coughAthenscough
The king is just the head of state. We’ve found other, better ways to select the person who performs that function. I’ll believe that the state can wither away when I see it. Or I’ll consider that a viable option when I see even the tiniest indication that it might do so. So far, there ain’t none.
Like I said, these aren’t the conditions under which the state could wither away.
Yes, Michael, you are correct about the city-state of Athens having been at one point a republic without a king. But their history is the same as the history of any other country - the royalty and nobility were there first. Democracy didn’t just naturally develop and flourish there; it took political revolutions to accomplish that. And, very probably, there were Athenians who thought that this ‘democracy’ idea was dangerous, that there had never been a civilization without a king, and that to think that anything else was possible was foolish.
John - so let’s take this idea one step further. We’ve found other ways of exercising the social and political power kings used to have exclusively for themselves through the creatin of legislative bodies and the expansion of enfranchisement. Still, the bulk of that power is exercised by a small minority of a country’s population, and the state is necessary to ensure both that their power can be exercised and to prevent any challenges to that power from below. So what happens if we devolve the total social and political power of the state to everybody? Everyone is thus committed to ensuring that such power is exercised, and they have no-one against whom they need to defend their control thereof. Therefore, the state becomes unnecessary and under those conditions will wither away.
And of course, if the Invisible Pink Unicorns stopped being so irresponsible and showed themselves surely they could teach us all how to live in harmony and run our affairs without the need for a state.
Can you explain how your scenario differs from this one?
I have refrained from pointing out the obvious fact that “Everyone” is not really an entity which can be thought to be committed to anything nor “have no-one against whom they need to defend their control”. Without a structure of some sort every individual would be committed to his own individual vision of how power should be exercised and would therefore have every other individual whose vision differed from his as someone “against whom they need to defend their control”. Unless, of course, you are talking about doing away with individuals. Which is exactly what those of us who hate your philosopy realize and fear.
Interesting weekend’s worth of posts. It seems I have been called upon to define “genuine need”, and so here goes.
First of all, this is needless melodrama. The idea that a welfare state will “inevitably” result in an ultra-authoritarian Marxist regime is absurd slippery-slopery, and accusing a prescribed minimum level of welfare of “condemning people to death” is hysterical dogma similar to that of Lemur866. Let us moderate the debate somewhat.
As I tried to make clear in the OP, a genuine need is that which prevents actual, immediate suffering, which can easily be cast in terms of simple physiological indicators. (A request to “Define suffering” has an obvious non-verbal response!0 An absence of TV, car or cosmetic dentistry hardly engenders “suffering”, but acute toothache due to years without dental care, sleeping in freezing temperatures or contracting cancer plainly does. The minimum level of provision required to combat this suffering (ie. emergency dental care covering extraction and community shelter in the first two cases) is what “meeting genuine need” entails.
Absolutely so, unless you consider it morally acceptable for a human to starve or freeze to death in a land of plenty, where so much food goes to waste. I accept a moral and legal obligation to educate all children at school and save my fellow man from becoming a victim of crime or foreign invasion, all of which costs a great deal of my money: It is enforced charity. Granting these gifts but withholding even more basic provisions strikes me as somewhat perverse.
The lazy, alcoholic bum is the bane of the economic left/right debate. We do not talk of the homeless family in midwinter, nor the uninsured minimum wage earner who finds they have cancer, nor the mentally ill or victims of childhood abuse who end up on the streets when those close to them cannot take it any more.
No, it is always the bum. He could work, but he prefers to sit in the sunshine swigging the beer he bought by selling his food stamps. The economic right sees him and, by denying him the most basic of needs so as not to “reward” him, must cover their ears to the sickening sound of countless others falling through the safety net from a great height.
It is not impossible that one day I will wake up freezing and hungry with a scarily painful lump somewhere. Which of these three needs would not be “genuine”?
You mis-understand. I don’t think that “dependence” and “suffering” are the same thing. When the state decides to give free housing, food and medical care to the homeless you will find that there are more homeless people. You have encouraged the behaviour and fed it. This leads to more suffering, due to the fact that there is now more homelessness.
I just don’t get this at all. How are schoolchildren like homeless people?
I chose agree. There is a fine line to be drawn somewhere between “pure” communism, where there are no wealthy people and everybody receives the same basic needs and total libertarianism, where it’s every man for himself and if you can’t swim, you drown. As others have noted, this is a basic tenet of Christianity that we are our brothers’ keepers and we are all responsible for each other. Therefore, I believe that the basic needs of all must be met even if their contributions to society are minimal. In any system, there must be those who put in more than they get out and vice versa.
For those that say, “My needs are none of your business and your needs are none of mine” I would argue that even they practice and benefit from collectivism. You get in a wreck and your car needs repairs- do you say “well, my tough luck and I’m standing alone”? Not if you buy car insurance. The insurance company takes some from a lot of people and distributes according to need. Ditto for health insurance- many put in so that each may receive according to need. Economically, we all enter into collectivist agreements whether by choice or by governemental decisions. We all benefit by “each according to need” whether we choose to admit it or not.
Now you are drawing equivalency between homelessness and suffering. I contend that it is possible to be homeless, but not suffer because of it, by provision of basic needs such that one does not starve or freeze. One will still be uncomfortable, even depressed and stressed at one’s predicament, but suffereing will have been ameliorated. And this is without going as far as commiting to “free housing”. How is a person provided with basic housing homeless?
Because I am legally obliged to meet their needs by government mandate.
Using the US as an example, can you be more clear about how it is a small minority the exercises power? All adult citizens (excpet felons) can vote.
I’m having a difficult time envisioning exactly what structure you are talking about. Maybe I need to hear your definition of what a “state” is. Even if we “devolved” to absolute direct democracy, there would still be a state, no?
Well, it’s easy for you in this thread as the “needs czar” to delineate a true need for a frivolous one. In practice, we don’t have a benevolent “needs czar”, but an enormous bureaucracy and a veritable “needs industry” of social activists defining what a “true need” is. You simply cannot draw the line and say: “If your tooth ache is 7 on the pain scale, it’s a need. But if it’s a 6 on the scale, it’s not a need.”
You will find that once you agree to eliminate all 'immediate suffering" from a medical standpoint, it will simply be a matter of time when “preventive care” becomse a “need”. Why wait for the painful tooth ache when regular dental check-ups can prevent them in the first place?
I accept a moral responsibility to do what I can to eliminate suffering in this world. It’s something I choose and I control. I do not accept a legal responsibility to do so. Just because someone drew a line on a map and said “these people are in your legal domain” does not create a new moral obligation for me to care for the people on my side of the line, nor does it erase the moral obligation to care for those on the other side of the line.
As you imply, toothache gets worse. Eventually you would experience pain such that every single human being would describe it as suffering were they to feel the same.
I believe that preventive care is the most efficient way to minimise suffering, which is why I advocate universal healthcare. But to respond to the point in hand, let us first eliminate that suffering which every reasonable person recognises as such: No “needs czar” need be appointed. As with many other issues, arguing that due to the difficulty of drawing an ultimately arbitrary line we should abandon trying to draw the line at all is fallacious. We can all recognise genuine physical suffering when we see it. Government must do what it can to prevent its citizens suffering.
And yet you accept a legal responsibility to educate all schoolchildren and protect all people from crime. Only a pure anarchist can argue that taxes ought to be voluntary, since nobody might pay them. Placing the meeting of certain needs above others even more basic is, I venture, like giving a homeless person a makeover.
Absence of a state does not equal absence of a social structure. Social structures long precede the rise of a state - the hunter-gatherer bands of humans before agriculture was discovered, and the small villages with their chieftains before the emergence of a surplus of goods and the rise of classes.
BobLibDem has nailed a key point - whether we realize it or not, our needs require collective effort to be met. Not just in those cases where the need is above and beyond the usual daily stuff, like car insurance in the case of accident or medical insurance in the case of illness - but in those selfsame daily needs we don’t often give much thought to. It took a collective to build the structures in which we live and work; it took a collective to raise, harvest, prepare, package, and distribute the food to the places from which we purchase it - not to mention a collective needed to run the establishments at which we purchase food; it took a collective to manufacture the means of transportation (both private and public) we use to get where we need to go, as well as a collective to build and maintain the infrastructure which those means of transportation require to function normally.
Society is already collectively organized, but it is still for the large part privately run. As a marxist I’m not proposing doing away with the whole of society as it stands now, I want to change it so that society is both collectively organized and collectively run. That’s not doing away with the individual, it’s doing away with one particular economic structure and replacing it with another, which seeks to create conditions that don’t require the sociopolitical institutions (like the state)
on which the old economic structures depended.
Individuals are not pitted against society and/or each other; most are brought together in groups of various sizes to produce, distribute, and maintain the goods and services society requires to function. Their needs already depend on collectivized labor, although since society is still privately run the requirement of profit must first be satisfied before those needs can be met. Only if you choose to ignore the established fact that society is already collectively organized does the philosophy of “individual vs. society at large” make any sense. When society is collectively run as well as collectively organized, collective responsibility for the individual members of society becomes a moral imperative. And that includes collectively deciding which needs ought to be met by society as a whole - although it will hopefully be obvious that housing, clothing, food, education, and medical care should be recognized as universal and basic rights, available on demand and unconditionally.
John - to answer your second question first, let’s turn to Friedrich Engels in The Origins of Family, Private Property, and the State:
And Lenin, from State and Revolution, summarizing the Engels quote above:
Wage levels and lifestyle considerations aside (as they ought to be, since criticism of the wage system itself is independent of the criticism of wages), the US is divided into two main classes - those who own the means of production and distribution and realize a profit from their operation, and those who operate those same means, but do not realize a profit from them as they must sell their ability to perform work to the members of the first class. These classes are, of course, workers and capitalists. Since wages (and benefits) are a component of the capitalists’ outlay and are therefore also a reduction of the potential profit the capitalists - or the company they owns - could realize, it is in the interest of the capitalists as a class as well as individually to reduce that outlay as much as possible, e.g. keeping the cost of wages and benefits to himself down and transferring as much of the cost of benefits as possible onto the workers instead. This directly conflicts with the individual interests of the workers, who’d like to earn a decent wage and not have to worry that what savings they can set aside might be wiped out in the event of a personal catastrophe, which leads them to fight back - sometimes individually, and sometimes organized alongside their fellow workers - to improve their own situation. Despite local, regional, or even sometimes national victories over workplace conditions, the exploitation doesn’t stop completely, so it is in the interest of the workers as a class to organize and fight to eliminate the conditions of exploitation for good. Hence, we have the irreconcilability of class interests which Engels and Lenin spoke about in their abovementioned quotes.
Now, to your first question - the bourgeois state, which was brought into existence first in the US, France, and the Netherlands - arose out of the need not to reconcile, but to gloss over those conflicting class interests. Since those interests are irreconcilable - and not just by definition, but as proven by the economic and social reality of capitalism - one will naturally conclude that the state will be constructed to the advantage of the class that currently holds power. Which, after 1776 and 1789, was the capitalist class. While the universalization of suffrage is an important trapping of democracy, it is one that can (and has been) limited by the ruling class in order to maintain its grip on political power. (Note how long it took for Blacks and women in the US to gain the vote, for one thing.) Even then, our votes and our voices can and have been ignored completely when it suits the government to do so. This is, of course, to say nothing of economic and social power, which are regarded as unassailable and the inalienably exclusive provenance of the ruling class.
Now, to try to wrap up - since the state is a means of papering over class antagonisms, which are a natural consequence of a class society (that is, a society in which one class has taken hold of political, economic, and social power and depends on the exploitation of other class(es)), where is the necessity of a state in a society in which there are no class divisions, and the exploitation of one class by another is therefore impossible?
I think if you waited until every single person agreed, then the person would be dead. You overestimate the degree to which “every single human being” would agree on something. I doubt there is **anything ** that every single human being would agree on.
Actuallly I’m not arguing that. I’m arguing that one person’s needs do not impose a requirement on me to fulfill those needs. You are in fact the one arguing about drawing lines. You are saying that because the lines can be drawn, they should be. I’m only pointing out the flaw in your own argument. Sure, lines can be drawn. But you are mistaken if you think that your definition of a “need” is ever going to be accepted by all other people.
That’s actually the crux of the matter. You take that statement as an asumption, and I don’t. Therefore, we come to different conclusions about what governments should and should not do.
I accept it as a reality that isn’t going to change, although ideally I wouldn’t. I’ve never argued that taxes should be voluntary. I’m not sure why you would imply that I did.
Come now, John. If you ask me to tack on unnecessary flotsam such as “every single human being with a functioning nervous sytem, unaffected by anaesthetic substances and being of sound mind” I will, but I hope that an intelligent and earnest debate does not require it. I hereby withdraw my “every single human”.
Do you not agree that a human being in acute physical pain has a genuine need for it to stop? If you do, we can proceed from there. We can agree what is reasonable (indeed if the unreasonable were appealed to in every debate of ethics or morality, we would stutter to a stop!)
No, I am saying they should be drawn full stop, and defending my general placement of it.
I understand that. I wish to explore how you deal with seeing suffering which could be minimised by government intervention. Do you simply ignore it?
Well, yes. I think that being homeless is being in a state of suffering. I wouldn’t want to be homeless, and if I was I would imagine that a lot of suffering would be involved, New England winters being what they are.
I disagree. No matter how much you spend on programs for the homeless, it will always suck to be a homeless person. Homeless people will always suffer, no amount of government spending will ameliorate it.
You say you don’t want to provide them with “free housing” and in the next sentance imply that you will provide them with “basic Housing”. What’s the difference?
It seems to me that your solution to the homeless is to give homes to them. This is the same as Marie Antoinette’s solution to starvation in France. It’s a nice thought, but it just doesn’t work.
It is by this same logic that the government housing projects of the 70’s were created.
Problem: We have people without housing.
Solution: Government builds housing for them.
This seems like a good idea. It’s certainly straightforward logic to solving problems. However, these liberal ideas actually make the problems worse when they are implemented. The public housing projects have been a disaster.
Says who?
Seriously. Do you have a cite for this in the bill of rights or the constitution? Does any country?
Our right are the pursuit of happiness. Our government has made no promise to the people not to allow them to suffer.
Even if those physical factors which cause such suffering, such as hunger, cold, toothache or cancer, are addressed?
No I didn’t. I said that even if they weren’t actually housed their suffering could still be lessened. I do advocate giving them basic housing.
In Britain, should you become homeless, you can apply for basic housing and eventually, after a period in a shelter or YMCA, you will get it. One need not be literally on the streets here for long if you actively seek help. Insofar as this system prevents avoidable suffering, I think it works, although efficiency and preventing abuses are a constant and worthy fight. I certainly cannot see that it increases genuine suffering.
I think you missed the point of my statement. Let’s say that you woke up that morning and decided that all three of those complaints qualified as a genuine need. Which one of them gives you the right to take resources from me (at gun point if necessary) to cure them? Why if you talk to me like a human being do you assume that I will not be willing to help in some way? It is the liberal statists among us who are insisting that forced welfare is the only way to address these problems. I am simply proposing that there may indeed be other methods.
If I may juxtapose two quotes to illustrate the disconnect between us:
You see, SentientMeat, the problem is not where we draw the line. The problem is who draws the line. I believe that each of us individually should be responsible for drawing that line for ourselves. That is, we should each be responsible to know when our own needs have exceeded our capacity and shoudl seek help. We should each be responsible to know when we have capacity to help and should seek those in need. There is little or no need for a “needs czar” to decide for us what constitutes genuine need nor indeed what constitutes a “fair contribution” to such needs.
The point I was trying to make with the statement you quoted is that if you define “genuine needs” so universally that we can all agree to them, then you should have little trouble getting voluntary contributions to help fill those needs.
Nonetheless, those who insist only the government can possibly meet the infinite demand for health care, among other things, are setting themselves up as such a czar.
In reality, we need two such czars. One is the free market, and we always have this. All societies, with no exceptions, are subject to the laws of the market. The idea that we can escape this by government fiat is a persistent notion, and persistently wrong.
The other czar is the individual. By balancing off my choices against the backdrop of all other choices, I decide what are my needs based on what is available and what my resources are. Deciding that a need must be filled, regardless of cost, is why deficits appear and persist.
You are also assuming that government is always the most effective way to deliver goods and services that fill a “genuine” need. This is rarely the case.
Certain problems can only be efficiently addressed on a large scale. Others cannot be. The “one size fits all” approach to the problems of life leads to gross inefficiencies that more than outweigh the suffering caused by an individual, piece-meal approach.
You are blurring the distinction between voluntary and non-voluntary cooperation. Collectivism based on mutual agreement is self-validating and self-correcting. You don’t like what you are getting, you opt out, and both you and the collective have to adjust or lose out.
Government collectives are coerced by their nature. Thus they are neither self-correcting nor self-validating. Sometimes this is unavoidable, but as a default structure it is inherently less efficient than voluntary cooperation.
Regards,
Shodan
Well, people taking resources from other people at gun point is itself only prevented by enforced charity: My taxes are taken “at gun point” to prevent people taking things at gun point. So, if we ignore the hyperbolic language, I say all of them.
I don’t. I merely forsee less funds being made available for preventing suffering if they are solely given voluntarily.
And what do you do when you see suffering resultant from a whole lot of people “guessing wrong”? Ignore it?
I’ll ask you as I asked John: Do you personally agree that a person in acute physical pain has a genuine need for it to stop?