Kavekkk wrote:
Wrong, I explicitly referred to any iteration of liberalism. That is, your assertion was incorrect no matter which definition of liberalism one uses. That was and is my argument.
Huh? That makes no sense. I'm specifically making a distinction between classical liberalism and social liberalism. To then respond to that by just proclaiming that they are both liberalism because the word liberalism is in their names is to ignore the entire point. These two ideologies place significantly different weight on the balance between individual liberty and government services. And it's that difference that is significant, since the examples I've mentioned earlier are all examples of governments that heavily infringed individual liberties in the pursuit of making a better society through government action. You may disagree if you want, but it's not like folks handed power over to Hitler, or Stalin, or Mao, because they thought those leaders would brutalize their own populations, but because they strongly believed that they would make their countries better and their lives better.
That their believe was wrong isn't the point. The point is that the same ideological concept used by modern socialists (like Sanders) were used to get those populations to give those leaders power. That's the problem with socialism. I sells itself on this idea that if we just give enough power to those in charge, it'll be used to make all our lives better, but once you've handed over that power, it's more or less random luck as to what happens.
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The republican party doesn't spend less than the democratic party while in office. Despite being in power they have done little to nothing to follow this agenda.
Hah. OMG. You're kidding right? First off, as I've said many times in the past, it's not just about how many dollars, but what those dollars are spent on. Some things government does infringe our freedoms more than others. Secondly, if you actually believed this, and actually believed that the GOP spends just as much (or even more as I've heard some try to claim) on the same kinds of things that we oppose the Democrats for spending on, then why aren't you supporting/praising/whatever the GOP? Kinda makes your claim suspect.
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I don't want or need most of the road network in my country. How is the government not forcing me to pay for its maintenance by taxing me? We could, for example, have nothing but toll roads, run by capitalists. That would be the libertarian thing. And yet the vast majority of Americans support the government taking away their liberty to spend their money as they wish by stealing it and blowing it on infrastructure.
Really? How do you suppose the food at your local grocery store gets there? And yes, most of the money for roads are paid for locally by residents and businesses via combinations of taxes, and additionally funded via things like vehicle registration fees and taxes on gas. About half of the total cost for all roadways in the US are paid for directly by the consumers of those roadways (gas taxes and registration fees). The remainder is made up via a variety of taxes, but again, we all actually do benefit from those things.
The flip side would be the dollars spent on things like bike paths, which are not paid for by those who use them, but rather out of the fees paid by drivers on roadways, and out of general tax funds. Yet, there's virtually zero infrastructure benefit to bike paths. They exist purely for the benefit/enjoyment of bicycle riders. No one transports goods or services over them. Emergency vehicles don't use them. Um... That's the example of how liberals want to spend money though.
We could argue for heavy rail as an infrastructure cost, but not really for light rail. Let me also point out that we do need to make a distinction between national level spending and state and local spending. Those are different things. I guess I'm just not sure what your argument is here. So because I don't oppose all government spending, I can't oppose *any* government spending? That's a pretty weak argument. And btw, there's a ton of so-called infrastructure spending that I don't thing is good either. It's not absolute.
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A road does tell you where to go. You can only use a road to go where the road goes, uh, obviously. The specifics of infrastructure are anything but neutral, hence why the building of infrastructure to and through various places is such a contentious issue. Same thing for laws. Fishing laws apply to everyone equally, but they affect fishermen enormously while having no impact on me whatsoever (I don't eat fish). What laws you have fundamentally alters society.
Sure. Again, I'm not sure where you're going with this though. And while an individual road can only take you where it goes, a road network that goes to many places is much much easier to build and maintain than say a light rail system. I'm speaking in terms of which method of transportation we should be ok with spending public funds on. And again, how much of that comes from general funds, versus those who actually use and benefit the most from said transportation methodology.
Your fishing law example doesn't make much sense either. Yes, they affect people differently, but if the law doesn't affect you, then that's fine, right? The issue is laws that affect you even though you aren't engaged in said behavior. So, for example, a law which requires you to purchase a fishing license, even though you don't have any plans to go fishing. Let's imagine that the justification for this is that by making everyone pay for a fishing license, even though they aren't going to use it to fish, it decreases the cost for fishing licenses for those who will, thus making fishing more affordable, and perhaps even decreasing the cost of fish (yeah, that makes no sense, but bear with me). You'd not think that's a great argument, since you don't even eat fish, right?
That's the kind of "fishing laws" that the left would create. Does that seem like a good idea to you? I don't think so.
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I'm not saying its arbitrary. It could be justified many ways, I'm sure. I'm saying that your argument that it's bad because it takes away your liberty to choose how to spend your money applies just as equally to spending on any number of different things. The only difference is that you agree with these things. You think the government is right that taking away your liberty to spend your money on something other than roads does improve the nation as a whole.
Roads was just an example of acceptable domestic spending. Don't get too caught up on it. Some spending is more necessary than others though, and some spending makes more logical sense to occur via government than private entities. Going back to the roadway example, we have to have some form of roadway system, right? If for no other reason than to provide the most cost effective "last mile" for any sort of transport of goods. Having them built and maintained by some level of government makes sense because then you will have consistent roads, of similar size, with similar requirements for load bearing, standards of materials, etc. Private entities could certainly make roads (and many private roads are, as the name suggests, built and maintained privately). Again though, the point is to do this at a level that is logical. So the federal government involves itself mostly with interstate highways, because it's purview is interstate trade and whatnot. State governments manage roads that travel purely within their own boundaries, because that's the most logical place do this. Local municipalities manage their own road ways. And private citizens manage their own driveways, housing complex roadways, parking lots, etc.
I would never argue that the government should subsidize the purchase of cars though. See how there's a difference? Similarly, while I don't have too much problem with government funding of research, including medical research, and even stuff like the CDC, I'm not a big fan of government getting directly involved in paying for, providing for, or mandating health care for individual people. IMO, the closer you get to the individuals actions and choices, the less the government should be involved. The details of the spending does actually matter. Not just that there is spending.
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See? As you say here, the distinction is perceived benefit. it is not liberty. You are fine with the government taking people's liberty to spend their money so long as you think it confers an actual benefit.
No. I make a distinction between services that benefit us all, and services that are targeted at individuals for just their individual benefit. I'm not sure how much more clear I can be about this. A fire department provides protection from fires for everyone in the community. Food stamps benefit only the recipient. Get it? I could explain at length all the different reasons why I think the latter form of spending is problematic, but right now I just want you to understand the difference in broad terms.
The latter form of spending represents government micro-managing our lives, which is an additional infringement of liberty above and beyond the initial infringement in the form of taxes.
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No, I'm not. Nazism and Stalinism are both inherently opposed to, again, anything you might call liberalism.
No, they are not. They are direct applications of the principles of
social liberalism. Which, I agree, is just a label since social liberalism is itself a significant departure from classical liberalism (what we normally think of as "liberalism"). But since you said "something we might call liberalism", it's relevant to point out that this is what those systems were using as their base ideology, and it does actually carry the "liberalism" label.
I think you're missing the point that in very very broad 20,000 foot level terms, "liberalism" is any ideology in which the social and governing rules are made up based on a desire to make the resulting society "better" for those who live in it. This is in contrast to earlier systems in which those who ruled did so by diving right or might or whatever, and their subjects were... well
subject to their will. Kings were not bound to make their subjects lives better. If they did so, that was great, but their motivation was to improve their own position, power, etc, not out of any systemic process. Even after the Magna Carta, the starting assumption was that the people don't innately have rights at all, but gain those which they were granted via the agreement.
It's only with the rise of modern liberalism that we see the concept of starting with the assumption that people innately have rights as the starting point, and then we allow government to infringe those rights, but only to the degree necessary to maintain a stable society capable of defending and protecting those remaining rights. That's classical liberalism in a nutshell. Later on, more or less as a result of needing to figure out how to apply this new concept to existing nations that had a long feudal tradition of power, social liberalism came along. It's still predicated (or at least sold to the public) on the concept of also making the best society for the people to live in. The difference is that it does everything it can to preserve the idea that the people work for the government in some way and the government provides for them in return. This is the basis for the "social contract" that you'll run into if you research the topic. Social liberalism explains away the existence of powerful government interaction with the citizens on the grounds that the citizens enter into a contract agreeing to have a whole hosts of liberties infringed in ways that would make classical liberalists cringe, in return for a host of government services.
The problem is that this is more or less an excuse to continue to hold significant power over the citizens of a nation. As such, it has on many occasions been used for precisely that. And it's often very hard for the citizens, upon being presented with some new set of agreements, to be able to tell the difference. They hand power first to their government, assuming their government will actually use that power to make their lives better and not abuse it. But they have to first hand the power over. Classical liberalism starts with the government having no power, and then the people just giving it a little bit here, and a little bit there, but (hopefully) never enough to take the kinds of actions that the ***** and the Communists employed. When you first are told you must hand a huge amount of power over to your government so it can use it to make your lives better, you're stuck hoping that it's not abused. That's it.
The same arguments that folks like Sanders use to try to get people to support his social agenda were the arguments used by Hitler and Stalin and Mao. They used the same soaring rhetoric. The same claims that they would feed the hungry, help the helpless, provide jobs for the unemployed, health care for the sick, etc, etc, etc. Again, I'm not saying Sanders would do the kind of things those other leaders did, but that's not the point. Once you've handed over that kind of power, it's only a matter of time until someone will come along and abuse it. And the problem is that every single time this happens, the socialists/liberals/whatever insist that the problem wasn't that their own ideology effective enables this to happen, but that somehow those people were "bad socialists", or "not socialists at all". They invent new terms and come up with all sorts of mental gyrations to explain this away.
But the simplest explanation is that the very system they are employing is inherently dangerous, because it places the power of the government to act on our lives ahead of our own rights to be free of such actions. The same power that allows a government to force you to wear a seat belt, or purchase health insurance, can be used to send those they don't like to the work camps, or sterilize those who are undesirable, or send the elderly to carosel, or whatever other horrific thing we might think of. All for the greater good, of course.
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That they both agree social spending is fine is a very small similarity given, again, that basically everyone does. Your bizarre belief that any ideology that places the group over the individual is a variant of 'social liberalism' is simply uneducated. Classical liberalism and 'social liberalism' are both highly specific and wide ranging sets of beliefs that cannot simply be applied to anything that shares one of their basic features. Is Confucianism a form of social liberalism too? According to you, yes.
Um. No. See above for my explanation of the ideologies in question. And while not every ideology that places the group over the individual is social liberalism, every single one that sells this to the public and derives its power from the public on the idea that they will make a better society for the whole *is*. If I'm just some dictator ruling with an iron fist and I declare that I'm going to do X because I have the power to and you have no say, then it's not social liberalism. Even if I believe that what I want to do is better for the whole doesn't make it social liberalism. My power must have been derived ultimately by people giving it to me because they wanted me to or at least believed that I would make their lives collectively "better" as a result. This could occur gradually as a result of voting within a democracy, or more quickly as a result of a popular revolution. But what makes it social liberalism is that the people believe (whether it's true or not), that they have entered into a contract with the government in which they agree to give it all it's power in exchange for the government using that power on their behalf.
That's a relatively recent concept in government. Even ancient democracies were more about extending the idea of clan meetings to make decisions to a logical degree. So instead of the heads of clans/families meeting to discuss issues in common, each head of a household (or landowner, or whatever) would vote. Same deal. But at no point is the modern concept of liberty and rights really fully developed. There's no inherent assumption that government is in any way constrained in its power or obligated to do anything on behalf of "the people". The method of decision making is there, but not yet the concept that each person has some right involved.