air. O.K. A nice little ditty. But the key to all of Guthrie is his use of pronouns in a few of his central songs, a usage that dramatizes the opposite of Thatcher's "society doesn't exist, only individuals." In Guthrie "I" is always a derivative of WE, and simply has no existence except as part of a we. And this is what makes dogmatists of "negative freedom" wrong from the git-go.
Carrol