Socialism is “a political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.” The OP mentions nothing about this. The so-called “positive liberties” in the OP are related to the notion of good governance, where the government is supposed to serve the needs of each member of the community. An example may be what the Danish government has been doing for decades: providing free health care and education, and urging unions and businesses to regularly negotiate the minimum wage.
If modern liberalism puts more emphasis on "positive liberties," what are the best arguments for it?
The best argument for “positive liberties” is that the “negative liberties” sound an awful lot like the “freedom” of the strong to dominate the weak.
Yeah, a lot of other Trump supporters probably felt the same way until they found out they’re losing their health care.
If you could choose how and when you got sick or injured, your statement would make sense. However, since you don’t know when you will be a “Bob” or when you’ll be a “Bill”, it makes sense to socialize certain services so that they are available if and when you need them. It’s kind of like saying “I don’t want to pay for Main Street because I only drive down Elm”. Maybe you don’t use Main Street directly. But chances are you still reap the benefits of its existence. Part of living in a civilized society is that you have to pay taxes that fund the various infrastructure that doesn’t make economic sense that privatize.
If your goal is to promote those causes, I would strongly suggest that you NOT go with calling those things “positive liberties.” The valid definition of “positive liberty” I found, is the possession of the capacity to act upon one’s free will. It would be a semantic trick, though to interpret “capacity” to refer to actual physical resources, such as money. I believe the fairly obvious intention of the concept, is to refer to things such as the structure of government, which allows a citizen to guide their own lives as much as possible. I.E. the right to vote.
Trying to “adjust” the definition of a concept such as “positive liberty” in order to manipulate opinions in one’s favor, is rarely a good idea. It tends to have more negative than positive results. People who were already opposed to the idea, will resent it all the more because of the obvious propaganda trick, and even the people who support the idea, and seem to cheer on the propaganda, wont respect the people using it.
There are much more accurate and practical ways to argue intelligently for those particular goals.
This sounds a lot like how I’d describe free-market capitalism. Dave Ramsey says something like ‘when you serve others in the marketplace, they give you certificates of appreciation with presidents’ faces on them’.
You also get them when you sell a blind man a rat’s asshole as a wedding ring.
Negative liberties or more precisely negative rights are the only liberties that exist.
Positive liberties derived from statists taking the seductive and popular term “liberty” and applying it to whatever the hell suits them.
Let’s take it back to “Life, Liberty, Property”. So-called positive liberties are actually property taken from others.
In any case it is more precise to talk about negative rights and positive rights. Positive rights do not exist. A right can only be a right if it can be logically exercised by every person simultaneously and with the same effect. I can’t have a positive right to the fruits of your labor because it would be in conflict with your actual rights.
Yeah, it’s all about language. Time after time statists have adopted the language of liberty to do evil.
There’s nothing at all about the free market that elevates all of society; as is most obviously demonstrated by the fact that if you can’t pay, you can’t play. The mechanism of the market discards actors who are neither flush with cash or able to find a way to make themselves marketable.
The liberal perspective is that these discarded actors act as a drain on society - and conservatives agree! The difference largely boils down to how to deal with the problem. Liberals dislike the “let them die, hopefully quickly” solution and thus we try to think of various programs that help them become part of the system again. And this help is what most of us don’t call positive freedoms, because, again, that’s a very dodgy, weasel-word sounding term that attempt to paint the situation as something it’s not. Freedoms are good. Helping people is good. They are not the same thing.
I think part of this impulse on my part to… commandeer the word freedom stems from my repeated encounters with the right online. I engage them quite a bit, and it is often the case that conservative and libertarian types will start to ignore the arguments about the benefits of policy x or y and cloak themselves in this concept of freedom, and not having government take from them and reducing their freedom to do what they wish with their money to pay for something else. They wind themselves up in this cocoon of cosmic victimhood where every liberal policy under the sun is seen as a direct assault against their own personal freedom. And this was an attempt to deny them that, to show that in some way, only caring about the negative aspects of freedom does not truly promote freedom in a more holistic sense.
In moments of frustration in talking to a brick wall of libertarianism, and parroting of them being for more FREEDOM, I tell them to get the fuck out and leave. For civilization itself requires some surrender of perfect freedom in all things as a trade to construct an even better deal for the entire society as a hole. That if all they truly care about is total freedom, or close to it, the only way to achieve such ends is to live alone, or close to it. But this is something I’m sure sways no one. It’s just me spitting on what I consider a ridiculous standard and aversion to the most delicate of constraints on the freedom of men to achieve some grander vision for society.
One of the great ironies of life is the completely inverted impression conservatives have regarding finite pies. They used to talk about a rising tide lifting all boats, and harp on inequality not being a thing to worry about because just because someone else is doing better, does not imply you are doing worse. This was best encapsulated via one of the best spokespeople conservatives ever had, Margaret Thatcher:
The problem now of course is that a rising tide has NOT lifted all boats, wages for large chunks of Americans have stagnated, while healthcare costs rise. Liberals at least pretend to give a shit about wanting to address this, conservatives take a blind eye to it, or pretend that what they did in Kansas of cutting taxes on business and wealthier people will spur growth (it spurred deficits and lower growth than its neighbors).But it’s worse than that, conservatives are ALL about finite pies and Zero Sum Games. If we let the brown immigrants in, they will take our jobs. There is only so much room on a life raft, have to cut off the flow. There is some truth to this regarding certain labor markets being hit by influxes of cheap immigrant labor, but the point still stands, this is a ZERO SUM GAME mentality. Looking at budgetary issues, conservatives are QUICK to point out EVERY time a liberal has some policy idea, how we are going to pay for it. Perfectly reasonable thing to do, but the hyper focus on that alone over and above the potential payoffs for the policy in question (which they rarely seem to care about) highlights more zero sum game thinking. By paying for healthcare, we take away from peoples earnings through taxes. FINITE PIES abound in the conservative mind. They are far worse than liberals EVER were, and it makes sense.
When they scanned brains, they found that conservatives had larger right amygdalas, the FEAR area of the reptilian brain, while liberals have larger anterior cingulate gyrus that deals with taking in new information for decision making
So it makes sense that conservatives would be more frightful creatures to external threats, that is how they are BUILT, while liberals tend to be more open to new ideas based on new information, more willing to test them out. For example, even if we find that after repeated studies of Seattles minimum wage hike that it failed to produce the desired result, I as a liberal consider that a good thing to have tried, so we have data to base future decisions on. A conservative would have been less likely to make a change in the first place, they are the anchors on civilization, the chains dragging along the ocean floor.
The street example is a good one. Here is a video example of a libertarian type running face first into a wall on healthcare.
Harping on "choice", which is a nice stand in for freedom to choose more broadly. This is why I started this thread, listen to how these jokers talk!It’s difficult to crack through their thick, cement laden skulls. Choice? On what basis does someone choose health insurance? If someone is young and healthy and poor, should they spend money on healthcare? Do they know whether someone bad will happen? If something bad does happen to someone, do they know how bad it will be? Or how minor it will be? IF not, on what basis of personal knowledge does a person choose a coverage level to evaluate potential health risks when they have NO EFFING CLUE IF they will get sick, or how badly they will get sick, of how expensive the treatment will be ??? LARGE chunks of the kind of information a person would need to make an informed guess of what coverage to buy is not available to them !!!
And we have a fucking solution, single payer, universal pool, catches everyone and costs less… but as Hurricane Galt up above there said, he’s more inclined to pay for himself alone, let every individual roll the dice as the preferred model!
ugh, the rot of conservatism is so deep, it needs to be obliterated.
At this point I’m basically convinced calling something a positive liberty is not a good strategy, it’s not as bad as calling every policy I dislike “SOCIALIST/COMMUNIST” like idiot conservatives do, but it’s needlessly confusing and counterproductive. You all win. But the battle is not over. The right and effective rhetoric must be found.
Well suppose that rather than wholly focussing on the bottom the focus was also directed to the top. Allowing people to potentially have one trillion or more dollars is very cancerous, as it demonstrates rapid growth without check. If there were a homeostatic mechanism that kept people within a minimum and maximum income the system would be healthier (IMO). But these ideas (Smith’s Invisible hand, Socialism, Love thy neighbour etc), tend to break down due to the inability of the “checking” ability of the system.
Those aren’t liberties, they are social welfare entitlements.
And I see liberals talk about them all the time. It doesn’t mean the majority of hard-working Americans are okay with paying more in taxes to provide such “liberties.”
The answers are right in your last sentence.
Invisible Hand (free market capitalism) = accumulation of wealth
Socialism (wealth redistribution) = leveling mechanism
Is your complaint that a market-based economy won’t, in and of itself, provide wealth equality? I would argue that’s a feature, not a bug.
That to me is the biggest suspicion I have toward “positive” liberties. They’re essentially a promise and a guarantee of active action on the part of the government… without limit, exception or adjustment due to circumstances. It’s essentially a forward-looking binding promise that may or may not be reasonable at some point in the future… which is the objection I have to it.
Negative liberties aren’t nearly so… obligating in a future sense. Being prohibitions, they’re not binding the government to DO anything; merely to NOT do something.
In some sense, it’s easier to think of rights in the positive sense- people have the right to free speech for example. But the implication of writing that in a positive sense means that the government is obligated to provide/enable that right, while writing it as “Congress shall make no law <snip>… abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press” merely prohibits the government from that, but doesn’t confer any guarantee that someone can exercise that right.
That’s the problem I have with it; it’s one thing to say that the govt. can’t prohibit free speech, but another thing entirely saying that the government guarantees free speech.
Yes I agree, it is a feature, and they are answers/ideas but not solutions, this is evidenced as when they are applied to the “system” they do not come to the fore, as evidenced in Capitalism, Communism and Christianity. I feel we could come up with a great number of ideas on wealth distribution with a variety of mechanisms in place to make the system… ideal (based on our preferences), but the application of any or all of these will lead to a similar result - which we have now.
Which is why it shouldn’t be dependent on Bill’s perception of Bob’s utility, but that of society as a whole. And how that perception swings, tells you how sick (US) or healthy (Scandinavia) your society is, IMO.
Medium sized sparsely populated places in N Europe are hardly places whose experiences can be translated to a continent spanning Superpower.
Just a reminder that there is a significant overlap between “liberals” and “hard-working Americans”.
What’s that got to do with anything?
I don’t think that phrase means what you intend…
True. I’d expect *much better *of the society of a superpower with the resources of a whole span of continent at its command…