DISQUS

Could you be converging on a new area of liberaltarian philosophy?

I sell peanuts in the grandstand.

In order of status: memorabilia guy< peanut guy < soda guy < hot dog guy < beer guy.

Why must you attempt to satirize the denizens of Utah? If their happiness doesn't accord with your theory of liberal values as the best possible moral disposition set for mankind, then accept that. Move on.

Your intolerance in this regard is striking. Such satire may bring solidarity to you and like-minded souls. But your satire is self-congratulatory...instead I suggest you try to persuade those moms in Utah, tell them of their false consciousness. See if they listen. Write comments on their blogs. Set up lectures in Salt Lake City. Show them that their lives are wasted, but show them in person. Say it to their face. The so called culture wars are won on the battle field. Otherwise you come across as a plaintive, whining elitist, a literary gentleman with a seat in the grandstands, unwilling to enter the fray below.

Nevermind that there's some time lag here. The depression started over a decade before WWII.

Ross sounds like a loser talking about cliques in a high school. Sez the bloated Harvard grad: If the libertarians start to hang out with the jocks, they'll be swallowed whole. No ripples in any of the cheerleader's skirts. But ah, if they stay at our table--the Young Life table--ticket sales won't be as high at prom, which means less money for next week's pep rally. Who gives a bull shittake?

No one but Atlantic writers think this way. There's no such thing as smart Republican populism.

WIll, I wonder what you'd think of "Rational Progressivism"? I came across this concept in an essay by Nate Silver of 538.com. If this be liberalism, then liberaltarianism may have a chance, I think. Check it out:

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/02/two-prog...

In fairness to the Stoics, who first espoused the principle, living according to Nature was the equivalent of living according to Reason. Like intelligent design theorists, the stoics believed that Reason pervaded the universe. A transcendent order that all earthly forms yearned to align with or mimic. Hints of Plato should be obvious.

Indeed our high discount rate impulses were thought to be abnormal and contrary to reason and therefore nature.

This way of viewing things--besides being based on dubious metaphysics--never really offended anyone until homophobics grasped onto natural rights theories and used them as a cudgel to beat down unconventional sentiments.

BTW, have you heard the latest Econ Talk with Richard Epstein? HIghly recommended, especially given your interests.

F$%K!

Test

Looks good!

As an aside, my photo essay on digitally driven architecture can be found here:

https://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19869/

By the buildings I chose to profile, you'll see have no quarrel with moderism.

I simply thought the analogy between classical liberal thinking and modernist design strained. However, you could have kept your best line and analogy and still made you strongest point: nationalist conservatism feels just like the musty lion hunting club you describe. But clearly there are more styles than the modernist or that of a Rush Limbaugh inspired Jumanji Den?

Given what you've described as your reasons for supporting classical liberalism, I would think Louis Sullivan's famous dicta about the skyscaper--that form ever follows function--would serve you quite nicely.

And incidentally, I am a Rawlsian libertarian just like yourself.

Awful analogy. Not that I have anything against Modernist design and architecture, aesthetically. But politically, the International Style and the Modernist movement in architecture deliberately grew out of a socialist programme. See Gropius's writings. For an amusing history, I recommend Wolfe's Our House To Bauhaus.

In effect, these artistic movements were anti-Hayekian: if some ornament could not be justified, then it was condemned as "bourgeois", and eliminated. But the truth is that many older styles developed from the accumulation of knowledge across time and from disparate sources--mainly through an invisible hand process.

The International Style is rationalist in the strictest Hayekian sense.

The term "basic structure" has always seemed to be excessively vague and almost without a referent. If by laws and norms, Rawls means basic structure, then the Rawlsians ought to show some parsimony and simply say "laws and norms".

Question: Gregory Clark has made a big splash lately suggesting that "labor quality" was the key factor in bringing about the industrial revolution. Clark even suggests this quality could be a genetic factor. Would Rawlsians say that "labor quality" is part of the basic structure?

If anything makes the worst off better than they otherwise would be under different arrangements, is that something thereby deemed to be part of the "basic structure"?

Your post reminded me of a wonderful bit, though one perhaps a little overstated by Aldous Huxley from his introduction to a later edition of A Brave New World. He wrote:

The most important Manhatten Projects of the future will be vast government sponsored enquiries into what the politicians and participating scientists will call "The Problem of Happiness"--in other words, the problem of making people love their servitude.

On Rawls's Desert Argument and picking up on your point about its scortched earth power, consider the following. No one deserves their genetic endowment. If no one deserves their genetic endowment, then no one deserves what flows from it. One product that flows from genetic endowment is good philosophy, and thus the true theory of justice. This theory commands a certain patterned distribution of goods. But since this flows from what's arbitrary from a moral point of view, we don't deserve it. Since we don't deserve the theory of justice, we don't deserve what flows from it. Therefore, we should not base any distribution on the theory.

Your first paragraph crackles with truth about academic philosophy. On another note, I want to emphasize something that may not seem coherent at first: markets are more intelligent than any one person. Part of that intelligence involves apportioning desert. So it could be the case that even though we can find no reason why any one particular person deserves the level of wealth they have earned, there is in fact one opaque to our single mind. Consider one such hypothesis. Call it Wilt Chamberlain Reloaded. Everyone, including myself, has found the salaries sports figures earn to be astronomical. How could anyone deserve to make THAT much money playing a children's game? Yes, but are they only playing a children's game? A year or so ago, I re-read William James' essay "The Moral Equivalent of War" and what struck me was that something that channeled these instinctual excitements over violence, action, risk taking and inter-group competition might be valuable in society. If as james supposed, they allowed for a release of potentially violent atavistic energies in a peaceful way, thus promoting stability and community, then those who performed this service exceptionally may deserve giant rewards. This is, of course, an empirical hypothesis. Do professional sports promote stability in a country?