Worried Yet?

  • national debt

« A Proportional Dilemma | Main | How Many Feds Does It Take to Screw In a Light Bulb? »

12/16/2012

Comments

"I am having a ball tickling their taboos. Into the bargain, it is great to be utterly serious about something and, at the same time, having chunks of fun just being that serious."

Funny, isn't it, how some of us just enjoy the game? I find that the older I get, the more fun it is to watch others spinning out of control.

As much as I agree that the State has a powerful niche in society that is forever in demand, most of the State serves destructive and negative impulses. We would be better served if society had fewer State catered demands. Yet, it does feel like the negatives and positives ascribed to the State is largely a reflection of society. The difficulty of anarchy is the value system that must underpin such a society to make it stable. Achieving such a value system over a large population would be very difficult and we'd have to get rid of anyone with political ambitions.

TanGen, I am basically with you, though I would not want to underestimate the problem of counting objectively "negatives and positives ascribed to the State." One runs into all sorts of problems, beginning with the interpersonal commensurability of utility assessments to disentangling the web of joint functions (and their individual efficieny levels) assumed by the state. These tasks are so huge and complex that in practice people revert to what is called politics, competition for and exercise of power. You could just as well try to stop the art of narration or the resourcefulness with which humans come up with more or less testable/scientific hypotheses.

Sorry for double posting - having technical difficulties, added the end piece, where I say evil things about Laura:

TanGen, I am basically with you, though I would not want to underestimate the problem of counting objectively "negatives and positives ascribed to the State." One runs into all sorts of problems, beginning with the interpersonal commensurability of utility assessments to disentangling the web of joint functions (and their individual efficieny levels) assumed by the state. These tasks are so huge and complex that in practice people revert to what is called politics, competition for and exercise of power. You could just as well try to stop the art of narration or the resourcefulness with which humans come up with more or less testable/scientific hypotheses.

We can make progress at debunking silly hypotheses, thus advancing the open-ended project of science, but we cannot stop the onslaught of false or unassessed hypotheses - if this is an analogy you could accept.

There is no objectively ascertainable optimal structure of society, we have to find out about the possibilities all the time anew.

We can't get rid of Laura Ebke, I mean the political scientist, I mean the guys who study the mess.

so beautiful.parajumpers

The comments to this entry are closed.

Follow Us On Facebook!

Twitter Updates

    follow me on Twitter

    More