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

[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.