> On Mar 24, 2012, at 8:58 PM, Michael Smith wrote:
>
> > As Carroll has repeatedly noted -- to deaf ears, for the
> > most part -- politics is one thing; policy, another. It's
> > really stupid for us to try and devise policy.
>
> I'm not sure that that distinction is really smart. I
> suspect you're just trying to evade answering hard questions.
It's not evasion; it's refusal. There are questions we're simply in no position to answer, no matter how 'smart' we are or where we went to school.
The questions we can't answer are often variations on "what would we do if we held state power?". Posed in that form, the question is clearly not only unanswerable, but preposterous. What we would do would depend very largely on the situation at the moment.
What makes the same question seem less preposterous is the act of posing it abstractly: What would be better?
But that question too, upon examination, is unanswerable. Better on what time scale, for whom, subject to what assumptions...?
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Michael J. Smith mjs at smithbowen.net
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