Shikha Dalmia’s Three-Axis Model

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She writes,

The central political problem for conservatives is maintaining virtue; for liberals equality; and for libertarians liberty — or avoiding government tyranny.

She argues against Tyler Cowen’s view that a culture that encourages individual gun ownership goes along with a culture of military adventurism. One point that she could have made is that many of our military adventures have been launched under Democratic Administrations, and those also tend to support gun control.

6 thoughts on “Shikha Dalmia’s Three-Axis Model”

  1. Go to youtube and peruse some of the “gun community” videos. I’d suppose less than half comprise what I understand TC to mean by “martial” culture. Maybe it is hard for people who don’t know the difference. I also don’t see the causality.

    • I think Tyler Cowen might be better served if he asked these things or hypothesized them rather than stating them as fact. Isn’t that what he has a tendency to do anyway?

  2. Didn’t realize the individual gun culture disappears when Democrats are elected. I wonder what the individual gun culture is like in Russia. Past powers seemed to have plenty of military adventurism without much of an individual gun culture, beyond duels anyway.

    • The correct snark would be that the gun culture flourishes under democrats, but you are correct that individual gun culture (a bit oxymoronic?) seems at least orthoganal to state,interventions.

  3. I think Dalmia’s three goals, or dreams, are where the emotional power of any of the three views come from: virtue, equality, liberty.

    Dreams of my father? My own dreams? My partner’s dreams?

    Only the middle one, equality, requires magic. Virtue is what good people choose to do — and all could, in theory, choose to be virtuous. Liberty is what a good gov’t would allow its citizens, and all gov’t could, in theory, choose to grant liberty.

    Nobody and no system can make the ugly equal to the pretty, the old equal to the young, nor the dumb equal to the smart. It’s a terrible goal. Equal opportunity is great, equality under the law is great (but not really working in the US as much as is optimal), but “equality” as in equal outcome is a certain failure.

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