> To take my argument further, perhaps too far for this list:
"too far"...as if...do you read this list?
> How do you define rights? Perhaps "life, liberty and the pursuit
> of happiness"?
Yes, let's have a serious discussion of "rights," and then quote platitudes
> Macau's old red light district was Rua de Felicida, Happiness
> Street. My happiness requires that I get laid from time to time.
Oh I see, it's a set up: happiness=???, in this case "sex." clever. Those dang puritans with their ambiguous language. What were they thinking?!?
> Is that a service the government should provide, perhaps with
> a new class of civil servant, comfort women? No. Should it
> coerce women via the law or reward them, perhaps via tax
> breaks, for contributing to happiness in that way? No, again
How did we get from "rights" to "needs"? This is a bit far down the slippery slope here. It is, on the other hand, a fairly common practice of supposedly libertarian influenced states. For instance, my grandfather was evidently a civil servant for the Navy in Ecuador and the Phillipines. He was paid, indirectly, by the US government to manage a brothel, to, as he so eloquently puts it, "keep the women clean." The women, likely, got relatively little in return and I have no knowledge of the conditions under which they were enticed to work. As for the much more problematic Japanese example that you are indirectly referencing, I don't think this was any more a case of "rights" or "needs" than your hypothetical: it was stark imperialist oppression, but calling it "rights" has often given cover to all kinds of questionable behaviour ("manifest destiny," "Monroe Doctrin," etc.)
If you find these a fair comparison to providing some aid to the needy, we're obviously using different scales of power and subjugation.
You are, of course, right, that there are a variety of ways of sorting rights. The problem, however, is that libertarians sneak back in and act like the sorting they prefer is somehow "natural" or "pre-/a-political." In fact, it is largely based on a history of force, similar to the one those comfort women were supporting. This force is not ancient history or inconsequentially accidental, but constitutive of any empirical evidence of Libertarian utopia.
> Or is it enough that government does not interfere as I pursue
> happiness, and entirely my problem to deal with that need?
> Exactly!
actually, no. There really should be some sort of protection accorded the women who service you, maybe even a union of some kind to help them control their working conditions. As a pure public health issue, there should at least be programs to prevent your activities from spreading STDs. But then we get back to my unfortunate family history...
> Similarly, various people need "a decent income", "reasonable
> housing" and so on. How are those needs different from mine?
Lets see...how about this: let's watch what happens after, say, a week where each of your needs remaining unfilfilled.
After week 1: You, sexually frustrated, perhaps a bit testy; them, emaciated, sickly, incoherent, despondent.
After week 2: you have almost reached your limit, where libertarian intellectual onanism will actually spill over into the real thing; they, however, are dead.
Well it looks like there might be something different here, but I'll let you figure it out.
> Alternatives exist; there are jobs and housing available.
Jobs and housing available...so you can get a job without housing and housing without a job? I think you may have forgotten the way social stigma works in the US. Or perhaps you've never had to deal with it. Housing needs money which requires a job: job requires address, phone number; fine, upstanding citizen profile, which, in the end, requires housing.
> Why is this necessarily a collective problem?
In a capitalist social system--which, in case you had forgotten, is what this one is--all of the production is carried out through a social process of valorization. Supposedly, this system, supported by state enforced private property and, effectively, a social division of labor, is more efficient and just than any other. This is legitimized over other forms of collective production because it supposedly makes up for its inadequacy in providing for every member of that collective--not only through the social division of labor, but also by making it illegal, say, for this woman to simply pitch a tent on your land (the horror!) or steal a few loaves of bread from the store to feed her kid--and for taking into account the individual consequences of the celebrated "creative destruction" by taking at least superficial steps to aid those in need during their supposedly brief dislocations.
It is understood as a collective problem because, in general, the "freedom" this poor lady enjoys could be visited on anyone at any time. It is handled by the state (along with all these other collectives) because it somewhat excuses the fact that most of what the state does is shuffle people like her away from your stuff, making sure that all your precious private property could never be appropriated by this dirty beggar woman who used to be your neighbor, but whom you now avoid like the plague: in order to keep all the dirty beggars from really getting pissed off--and in order to help justify the coercion the liberal softies' taxes support--there gets to be this little "welfare state" that is meant to clean up the refuse and, possibly, put it back to work, supporting the social process of valorization. In other words, it is a patch for the fucked up way the system operates. It is necessary but insufficient. Libertarians think the system works just fine and dandy--just individual failings--so it is unsurprising that they would be unable to conceive of this as a collective problem. Then again, for them nothing is a collective problem, which would imply being thrust, involuntarily, into a role of communal responsibility that one didn't choose. For them the system is only about rights (of property); not responsibility. If you'd like to talk about changing some of the fundamental aspects of the system we're up for that: but don't act like these problems and issues don't exist or are just the product of German propagandists.
> If it is, why is the state
> -- rather than the family, union, neighborhood, commune or
> whatever -- the right collective entity to deal with it?
this is always such a fascinating question for the libertarian soul. It is as if the state is some essential entity that always has the exact same ironclad character. It deals in such absolutes that it can't possibly engage in any sort of pragmatic policy discussion; its purity is admirable but wholly incoherent except in a thought experiment. What is the state? On what level does the state operate?
Are we talking about the "state" of the federal authority? The "state" of the state (in the USA)? The "state" of the county, the city, the town? What if the state exists, as it does in some parts of the world, as an organic extension of families, clans, tribes, communes, neighborhoods, unions etc.? What if the state is supposed to be a collection of these communities, if they were joined together for a common purpose of some kind? What if the state has a significant legitimacy crisis not because of some libertarian objection but primarily because it was an imperialist imposition of libertarian philosophy itself? These are historical, not hypothetical, questions. At what level does the evil, absolutist vision of the state that Libertarians cling to tip over into being justified in the same way as any of these other collectives? I understand the idea that the closer the "state" is to the locality, the more it will understand the needs of the community--though this doesn't help me at all to understand how neo-liberalism is justified when imposed by international organizations; but, as the latter is a poignant example, I don't see the theory at all concerned with actual practice.
It is more of a canard that is raised when there is a threat to the extension of their pure vision of individual personal property in any possible setting, anywhere in the universe. It is a thought experiment that attempts to act stoically interested in ideas and enlightened visions of freedom and justice when, in the end, it is mostly interested in reshaping the world in its image, and then blaming the people of the world for not accepting the miracle of its birth. It is a vision of history that reverses the course of events, so that freedoms and liberties as it has defined them are transhistorical, rather than historically constructed and fought for, imposed on unwilling populations with different versions of these ideas, and secured by control over state power--the very state to which it is violently opposed when other members of the community it subjects to taxation desire that those resources be used for something other than bloody militarism or police surveillance.
The unfortunate Enlightenment doppleganger of "positive liberty" that is so virulently resisted here is not just some archaic, fascist eruption into the pure system of "natural" negative liberty: it is a necessary suture for the coherent functioning of the Libertarian ethos of capitalism. That the capitalist class seems to have no problem begging for a bailout is a different issue altogether and the really consistent apologists for the latter ideology seem content to watch the whole thing implode, promises of renewal and redemption intact: heaven on earth, after all, follows the Armageddon. If only we can be strong enough to resist the temptation to use any method of state intervention, we will be rewarded with pure freedom in the afterlife. Oh where are the ubermensch when we need them!
> Granted, the state needs to be involved, ensuring that firetrap
> housing is fixed, no-one is kept out of a job on the basis of
> colour or gender, unions are not crushed, et cetera. But why
> should it be primarily responsible for providing an income or
> housing?
Primarily? Who said it was primarily responsible for this? I believe the issue is that it is responsible in the last resort. When the "free market" is not functioning, when the alternative is either widespread anarchy or people dying in the streets, when none of the collectivities you list above are willing or able to help, the state becomes, by default, the agency for this kind of human sanitation. Its primary responsibility is making sure that the poor soul doesn't pollute your neighborhood, bringing down property values, squatting, growing corn on a corner of your ridiculous four acre estate, or stealing any of your stuff. It's just a shame that we no longer have those Lockean poor laws that would allow for a workhouse or the punishment of transportation to the colonies; unfortunate that good liberty loving Americans lost their stomach for pure forms of negative liberty, instead devising complex systems of welfare which make visible the positive attributes necessary to uphold it.
Now, certainly, this is not ideal. But it is the necessary consequence of the implementation of the libertarian fantasy you're slowly trying to expose us to--evidently believing this is the first time we've heard it. None of this, except in its ideological purity, explains why USAmericans, in general, are so much more fearful of taxes *as such.* In other words, USers don't seem to care one way or another why they are being taxed, simply *that* they are being taxed. It amazes me that US politicians, in general, don't have to really prove that they have experience cutting costs or, as Foucault seems to believe of even the Libertarians, perfecting the art of governance in terms of its efficiency or efficacy. Especially at the presidential level, there is simply the promise to lower taxes or remove them in some way. Your Libertarian thought experiment is all fine and dandy, but there is little evidence that this is really a widespread fantasy: in the end, USers generally want government to work--hence the unanimous condemnation of the response to Katrina. Yet people seem to believe that it will work even if we don't pay for it--or at the very least politicians seem to promise, like snake oil salesmen, that they can do more with less. Maybe they are just talking to two different populations, but in any case it is certainly strange, as the original comment on this thread mentioned, to see the resistance to taxes so deep a cultural commonplace that people who probably have no fear of ever having to pay them are still antagonistic to the state, to taxes, and sometimes explicitly to any form of progressive taxation. Maybe I've already partially answered my own question, but I assure you that the simple, but extreme, Libertarian theology you're espousing doesn't explain it completely--entertaining as it may be for you to blow our minds with your ability to espouse it in such purity.
s