DISQUS

"No envy basically just says, that you wouldn't rather trade your starting position with anyone else. All differences in income are matters of choice."

This is not what the real-world experience of envy is necessarily about. I suspect that even if resources were allocated with precise equality, and even if that equality could somehow be maintained over time, envy would still run rampant: We'd still want to own other people's stuff, and just add it to our own.

A "no envy" rule of this sort (with which I was not previously familiar) would seem to require either a change in the definition of the word envy, or in human nature itself.

A good question. Why is envy the minimand? Why not some other socially undesirable trait, like poverty? (And might envy, taken as a minimand, actually decrease in a situation where entitlements are high but unequal?)

Richard,

Seasteading is intended in part as a demonstration project -- which means it's meant to convince people who aren't currently libertarians that libertarianism can succeed in practice. This will lead to improvements in democratic countries where voters will demand reform.

Now, we may grant that seasteading's chance of actually succeeding is arbitrarily small. But it seems absurd to suppose that the project is only meant to convince men, or that it's going to come packaged with some super-secret provision to disenfranchise women as well.

I'm sure that ... uh... Feministing gets like a totally representative sample of women, too.

Oh wait, I goofed. You're right on the inference. But I still think the video makes sense, in its own very twisted way.

You could still matter to someone but not matter to God.

The statement doesn't admit any valid inferences about the class of people who DO matter to someone. It's conceivable that no one matters to God, for just one possibility.

Also, (I think) this video seems comprehensible, although I believe it says something I don't agree with: If we were all atheists, then you'd be shot by random kids, because There Is No Morality Without God.

Sorry, but I can't resist... you might have titled the post "The Nine Billion Names of Galt."

"I think [Ross Douthat is] right to imply that a GOP with a weakened libertarian influence would become a more “right-wing populist” party."

Isn't this rather directly reversing cause and effect? Libertarians got fed up and left because the GOP became a right-wing populist party.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't, alas, take them seriously. If an argument enjoys political currency, you have to take it seriously. But this doesn't make it a true argument, and it doesn't mean that "property" doesn't advance our understanding of rights. It just means that we have to be careful about definitions. I'm not sure that either you or Todd Seavey would disagree with this, so I'm actually not sure where you disagree at all.

The contemporary welfare-liberal argument is that redistributive fiscal policy does not violate property rights as long as policy was determined according to certain principles of legitimate democratic procedure. The contemporary environmentalist argument is that reasonable land-use restrictions do not violate property rights because there can be no legitimate right to destroy species or degrade the quality of the environment for future generations.

And theft doesn't violate property rights either, because in the thief's mind, the stuff should be his anyway.

These people don't have an interesting or alternate view of property rights. They have a silly, absurd, or even self-contradictory view of property rights. You're conceding to them a term that they have no business using, just as an astrologer has no business calling himself a scientist.

Your first line of argument presumes that socialized medicine will succeed at delivering what it promises. There are good reasons to believe that it won't, and indeed that it never has. We won't be more free if we are still sick AND if our money is being taken as well.

(Obligatory disclaimer: My comments should not be taken as an endorsement of the current system of the United States, which has huge problems of its own, none of which I think can be solved by socialism.)

I'm not going to presume that you should get married. If you don't want to, then don't.

On the other hand, if you and Kerry consider yourselves to be in a lifelong and devoted relationship, then by all means refer to yourselves as married, even if you have had neither the ceremony nor the permission slip from the state. Marriage by consent has a fine long historical pedigree, even if it's not legally recognized anymore.

And two side notes: First, I had a professor in college, heterosexual and married, who always referred to his wife as his partner. I liked that. Second, I've very often run into trouble using the word "partner," since it's presumed that I mean a business partner. Particularly since in my case it's a man.

I'd make Lenin required reading. He's so awful, people would be turned away from communism forever.

I would ban everything ever written by Naomi Klein, Ayn Rand, John Kerry, Francis Fukuyama, Brad de Long, and John McCain. I'd also ban the Book of Mormon.

Then I'd start hunting down your readers, one IP address at a time....

True, coal will still be around. But there are at least two reasons why it's far less attractive than Salmon seems to think.

First, no one's come up with a decent coal-burning vehicle yet. I'd expect mass commercial sales of a hydrogen car far sooner than a coal car.

Second, both coal and oil require the sorts of infrastructure permanence that many countries in the least developed parts of the world still don't have. If a solar-to-hydrogen-fuel-cell setup becomes economical, this will be far more appealing to the developing world than relying on regular deliveries of fossil fuels every few weeks. Just set up your individual, home-based or village-based power plant, and let it run.

This isn't so fanciful, either. For just the same reason, many people in the developing world never had land-line telephones but went directly to cellular.

Assuming genetics is to blame, it is unfortunate that I will never be one tenth the musician John Coltrane is, but it's isn't unfair. Learning to differentiate the two is... well, I'd say it's part of growing up.

This is not to say that we should never correct any instances of misfortune, but there is a moral difference between the brute facts of nature, which can only be unfortunate, and the deliberate actions of other individuals, which are the only things properly called unfair. Nature doesn't know "fair" and "unfair," which are concepts of justice.

Also, I wonder if the experimental data has anything to do with the remarkable success of anti-egalitarianism in fiction, as compared to anti-egalitarianism as an operating philosophy for the man on the street. Plenty of people read and like Ayn Rand's novels, but can't accept the abstract principles they advocate.

So, basically you are accepting my distinction between an instance of coercion and the harm from coercion.

Yes and no. Certainly, there is a distinction between instance and degree. But I believe that you have changed your argument.

Initially, you claimed that "a higher tax isn't more coercive than a lower one. You're either being coerced or you're not."

It's true -- unquestionably -- that you're either being coerced or you're not. But it's also true that there are degrees of coercion beyond mere "yes" and "no," and that within "yes," less coercion is, well, less coercive than more coercion. A person who uses a lesser degree of coercion is less guilty.

At this point it behooves us to say what we mean by "more" or "less" coercion. The degree of force employed and the degree of harm wrought are two different factors to weigh in assessing the severity of any act of coercion, and this does raise some interesting quesitons when the two are mismatched as in your recent example.

(Incidentally, one promising way to assess the degree of coercion in two or more scenarios, each with a number of imposed alternatives, is simply to ask which set of alternatives would allow me to choose the most favorable result. Between your "a" and "b" above, I might prefer to pay $.45 rather than be kicked in the shin, and thus "b" is the less coercive when these two are compared in isolation. Both, however, are coercive, as they both compel me to disregard my own hierarchy of values in favor of yours.)

But in any case, I don't think that these conundrums have much to do with the original post. Let me try one more time to come up with an example that will express what I mean.

Suppose there are two history books on a shelf. We are told that one book contains thousands of lies, while the other contains only a single, relatively trivial lie. Which book would you rather read? Which one is more truthful? Would you really say that "a book is either honest or it's not," and that the one is "not more dishonest" than the other?

I am saying that the guy with the thicker wallet was robbed of more. This seems self-evidently true.

Suppose someone breaks into my house and steals only a beer from the fridge. Suppose someone else breaks into my neighbor's house and steals everything. We were both robbed, but he was the victim of a greater robbery.

Likewise, someone who pays more in taxes has been coerced out of more. In what way is this not greater coercion?

Incidentally, your alteration to my example regarding tax rates would change things, but it's hardly charitable. When a discussant offers a comparison, it should be assumed that things not mentioned remain equal. The example doesn't "flatly fail" unless it's changed along the way.

Here's another example: I skipped lunch. I'm hungry. But people are also starving to death right now in Burma. Consider one of them. Is he "not more" hungry than I am? If I were to accept that "hunger" is like your "coercion," then I would have to say that he and I were equally "hungry," but this would impair our understanding of the situation to an almost unbelievable degree.

Is there only ever to be "hungry" and "not hungry," without regard to degree? This seems artificial and contrary to ordinary usage not just in politics, but virtually everywhere.

Consider another example: One woman is beautiful. Another woman is not beautiful. A third woman is more beautiful than the first. In the group, there are two "beautiful" women. This doesn't sound weird, does it?

In short, I think what you've found is a Wittgensteinean language game, not a serious problem in philosophy.

Suppose you are taxed once a year. Some people pay a higher rate, some people a lower rate. There is ONE instance of coercion per taxpayer. Just like there is one mugging per victim, regardless of thickness of their wallet. You really want to say that people with the lower rate are coerced less?

Absolutely. I smoke two packs a month. You smoke two packs a day. You're "a smoker," and so am I. But you smoke more. What's so confusing about that? I could give you examples of similar usages all afternoon if I wanted, and this suggests that you've found merely a language game, not a defect in our thinking about coercion.

Now consider two governments: One has a 1% tax rate, while another has a 90% tax rate. Both are "coercive." One is certainly more coercive than the other. We count both the degree of severity and the number of instances, although in asking "How coercive is it?" we have a sliding scale from "not coercive" (zero acts of any magnitude) to "extremely coercive" (at least one act, and all acts considered together are extreme).

Short answer: Tell the guy who pays 100% of his income in taxes that he is no more coerced than the guy who pays 1%. See what he says. Then get back to me.

Long answer: Although binary with regard to presence or absence, coercion isn't a discrete phenomenon.

Once present, coercion is continuous, yet variant in degree. This is why we speak of how coercive an act is, and we measure it as mentioned above (though only intuitively, and relatively) by comparing what we might have done without the coercive act, and what we did do in its presence. "Not at all coercive" is a possibility, but so are varying degrees of coercive.

Therefore I may be either "coerced" or "not" -- the latter being the case only if I paid 0% in taxes -- but this set of classifications (are or are not, and then how much) is not unusual. There are plenty of other phenomena that admit both of a binary distinction and also of differences in degree:

You're either a smoker or not, but some smoke two packs a day, while others only smoke that much in a week.

You're either religious or not, but some believers go to church every day, and tithe, and so forth, and others don't.

A painting may be aesthetically pleasing or not, but some are more pleasing than others.

You're either pregnant or not, but there is a difference between nine months and one.

Many examples could be added. Where exactly is the trouble?

Why should people have preferences about the distribution of wealth in a society? I suspect that when they are asked to declare a preference among these different graphs, they may imagine themselves making a choice about which society they will find themselves randomly placed into -- from behind a Rawlsean veil of ignorance.

By that standard, E is also the clear winner, but before making my choice, I'd like to know more about the absolute wealth of each society, and also how big an increment we have from one bracket to the next, and whether that increment was standard. I could easily imagine favoring distribution A if for example the lowest bracket was $1,000,000 per year. I might likewise find A untroubling if the differences between the brackets were trivial and if the overall standard of living were still high.

But then... the original question still stands: Why ARE we arguing about the justice of patterned distributions? What are the processes that get us to each of them?