The ancient Greek efflorescence was exceptional in premodern world history for its duration, intensity and long-term impact on world culture. It took place in a social ecology of hundreds of city-states. While wealth and incomes remained unequal in those communities — there were many slaves in the most prosperous of the Greek states — a substantial part of the Greek population experienced prosperity. The growth of the Greek economy was driven by an extensive middle class, by many people who consumed goods and services at a level far above subsistence.
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The historically distinctive Greek approach to citizenship and political order was the key differentiator that made the Greek efflorescence distinctive in pre-modern history. It drove specialization and continuous innovation through the establishment of civic rights, aligned the interests of a large class of people who ruled and were ruled over in turn and encouraged the free exchange of information. The emergence of a new approach to politics is what propelled Hellas to the heights of accomplishment celebrated by Lord Byron.
I like the author’s stance as it shows the vital intertwining of politics and the economy, an important aspect of understanding society that libertarians prefer to ignore, at the cost of a distorted notion of freedom.
Though an amateur as for Ancient Greece, the literature that I have read on the subject matter leaves me somewhat sceptical as to the extent and continuity of wealth in Ancient Greece that Ober seems to insinuate. To tell from the rather short article, his story strikes me as a bit too smooth and idealising.
But the basic story line is fascinating and may well represent an important scholarly advance.
Ober’s approach may help libertarians overcome their unwillingness to extend the idea of spontaneous order from its “economistic ghetto” to social life in general, including the spontaneous order of politics and the state and its interaction with the narrower Hayekian spontaneous order.
Also, and perhaps of particular interest, it appears advisable to think through the concepts of division of labour and specialisation as naturally comprising politics and the state. Highly populous and productive societies are predicated on a fairly efficient political and governmental division of labour making possible and supporting (the beginnings of and later more fully developed) civil society.
No modern markets, no modern economy without a division of labour that encloses politics and the state.
First question: Is it moral to force others to give to the cause of your choice?
Second question: Is it moral for the government to force others to give to the cause of your choice?
Well, I would argue, it is misleading to insinuate that the two questions are logically and morally analogous, as is the strategy of the philosopher-interviewer in the below video.
Missing the difference does not strike me as the sign of a particularly good philosopher. It would appear rather to be an indication of political bias taking the place of meticulous philosophical inquiry.
The state is a modern technology whose emergence made and makes contemporary freedom possible.
Among the government's unique "social-technological" capabilities is a substantial reduction of violence in the territory under its protection, fostering an equally substantial increase of trust in societies populated mostly by people who are complete strangers to one another.
This is only one "social-technological" capability that no single individual can possibly provide to the community. This capability is unique to an institution - the state - which is radically distinct from an individual.
Corresponding to the state's unique features that single it out for special treatment as compared with individual citizens are specific rights that are therefore granted to it, but not to citizens.
In order to fulfil its unique functions, like peacemaking, the state requires resources; for which reason one works out procedures that allow the state to collect contributions ("taxes") and enforce this right -
in such a manner as to keep the state-technology-as-a-whole a worthwhile proposition to the population (which qualification points to many other issues that cannot be dealt with here, one of which being the fact that the taxation right is embedded in a host of other duties and restrictions to be honoured by government).
Individuals are not granted this same right, because they are incapable of providing the requisite return service.
Of course, if my neighbour were capable of providing the above helpful services offered by the state, we would have no reason to hesitate in devolving the same special rights to her as an individual rather than to a whole set of complicated institutions.
Thus, it appears to me, the discussion wilfully triggered in the video by means of the two above questions is not primarily one of morality, but one of empirical evidence. By which I mean: if my explanation of the unique capabilities of the state can be empirically corroborated and thus legitimately used as a premise, the moral issue evaporates. Sure, new puzzles present themselves; but probably less painful ones on balance than when mankind for some reason did not have the ability to create the social technology called the modern state.
Government is a difficult and dangerous instrument; we should dedicate our energy to keeping an eye on it (as citizens) and managing it knowledgeably (as politicians), instead of allowing ourselves to be sent into a maze of philosophical trickery and "gotcha questions."
From my point of view, one of the most virulent threats to freedom nowadays in the Western world derives from a new state "religion" called global warming. In the absence of an effective separation of state and "religion," science is under massive attack and in advanced decline in many of its institutions.
During a conference I attended in Prague, Czechia, a gentleman from the University of Cambridge, UK, admitted he was impressed to have met in me the first German, who is opposing the theory and corresponding policies of anthropocentric global warming (AGW). Not only that people in my country are being systematically misled and discouraged to take an oppositional stance, I know a number of players in the huge subsidised markets that have grown up around the new "religion" who tell me on the quite that they think the whole AGW-thing a scam, yet either fear to swim against the tide or pragmatically conclude that there is easy and big money to be made from jumping on the bandwagon. My country is criss-crossed by drag marks of fanaticism and corruption. This cultus is totalitarian (like any state of war) and it is accustoming people to accept totalitarian practices.
... very few [scientists opining on climate change/global warming; G.T.] are familiar with the science. They, like most of the public, assume other scientists would not distort, manipulate, or do anything other than proper science. When scientists find out, they are shocked, as exemplified in German meteorologist Klaus-Eckert Puls’s comment:
“Ten years ago I simply parroted what the IPCC told us. One day I started checking the facts and data—first I started with a sense of doubt but then I became outraged when I discovered that much of what the IPCC and the media were telling us was sheer nonsense and was not even supported by any scientific facts and measurements. To this day I still feel shame that as a scientist I made presentations of their science without first checking it.”
I got a call in December last year from a German television reporter named Peter Onneken. He and his collaborator Diana Löbl were working on a documentary film about the junk-science diet industry. They wanted me to help demonstrate just how easy it is to turn bad science into the big headlines behind diet fads. And Onneken wanted to do it gonzo style: Reveal the corruption of the diet research-media complex by taking part.
Testing bitter chocolate as a dietary supplement was his idea. When I asked him why, Frank said it was a favorite of the “whole food” fanatics. “Bitter chocolate tastes bad, therefore it must be good for you,” he said. “It’s like a religion.”
“Slim by Chocolate!” the headlines blared. A team of German researchers had found that people on a low-carb diet lost weight 10 percent faster if they ate a chocolate bar every day. It made the front page of Bild, Europe’s largest daily newspaper, just beneath their update about the Germanwings crash. From there, it ricocheted around the internet and beyond, making news in more than 20 countries and half a dozen languages. It was discussed on television news shows. It appeared in glossy print, most recently in the June issue of Shape magazine (“Why You Must Eat Chocolate Daily,” page 128). Not only does chocolate accelerate weight loss, the study found, but it leads to healthier cholesterol levels and overall increased well-being. The Bild story quotes the study’s lead author, Johannes Bohannon, Ph.D., research director of the Institute of Diet and Health: “The best part is you can buy chocolate everywhere.”
I am Johannes Bohannon, Ph.D. Well, actually my name is John, and I’m a journalist. I do have a Ph.D., but it’s in the molecular biology of bacteria, not humans. The Institute of Diet and Health? That’s nothing more than a website.
Other than those fibs, the study was 100 percent authentic. My colleagues and I recruited actual human subjects in Germany. We ran an actual clinical trial, with subjects randomly assigned to different diet regimes. And the statistically significant benefits of chocolate that we reported are based on the actual data. It was, in fact, a fairly typical study for the field of diet research. Which is to say: It was terrible science. The results are meaningless, and the health claims that the media blasted out to millions of people around the world are utterly unfounded.
Image credit. This is how bees are thought to perceive the below sight.
Somewhat Reasonable explains how bee facts change, while Green agendas do not:
The deadline imposed by President Obama’s [pollinator] task force memo passed months ago, and yet the White House has been strangely silent on the issue of pesticides and honeybee health. What initially looked like an easy lame-duck giveaway to green groups has turned out to be factually complicated.
Long before the White House weighed in, anti-insecticide activists promoted claims that honeybees were headed for extinction because of pesticides, specifically neonics – unless the government banned them. Time magazine picked up their refrain, devoting a long cover story to the scary prospect of “a world without bees.” Other news stories uncritically repeated the end-of-bees assertions. One-third of the food we eat could disappear without bees to pollinate crops, they proclaimed. But there was a problem.
The narrative turned out to be false, extensive evidence now demonstrates – and inconvenient truths had gotten in the way of another slam-dunk Executive Branch edict.
So there is no recent pollinator crisis that can be laid at the door of neo-nics. The reverse in fact: farmers who cannot now use neo-nics are using pyrethroids instead. These cause more collateral damage to insects other than pests because they are sprayed on rather than locked inside the plant as seed dressing.
If you would prefer farming with fewer pesticides, there’s a simple way to achieve it. No, not organic but genetically modified crops. Bees thrive in them.
I love Nebraskan food. It is amply available in supermarkets in Germany. US-American meat tends to be the best there is over here, even ahead of South American imports.
Pierre Desrochers sums up much of what is wrong with locavorism, the fetishisation of local agriculture as the magic bullet that will solve our food problems.
Did you know, Nebraska's official name used to be "The Tree Planter's State?"
Explains Senator Laura Ebke in her fun fact of the day: "Nebraska has had two official state names: the "Tree Planters' State" and the "Cornhusker State" Nebraska was designated the "Tree Planters' State" by legislative action in 1895. Nebraska's claim to tree-planting fame includes the founding of Arbor Day in 1872 by J. Sterling Morton of Nebraska City, the Timber Culture Act of U.S. Sen. Phineas W. Hitchcock in 1873 and the millions of trees planted by early settlers as windbreaks, woodlots and orchards. The 1945 Legislature changed the official state name to the "Cornhusker State.""
Freedom means progress, thus freedom means an environment more adequate to humankind - and there cannot be any other standard for judging environmental quality.
Pierre Desrochers reminds us:
Last month [written in November, 2006] our southern neighbours welcomed the arrival (or birth) of their three-hundredth million citizen. While the news should have been welcomed, a number of environmental activists and journalists viewed it as cause for concern. They had no reasons to, because a rising population in a prosperous economy is entirely consistent with a higher quality of life and improved environmental amenities. As Dan Griswold of the Cato Institute pointed out, even though the U.S. population is today four times larger than it was a century ago, during this time period "life expectancy at birth has grown from 48 to 78 years, infant mortality rates have plunged, a host of deadly diseases have been conquered, and the air we breathe and the water we drink are far cleaner than when we were a less populous country."
The idea that economic growth generates pollution problems, but simultaneously provides the means to clean up most of them and even to improve on earlier conditions, is probably too counterintuitive to be readily accepted by most people. It is nonetheless backed up by much historical evidence. A brief discussion of the causes underlying forest regrowth and improvements in air and water quality in advanced economies can be illustrative in this respect.
Take, for instance, the case of forest cover:
It is a common misconception that deforestation is a recent occurrence, with the bulk of it taking place in the tropical regions of the world in the last five decades. As Williams (2002) points out, possibly as much as nine-tenths of all deforestation occurred before 1950, as people cleared forests for shelter, food, warmth and to create a multitude of implements. Beginning in some European countries in the middle of the nineteenth century, however, these trends have long been reversed in virtually all advanced economies and in some developing economies (including China and India). Among other factors explaining this rebirth of forests in over fifty countries is the fact that farmers and foresters became increasingly efficient in their capacity to grow more food and fiber on ever-decreasing areas, with the resulting abandonment of pasture and cropland paving the way to afforestation and reforestation.
Meanwhile, wood users became increasingly adept at extracting more value out of their input, while development of substitute products, ranging from electricity to plastics and metals, reduced the demand for wood (Ausubel, 2000; Williams, 1989). Rudel et al. (2004) also point out that economic development and urbanization has created better paying non-farming jobs in urban areas, causing a number of agricultural workers to abandon their land. In places with stable or growing populations and little ability to import forest products, continued declines in forest cover spur increases in prices of forest products, causing landowners to plant trees instead of crops or pasture grasses. Disastrous floods in deforested watersheds have also motivated government officials in developing, but now prosperous, countries to implement reforestation programs.
Image credit. This woman is congratulating soldiers for embarking on a disaster. By embracing new net neutrality legislation, might we be facing a much hailed disaster? Or are we going over the top with our fears?
A Closed Reading of Liberty and an Open-Ended Reading of Liberty
One reading of liberty favours political abstention, while another reading insists that political participation is an indispensable condition of freedom.
I would argue that the second reading trumps the first.
We cannot enjoy freedom in the absence of the possibility for every adult citizen to participate in politics, if she is so inclined. But we can have freedom in the absence of some of the many interpretations of freedom to be politically preponderant.
Challenging Net Neutrality
New net neutrality legislation is perceived by some as opening the floodgates to allow massive politicisation, in an area where previously politics had little/considerably less influence. Both this general contention as well as detailed arguments against concrete negative implications of net neutrality may be perfectly valid. It is absolutely vital that such objections can be raised.
Playing on the fear of one narrow issue that would have been easy to legislate (that broadband companies might block or limit access to certain sites), the government used this niche concern to drive through a total takeover of the Internet.
However, objections against net neutrality and accusations of inordinate political influence are contributions to a debate, to which anyone is invited whatever her position relative to the anti-net-neutrality view.
It is perfectly compatible with freedom, in fact, it is a requirement of freedom that people compete to shape the debate and the eventual political decision making so as to conform to their preferences.
We should never forget that in a free society arguments and policies supported by (some faction among) those conscious of liberty are not by rights exempt from loosing the battle for public opinion and political dominance.
Only what I call robust conditions of freedom ought to be exempt from being overwritten by temporal fads and currents in public opinion and political dominance, or to put it differently: the right to compete in the political arena must be absolutely defended and has a higher priority as a publicly protected concern than any particular opinion contributed to the scramble for ultimate political validity (expressed through legislation and enacted policy).
There is a liberal (= libertarian) conundrum that relegates the libertarian to the sideline of real world politics. He wishes no politics, no interventions to take place, while many other players take the opposite stance. For the liberal position to become more prominent, its adepts must organise themselves politically and act in the very world of politics that they feel we ought to be able to do without.
This has two implications: in order to concretely defend liberal positions, the libertarian must engage in practical, pragmatic and hence compromise-accepting politics, i.e. he must contribute to the politicisation of the world, he must become an effective special interest (say, in matters concerning net neutrality).
Or else, the natural and legitimate desire of many of us to take advantage of the possibility of political participation - an indispensable condition of freedom - will be disproportionately utilised by opponents of the libertarians - which is what happens in real life, and has shaped the political face of our societies for at least 150 years.
Self-Correcting Freedom
If this is so, why should we still enjoy the blessings of civil society? I doubt that the libertarian can pride herself of being responsible in the chief for this happy situation. Much rather, the robust conditions of freedom are so deeply rooted in our societies that substantial violations of the framework of freedom are painful to such an extent that we tend to avoid them, at least in the long run, irrespective of people being much concerned with or knowledgeable about freedom.
I suspect, we are free to such a large extent as we are in our historically privileged 20 or so countries supporting advanced civil societies, because freedom works so well, indeed better than anything else, at the level of development attained by us, and people find out about it, by trial and error, rather than some of us understanding freedom supremely well and exerting sufficient influence to protect her.
Macro-Level Freedom and Freedom at the Micro-Level
This assessment refers to the macro level. On the micro level it is certainly very important that the message of freedom is introduced into the various political debates, especially regarding specific issues such as net neutrality and concerning the defence of the robust conditions of freedom.
But again, the message of freedom contains the postulate of open debate--and once you delve more deeply into the net neutrality issue, it is impressive to see the intricate ramifications of the theme, the many layers of issues and the spectrum of competing expertise. I place more trust in this vibrant debate than in any ideologically stream-lined, cut and dried opinions (such as one reducing the FCC to a simple motto "If It Ain't Broke - Break It")--and I am ready to find myself surprised by knowledge I did not have before.
I am almost certain that a very thick layer of argument that is dear to the libertarian's heart is largely irrelevant or even counter-productive in that it alienates large parts of the public from the libertarian core objective of freedom: the false reasons/assumptions underlying the libertarian abstention from practical politics.
Freedom to Act with Public Effect
The libertarian's basic error is to ignore that a free society is one that allows and invites people to get involved in politics, enabling them to express their preferences and fight for their realisation. Ignoring this side of freedom condemns the libertarian to chronically arguing on too high a level of abstraction and within a closed, quasi-proprietary set of assumptions and expectations.
That is to say, libertarians tend to formulate fiercely held convictions concerning the correct and feasible connection between what they propose to do and the expected or desired outcome of such course of action, without regard for the intermediate conditions - to a very large extent brought about in the world of politics - that ultimately determine whether such a connection can be achieved or whether the means and ends actually available will be of a different kind and form of connectedness.
The belief in freedom and the belief in a world with very low levels of political activity are incompatible.
Freedom must find ways of accommodating herself with some of her more complicated and potentially disruptive consequences. In an open society, freedom permanently disrupts and restores the tissue of which she is made.
Almost paradoxically, it is precisely because liberty invites and empowers us to pursue by political means our competing visions of the inevitably partially designed order in our social surrounding, freedom turns out to engender more of a spontaneous order than the libertarian is capable of handling/willing to acknowledge.
We cannot be free and abstain from public action to the extent many libertarian hope for.
The kind of thinking that is conscious of freedom can only make a contribution to the general discussion to which everyone is invited. Freedom as method is a way of influencing the debate, with unevenly successful, unevenly correct, and unevenly attainable results.
Kelvin Kemm asks what are the lessons learned from Fukushima? Once you pierce through the propaganda to the facts, the answer is: nuclear energy is amazingly safe. Indeed, thanks to events that have occurred at Fukushima Daiichi
nuclear power has been proven to be much safer than anyone had previously imagined.
There are areas of life where no such thing as the good old times exists.
The IT sector seems to be such a field.
If you do not put restrictions on human curiosity and creativity, the natural thing happens: continual change and progress.
Man is a natural innovator. Transforming the world is an anthropological constant, a fundamental need inextricably tied to the human condition.
Liberty is about ensuring conditions that allow man to act out this natural human need. Liberty is about making sure that government facilitates this human propensity rather than hindering it. Obstructing the drive to change our world is a way of dehumanising men.
that man must and ought to strive for ever growing wealth. If this desire for more wealth is crudely equated with greed (which is silly) then greed is morally desirable - as one might argue for rhetorical effect, while correctly speaking greed is bad, of course, and self-interest good in the above sense. In fact, what is bad about greed is that it represents an overdoing, a transgression of the right measure of something, an excess beyond the harmless or wholesome, whereas an excess of self-interest does not make conceptual sense as defined above, since it would imply a violation of self-interest by self-interest.
The crux: the way in which human beings adapt to their environment is by having and satisfying desires/needs. The greater the variety, variability and degree of differentiation of a specie's ability to have and satisfy needs/desires, the greater its ability to fit successfully with the wider environment. So the ability to constantly renew, extend and grow this ability is key to survival and advancement.
Now, what is wealth? Wealth consists of things and practices that enable man to satisfy his desires/needs. Hence, if an open-ended development of desires is an anthropological sine qua nonand the key to continuous successful adaptation to a changing and changed environment, then incessantly growing wealth is just as important.
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