DISQUS

Will Wilkinson I'd think so. I've always wondered why property-focused natural rights-type libertarians don't act like this is more of a serious problem for them.

Who dat? "Given that personal property rights are all parasitic on the laws of states"

Personal property rights, in the form of owning one's own body, owning the food which one gathered, owning tools, owning a dwelling, owning a cornfield, owning a fishing weir or hunting stand, etc., existed for millenia before any state existed. It is the state which lives parasitically off of personal property rights, not the other way around.

Mind you, those who live in the belly of the state will tell you with a straight face that you owe everything them. It is not good for the business of being a parasite, to let one's true occupation be known.

Lemon Michael Ignatieff was really only a public intellectual when he was living in England or the U.S. He has since returned to Canada and is now the leading candidate for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada - abandoning his intellectualism and his intellectual honesty in the process.

Will Wilkinson Look here! http://www.infoplease.com/spot/topintellectuals...

Luis Bingo. There are lots of issues with Rawls, but Rawls isn't saying here 'for any given desirable position, everyone on earth must have the same exact opportunity to obtain that one given desirable position'; he's saying 'everyone should have similar opportunities to reach similarly desirable ends.' Both Robert and Sudeep have had the ability to achieve desirable ends and have done so; Rawls (in that example) would seemingly be satisfied.

Now, you've still got a point that this is unattainable in practice (Anne and Betty will always have some differentiation as a result of network and just plain luck) but it doesn't seem like a bad goal to be striven for within reasonable constraints.

Will Wilkinson Matt, It's been awhile since I read Gray on Hayek, so I'll have to revisit it and get back to you.

And by the way, I'm cartooning my own book idea, which is largely about the new sentimentalist literature in moral psychology and what it tells us about what is distinctive in liberal moral personality and moral culture. The stuff about globalism and mobility is meant to reinforce how the liberal taste for fairness, equality, and a distaste for coalitional exclusion has a lot of room to grow.

Will Wilkinson Matt, I agree that the kind of social cooperation we want often needs political cooperation to enable to production of public goods that facilitate social cooperation. And I agree the jurisdictions for public goods need to be geographically bounded. And I agree that in order for the administrative authorities to provide the goods (that justify their existence ) in their jurisdictions, they may need to regulate entry into the jurisdiction. So far, we're more or less on the same page. But I find the idea that a basic (but like most rights defeasible under certain conditions) human right to move over the Earth is not necessary for the minimal respect each person is due very hard to swallow. Indeed, I think mobility rights create a check on state power that helps ensure that people within states have other their rights respected in addition to helping ensure people have a decent material minimum. That is, mobility rights are necessary for other economic and political rights to have fair value. So here's our debate.

That's me putting it into quasi-Rawlsian language. But I think a lot of our disagreement will have to do with the difference between my (to you probably deflationary) conception of states as monopoly providers of certain necessary public goods, and what I take to be your more Rawlsian sense of states as sites of democratic activity and democratic activity as important to human dignity in a way that completely eludes me.

I'm working on a book proposal about the psychology and authority of liberal moral sensibilities, and after arguing that conservatives really are more or less backwards, I intend to argue that liberalism really does requires a kind of Mises-Hayek kind of global federalism, and that contemporary welfare state liberals and social democrats are illiberal (standing athwart history yelling stop) insofar as they stand in the way of this. So this is a debate I really appreciate having. (As opposed to the debate with a lot of conservatives, who generally don't see the need to justify the exclusion.) I look forward to these papers and your dissertation. Thanks again for all the helpful pointers.