>>> andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> 05/17/2008
12:45 AM >>>
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.
^^^^^^^^^^^^ CB: Hear,hear , andie ! I hereby declare myself an "andie nachgeborenen" style Liberal, a postive and negative liberal, a New Deal Liberal Plus.
The critiques of positive freedoms , (perhaps better termed powers)on this thread are on a slippery slope in the opposite direction away from "to each according to need", that is they are sliding to the right, as andie implies. They are moving back into the Realm of Necessity and away from the Realm of Freedom, as Marx and Engels defined them. The Realm of Necessity is where ruling classes control masses by conditioning fulfillment of needs on exploited classes producing surpluses for the exploiting, ruling classes. That's where these phony left arguments against positive powers freedoms are slipping us back to.
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