The fundamental thing about freedom is that some people will use it for stuff you don’t like.
Also,
I think left-of-center people should reclaim the mantle of free speech, and specifically, I think they shouldn’t cheer on the virtual marginalization of anyone nonviolent, including their ideological opponents.
Read the whole post. Matt is good, but the way I see it Marc the Intern is definitely better. I will miss him.
That kid has a bright future.
Definite FIT material.
I agree. Marc’s farewell column is very good.
the appeal of a career writing, researching, or editing in intra-liberal politics was greatly advanced by this awesome experience.
Bleh. He seems like a smart lad. I would advise him to aim a little higher than becoming another Matt Yglesias. The marginal benefit of another scribbler talking mainly to people on his side of the aisle is, at least in my opinion, rather low, even if he happens to be good at it.
The kid has no future at all if he doesn’t get his mind right. And all of you know it.
I had a friend in my social circle that decided to devote his youth and energy to congressional republican causes. I felt like he was too good for something like that and it was a waste. Maybe the fact that I felt that way says bad things for the future of the republic, but I couldn’t help thinking he was tossing away a very promising future on some nonsense he wouldn’t look back on fondly at 40.
This is an impressive young man.
I wonder if Marc has heard of libertarianism. This post could have been written by a libertarian.
I skimmed Marc Novicoff’s four favorite articles that he highlights, and a few quotes of what he advocates:
“Universal health insurance is a winning fight worth having.
Affordable healthcare for all is the progressive message that works everywhere”
“Centralize everything. All welfare programs should be administered at the federal level”
“We should raise the minimum wage. We should cancel some student debt. We should give more money to poor people (baby bonds are just one way of doing this). We should help small businesses during a pandemic.”
“If a welfare-cutting libertarian is in office with popular support (like Reagan), and you care about programs that cut poverty, you should try to save whatever programs you can before the libertarian guy cuts it.”
This isn’t libertarian at all.
So much for him being libertarian. Nonetheless, it’s true that his farewell column was quite libertarian. Perhaps he’s a “liberaltarian”.
One of his recent articles also praises Yang for continued focus on increasing no strings attached cash transfer welfare.
I don’t trust the reasoning of anyone who lived through the last year and a half and still has some fondness for things like UBI. Even with limited conditional increases in cash transfers, there are millions of Americans who are voluntarily unemployed.
“The fundamental thing about freedom is that some people will use it for stuff you don’t like” was soon followed by: “I realize this brings up a common sort of paradox where I want strong enforcement of the rules I like and weak enforcement of the ones I don’t, but this is just how it is.”
Is he getting points for being self aware? It’s not a pro-freedom position but rather political rhetoric that takes advantage of the fact that Americans love the concept of freedom. People who are pro-abortion argue in terms of choice and freedom, but not a few of them would be happily to curtail freedom in other areas (guns, speech, religion, etc).
He is getting points for recognizing that everyone (including self-described freedom loving libertarians) wants exactly as much government coercion as they think is optimal for their understanding of what freedom means, while viewing more than that as an undesirable infringement on freedom. THAT is the paradox.
No points should be given for simply claiming you love freedom more than your ideological opponents. Everyone needs to justify the policies they support on a case by case basis.
I don’t think there’s anything paradoxical about this. If there is, it’s an artifact of deceptive rhetoric, e.g., trying to argue that limitations on freedom are “true freedom” or on democracy are “true democracy.” But the honest way of stating this is that people optimize for multiple variables, e.g. freedom, democracy, equality. Libertarians weight freedom a great deal. Progressives weight equality more. Maybe democracy too. Each variable often comes at the expense of others. Each of us doesn’t have ‘our own unique understanding of freedom.’ Ancaps are more pro-freedom than me. I acknowledge that. I think that’s probably too much freedom. I feel know need to redefine mandatory contribution to law enforcement as somehow truer freedom.’ I’d appreciate it if people who supported coercive laws similarly accept that they are coercive and not some higher freedom (ditto with other abstract principles).
That said, no one makes judgments on a fully case by case basis. There are doubtless identifiable phrases that outlawing would be utility-increasing, but I’d oppose doing so because it wouldn’t be worth the erosion of the general taboo on outlawing speech. So too for equality and freedom. We often tolerate obvious first order suboptimalities in deference to abstract principles, and I think it is often wise that we do so.
Good point Mark about a plural number of often conflicting values being at play and good point also about important trade offs between consequentialist and deontological effects. Also kudos for trying to stay within current conventional definitions on the relevant terms rather than simply redefining them in a way that is convenient for your argument as many people do on these issues.
I do want to point out that a respect for conventional definitions cuts both ways here. You neglect to discuss important issues regarding positive versus negative rights. An-caps only recognize negative rights as legitimate. They are a tiny minority of the total population (and self identifed libertarians as well) in that regard. Most people think that having freedom not only involves an absence of excessive government constraint but also the presence of some meaningful choices to make. That is why the founders considered a goal to “promote the general welfare” such a foundational role of government that they mentioned it in the very first sentence of the Constitution, much to the dismay of an-caps.
I tend to agree with the negative rights definition of political freedom, because with positive rights, one person’s right’s are necessarily someone else’s coercion, and a half of the equation that is by definition written off in this terminology. I think it makes more sense to discuss things like welfare without employing the concept of rights. I am biased of course being a libertarian, but I think Americans’ deviation from classical libertarian conception of rights is more often the exception than the rule (e.g., if you have a whole pizza you have an obligation to share a slice with a starving man, but the idea of a UBI remains unpopular).