Questions of Liberty (warning, under-informed politics)

[chess]

Inspired by the latest #obscenitytrial craziness, here are some under-informed thoughts on the different trade-off positions you can consistantly take on personal liberty. I notice that they line up quite well with the major UK political parties (at least in principle; the practice is much murkier, of cousre), so it's possible my views have been shaped by the political landscape in which I find myself.

There's the 'state-socialist' approach, typified by Labour. The state promises to keep you safe and healthy, but dictates how you should live your life, for your own good. This keeps down the amount the state has to spend on keeping you safe and healthy, because you are mandated to undertake preventative measures and avoid risks. At its extreme, this approach involves state-mandated exercise routines and a complete ban on any sex without condoms outside a carefully monitored breeding program.

There's the 'libertarian' approach, typified by the Conservatives (economically, anyway - social conservatism holds them back in this regard) and the Liberal wing of the Liberal Democrats. The state doesn't necessarily promise to keep you safe and healthy, but in return it doesn't place any restrictions on your behaviour; you can have as much risky sex or extreme sports or couch potato behaviour as you like, but you are also at liberty to die of starvation or preventable diseases if you can't pay for the consequences.

Then there's the 'universal welfare' approach, typified by the Social wing of the Liberal Democrats and the Green party. The state promises to keep you safe and healthy, and keeps out of dictating the terms of your life as far as it possibly can. However, it does require that you hand over a large percentage of your productivity to pay for the continued safety and health of all those people undertaking risky behaviours, even if you are personally very responsible in your life choices. Obviously you can see how this can be very unfair in practice!

Personally I support the 'universal welfare' approach, but I can see why it would require extremely careful management and education to avoid it completely wiping out productivity (why should I work at anything when all my money / reward for the work is just going to go to people who didn't bother?).

Comments

[naath.livejournal.com]

I'm in favour of a universal welfare approach, combined with providing information (and perhaps moderate incentives, but not compulsion)to make the healthy/safe choices where possible and also policy that aims to make those choices possible for as many people as possible.

Many of my issues with the current state of affairs however are to do with what I think is incorrect and indeed in places frankly dangerous information about what choices are "health" or "safe"; so perhaps the state shouldn't even bother to try providing information, because it sucks so hard.

I think that we (the UK) as a society could easily afford to provide basic but reasonable housing, food, and health care to everyone in the country; and it seems to me pure selfishness when we do not.

[chess]

I kind of worry that I don't have a very good perspective on the downsides of 'universal welfare', though, because I've never, ever needed more money than I have for personal consumption and I've never had a job I really hated but was actually essential to the continued production of stuff that I rely on.

I suspect I would be less in favour if it if I'd experienced actual need (and therefore was more concerned about ending up back in that state if my money was taken away to spend on other people) or a job I didn't love (and therefore was more worried about the effect of removing extrinsic motivation on productivity).

[naath.livejournal.com]

Tax levels that take the minimum wage below the poverty line are clearly (IMO) a violation of the universal welfare principles.

I find that the extrinsic motivation of having SHINY TOYS (which shouldn't be included in welfare) is enough to keep me doing a dull-but-generally-reasonable job. I'm not sure it'd keep me doing a truly awful job. I don't know how many people are doing awful jobs in order to eat, and I don't know what we can do to make those jobs less awful so someone would do them in order to have iToys even though they had food.

[chess]

Deciding what a 'basic standard of living' (i.e. enough to live on but without Shiny Toys) actually is, especially when people have children (who need a stimulating environment to grow up in), turns out to be a massively thorny problem, alas.

If you're still relying on extrinsic rewards for employment, you have an extra pressure on defining it low enough that the difference is worth working for (otherwise you get what people call the 'benefit trap', where you're actually worse-off doing an official working job because at the very least you suddenly can't do all the casual labour that was making ends meet previously).

[ilanin.livejournal.com]

The other issue you have to deal with is that people are bad at decision making and will frequently prioritise having shiny toys over other things which would rationally be considered substantially more essential for life.

Oh, and the other other issue is that a large proportion of the people you are trying to provide these basic necessities to are extremely suspicious of the government and therefore inclined to ignore official help and/or advice.

[chess]

The 'liberty vs efficiency' tradeoff holds here, too.

You can take the 'state-socialist' / 'nanny-state' approach of supplying your welfare in kind (or in restricted currencies like food stamps), which keep people from making poor purchasing decisions and requiring additional welfare payments / emergency treatment to make up for them.

Or you can take the 'libertarian' approach of supplying enough money that they _could_ survive on it if they made vaguely sensible decisions, and letting them starve / suffer from their illnesses if they don't.

Or you could take the 'universal welfare' approach of supplying so much money that they will have room to make some bad decisions with it, at the expense of all the people who have to supply the productivity backing that money.

[naath.livejournal.com]

Yes, it's all really irritatingly difficult.

[ilanin.livejournal.com]

An objection I should have raised before now and haven't (either because it's so far internalised in my thinking it takes a while to remember other people might not take it into account, or because I was distracted by being unable to find my car keys - take your pick), because it's a centerpiece of right-wing thinking, is that there's a limit to how large a percentage of their productivity you can demand from people. Some people will be happy with whatever level of general taxation that you set, but as that amount rises an increasing number of people will become disaffected by this and begin to evade paying taxes using a range of gambits from paying accountants to find loopholes to underreporting income to emigration. This is particularly a problem because the people who are most able to employ these strategies are the highest-income strata who are responsible for a large percentage of state income and also (presumably) the least replaceable to the national economy, should they choose to emigrate. Therefore, the universal welfare approach actually requires a large supermajority of adherents to actually be workable, because not only do you need a political majority to implement it, you also need a populace that isn't going to brain drain to somewhere that operates on a libertarian model.

[chess]

The current solutions to this seem to be:

1) Deny the truth of that assumption - instead assume that enough of the actually essential people will like it in the heavily-taxed place and stay, and those who leave will find that they weren't as essential as they believed themselves to be. (Generally this approach is taken by academics who naturally overvalue the contributions of academics, who tend to be intrinsically motivated, and undervalue the contributions of administrators/managers (in which category I include entrepeneurs, investors etc), who tend not to be so much...)

2) Attempt to cause a global revolution, such that there are no pockets of libertarianism which remain to undermine the model (you can see this approach in anti-tax-haven rhetoric, for instance) or at the very least such that remaining pockets are small enough to ignore, because a large enough fraction of the competent people will not be able to successfully move there.

[chess]

(note that 1) might be correct - the northern-European social democracies that have supposedly quite high tax rates, although nothing like the tax rate needed to do 'true' universal welfare I expect, appear to still be doing okay for smart-people-who-get-things-done, even though they also have disadvantages in climate...)

[ilanin.livejournal.com]

There are an interesting set of countries around the world for which this appears to be broadly true - Scandinavia, as you say, Switzerland, Canada to a certain extent, perhaps also New Zealand. What do these states have in common? Well, they're cold. But additionally, they're also all either small or sparsely populated or both. My suspicion is that governmental efficiency scales absolutely horribly with population, so the amount of money you need to run something like universal welfare is a plausible amount for a country of 10 million and a ridiculous amount for a country of 60 million.

[chess]

That would be why localism is an important part of the debate for people who are seriously thinking about this stuff; small autonomous administrative units with reasonably liberal border policies and co-operation on the things that make sense to do over a wider area (which we basically do transantionally now anyway - see all the people who rely on US defence ;) ).

If government works best at a smaller scale, then it follows that we should have 'nations' (or at least authority to do welfare-related redistribution and whatever else works best at that scale) at a smaller scale...

[ilanin.livejournal.com]

Now, obviously enough I agree with this statement in theory, but there are probably as many practical problems with localism as there are with supranationalism. Conservative eurosceptics have frequently observed that you cannot have a democratic European Union because there is no european demos - no trans-national political class which shares ideals and concerns. Similarly, there's not really a regional demos in most nation states.

One might reasonably observe that whenever localist policies are suggested or attempted to be implemented by the current government there is generally a national uproar about postcode lotteries. Everybody likes localism in theory but in practice it seems to generate an awful lot of complaints. I think that's probably a reflection of this. We have a English demos. There's a wide expectation that things will be broadly the same across England and indeed for the most part across the United Kingdom (at least, that's my explanation for English frustration at Scotland receiving extra funding through the Barnett formula).

Not that I think that's an insurmountable obstacle to the implementation of localist reforms, but it's something that has to be worked on.

[ilanin.livejournal.com]

The problem with 2) ought to be apparent as well - it's inherently unstable. That is to say, even if you somehow succeed at bringing about the worldwide social democratic revolution (comments on the unlikelihood of which are, I feel, somewhat superfluous. Revolutionaries have never cared that they are tilting at windmills, especially since sometimes the windmills unexpectedly fall over) then the situation you would be in is still unstable. Basic game theory - any situation whereby defectors from a universally agreed on policy benefit from defecting (and clearly they're going to here, assuming they're of sufficient size to accommodate the influx of competent people) is not evolutionarily stable.

[naath.livejournal.com]

This is a problem only where the rate of taxation required to fund the needed welfare is higher than the rate of taxation that brings in the highest possible amount of money (whilst I agree this number exists, I do not agree with any of the ways I have read about for deciding what it might actually *be* and I expect that it varies over time and between cultures in a thoroughly infuriating way).

[passage.livejournal.com]

Is it significant that you've split the Liberal Democrats for this? Are they more united on other issues than the other parties (one thinks of Europe), or have they managed to be more heterogeneous than the Conservatives or Labour?

It could be a not being in power thing - it's easy to ignore your differences if you only have to criticise policy, but might suggest problems when in power, especially if their voter base is equally heterogeneous.

[ilanin.livejournal.com]

The split in the Liberal Democrats is, fundamentally, the result of the Liberal Democrats being a merger of two parties that never really had that much in common other than a shared threat of extinction. What used to be the Liberal party is what chess calls the liberal wing; the former SDP is what she's called the social wing. If it weren't for this ridiculous merger we wouldn't need to import the ludicrous Americanism "libertarian" to describe policies which are fundamentally Gladstonian Liberal.

[chess]

I don't think they're any more heterogeneous than the other parties. You could equally say that Labour has a strong Old Left nationalise-industry wing and a New Labour / Third Way wing, or that the Conservatives have a libertarian wing and a social-conservative wing. The most obvious split in the Lib Dems just happens to be on this issue (somewhat because they were two actually different parties until quite recently for a major party - it's pretty much the difference between the Liberals and the Social Democrats.)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

FWIW, I don't know if I'd draw the lines in exactly the same place, but I think that is explicitly correct, as in, I saw a blog comparing the UK system to the Dutch PR system, and the plethora of parties make a lot more sense if you think of them as "the xenophobic right-wing of this party", "the social-liberal part of this party", etc.

And I think (at least notionally) that issues that in a PR system would be resolved by parties negotiating with each other to decide who can form a government, will be resolved within one party by voting on a leader, and the leader needing to forge a compromise between the two tendencies in that party. That has less granularity -- it's a lot lot easier for compromise between two tendencies within one party than for (eg) right-labour and left-conservative to form an alliance. But there is _some_ effect whereby issues which are not broken down by party lines get settled, even though it's rather bad.