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Commencing deglibification* sequence:
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.
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Duh. But you also know that any piece of legislation -take the history of labor law from Lochner through Davis-Bacon- can be seen as having contradictory determinations regarding negative and positive liberties and be viewed as simultaneously paternalistic, liberty increasing yada yada. I'm fully aware that Nozick, Epstein etc. want to return us to the era prior to Holmes, Hohfeld and Hale; the latter pointing out rather astutely that what were once viewed as differences in kind are differences of degree and coercion is ubiquitous, anticipating Foucault as Duncan Kennedy and others have pointed out. See Barbara Fried's book on Hale, esp. the chapters titled "The Empty Idea of Contract" and "The Empty Idea of Property Rights."
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> 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.
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> 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.
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Well this begs the question on the polyvalency and competing redescriptions of paternalism, the criteria for determing whether various pieces of legislation, judicial decisions are paternalistic or liberty enhancing [liberty for whom, for what, vis a vis who?], the both/and problems etc.
As the parent of a 33 month old, I know a little about paternalism. As a wage laborer and shop steward with a boss I also know about paternalism :-)
> 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.
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No, I'm not a Nozickian -although I do like your slippery slope argument in the above paragraph :-) - but I do think the States should minimize paternalistic legislation because they should minimize and redistribute the various types of coercion extant in capitalist societies and that if State officials, whether from Sweden or Mississippi, spent more time in public discourse, as horrible as it is at the current juncture of history, speaking more about positive liberties without resorting to nineteenth century tropes and Hegelian verbiage, perhaps we could gain a little more clarity on the road to dealing with our public bads [public goods] and more importantly the positional goods [bads] problems that plague the production and distribution of authority, power and wealth.
"The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men's labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name, liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names, liberty and tyranny. The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a *liberator*, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as a destroyer of liberty...Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agree upon a definition of the word liberty" [Abraham Lincoln at the Sanitary Fair, Baltimore MD April 1864]
Ian
*if deglibification ain't in the dictionary I call dibs on the intellectual property......... :- )