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

[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.