Will Wilkinson - Latest Comments in Bop: More Utopia Tennis

Re: Bop: More Utopia Tennis

Milena Thomas — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 23:10:08 -0000

Uh. Wow. This takes a bit of mental gymnastics, doesn't it?

Well, I thought I'd mention that it could be useful to discuss that laissez-faire doesn't imply government inaction. There are many times when government inaction could prove to greatly inhibit personal freedoms.

A strongly enforced Rule of Law (distinct from ad hoc regulation and run-of-the-mill government meddling in personal and market affairs) is a necessary component in any free society.

Re: Bop: More Utopia Tennis

Andrew Schwartz — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 00:07:08 -0000

It strikes me, Will, that the "limited government" argument is framed in a way that, to a large extent, accepts the basic premise of the anarchist: "the state is bad."

I wonder what might happen if proponents of "limited government" instead began to advance arguments for "honest government," or "honorable government" - based on the premise that the state is like a person: it posesses (in addition to a capacity for evil) a benevolent potential, that is best actualized when it focuses on its strength: protecting citizens from theft, fraud, and physical harm.

Re: Bop: More Utopia Tennis

Constant — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 12:57:43 -0000

"he's going to need to think of a different sort of argument."

I disagree. What he wrote was true and a valid argument for the point he was making. It was not a metaphor as he used it. He used poison as an example (not a metaphor) that demonstrated that a certain line of reasoning was invalid. He was not employing metaphorical or analogical reasoning here, but critiquing the logic of an inference by re-applying the same logic to another situation.

Specifically, he was refuting an inference to a conclusion about causality. His problem was with this statement: "[m]any states evidently succeed in achieving relatively benign outcomes"

He was, in fact, making the familiar correlation-does-not-imply-causality argument, using poison as an example. If some states are correlated with relatively benign outcomes, this does not mean that the the states achieved those outcomes.

Re: Bop: More Utopia Tennis

Matt — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 09:52:38 -0000

Like John, I was going to point out that the poison analogy isn't very good since lots of things that are poisonous in big doses are quite fine, even good for you, in smaller doses- most vitamins, red wine, acetaminophen, etc. Of course having a bad analogy doesn't itself make the argument wrong, but since it seems that many things are good in some dose but bad in much bigger ones is a general fact in life that he's going to need to think of a different sort of argument.

Re: Bop: More Utopia Tennis

John Meredith — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 05:20:16 -0000

Rod's poison analogy is a poor one for him because, as you imply in your response, it is a cliche of toxicology that the 'poison is in the dose'. Compounds are only toxic if there is too much of them relative to the organism's tolerance. Smaller doses often do the organism good, including as medecines.

Re: Bop: More Utopia Tennis

Craig — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 02:03:05 -0000

Make that dispersed costs.

Re: Bop: More Utopia Tennis

Craig — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 02:02:17 -0000

On shrinking the role of the state - don't you need to distinguish between government programs that have popular support (for e.g., social security in the US, or universal health care in your new utopia to the north, or some regulation of business and labor markets) and those that are clearly the product of rent-seeking (for e.g., subsidies to the sugar industry).

Although the latter will be hard to get rid of (because of concentrated benefits, reduced costs), at least you can appeal to shared norms about fairness. But with the former, you have to make ethical arguments (say, against the idea of positive rights) that clash with widely accepted norms.