Thought for the Day: 1 March 2013

Brad DeLong had a recent post, American Conservatism’s Crisis of Ideas.  Two comments on it caught my attention:

…a consistent libertarian would denounce the phrase “will of the people”, “free” or otherwise, as an invocation of a Rousseauian collectivist concept. The libertarian would counterpose to this the wills of “free individuals” as the only reality to be reckoned with, and declare that any social insurance scheme by its collectivist nature cannot possibly reflect the will of anybody real, and is therefore only the project of those individuals whose own will is to exploit the needs of others to foster a dependency upon these selfsame individuals in pursuit of their own self-aggrandizement, an egoism the libertarian understands perfectly well.

and

So the problem is that conservative politicians definition of “good” behavior and its purported benefits to society conflict with the definition of “good” of the majority (overwhelming majority?) of Americans.

If this is the case, the presumed “bad” behavior can never lead to catastrophe because it is not “bad” behavior at all and as such, if it does lead to catastrophe, there will be too many people who are OK with the behavior that they will agree on an appropriate remedy.

My response to the first comment was to cite this.  The punchline is:

Men who are not slaves to the law prescribed by the processes of democratic governance as their master don’t stay free men for very long.  [Instead they become slaves to powerful individuals.]  That is a paradoxical fact that is nevertheless woven into the original definition of “freedom”–and if you don’t grasp that, you don’t understand.

My reply to the second comment:

One of the hazards of democracy is that the majority may choose to engage in behavior which proves to be pathological to the society as a whole. A dilemma for those who identify the majority behavior as pathological is whether to honor the principles of democracy and attempt to sway the majority by force of their arguments or whether to abandon their commitment to principle and do whatever is necessary to save their own necks. (Is it ever appropriate to conclude that your commitment to principle is a suicide pact?) Another dilemma for those who identify majority behavior as pathological is that they could be wrong.

Life is a risk. To some degree you can choose which risks you accept and which risks you avoid. Make the best decisions you can with the information available to you and move forward. The only way to avoid ever making a mistake is to never do anything. But then that would be a mistake itself, wouldn’t it?