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Mikee

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Posts posted by Mikee

  3. Income Inequality

    in The Objectivism Meta-Blog Discussion

    Posted · Edited by Mikee

    the argument by supporters of this idea is that income inequality can lead to social instability. Particularly income disparity is socially destabilizing and often this phenomenon is attributed to the disappearance of the middle class in the United States. Other examples that supporters point to is the current economies of most central and south american countries with large income inequality gap.

  8. Critique of voluntary taxation

    in Political Philosophy

    Posted

    Also, in the case of police and/or courts, there are a few other ways to fund them, too. Without going into the merits (just for the sake of raising other alternatives), you could set up a system where someone is charged after the fact for making use of a service. It goes against most current conceptions of police being "free", but we all know that's not true anyway. I.e. the police will show up regardless, but then (part of) the cost will be billed to the person who benefited from their response. For certain other services that are more preventative in nature, one could imagine making these conditional upon sufficient funding; if you want them to patrol regularly in your neighborhood, donate more. Yes, some people would probably be in the position that they couldn't afford to pay, but this would probably be a minority (and you can compensate for that in other ways, maybe charge everyone cost + 10% to account for missed payments).

    My concern: practically speaking, the police function, by its nature, requires rapid response. There is no time to verify whether or not a citizen has paid for this or that program of protection. Also, it is to my self-interest to have all citizens covered by the police, since uncovered citizens would become a source of social violence, either as victims of criminals, thus increasing criminality, or criminals themselves, out of a need for self-defense.

  10. My Social Contract Debate

    in Political Philosophy

    Posted

    Yes it is an anti-concept. It is a legitimate but inexact and failed attempt to name the tacit agreement that underlies a society, but which is better known as the trader principle. The technically redundant emphasis on the social aspect is meant to deceive the listener into accepting agreement with a collectivist counter-party to the contract, instead of understanding it as an agreement of man to man. The social contract then becomes a package deal of measures (conscription, taxes, speech and thought crimes, innumerable petty economic regulations) contradicting the motive to enter into the contract in the first place.

    [playing DA]

    Your logic falls apart when you say “agreement with a collectivist counter-party”. Any individual in the U.S. is one person, the rest of us is the collective “us”. 99% of the activity that person engages in affects the collective us (how many in the collective us specifically depends on each act). That package deal is amorphous and changes with time, as it should, as society changes over time. Your point about “contradicting the motive to enter into” is specious. All contracts have punitive clauses–even the tacit ones–that contradict the motive for entering into. The motive for ALL contracts entered into freely is mutual benefit. If someone feels that they receive NO benefits whatsoever from the tacit contract they live under in the U.S., that person has the choice of 1) changing it, 2) leaving or 3) accepting it.

  11. The Latest from Sam Harris

    in Intellectuals and the Media

    Posted

    this sounds rather rawlsian:

    ‎

    Many of us have been extraordinarily lucky—and we did not earn it. Many good people have been extraordinarily unlucky—and they did not deserve it. And yet I get the distinct sense that if I asked some of my readers why they weren’t born with club feet, or orphaned before the age of five, they would not hesitate to take credit for these accomplishments. There is a stunning lack of insight into the unfolding of human events that passes for moral and economic wisdom in some circles. And it is pernicious. Followers of Rand, in particular, believe that only a blind reliance on market forces and the narrowest conception of self interest can steer us collectively toward the best civilization possible and that any attempt to impose wisdom or compassion from the top—no matter who is at the top and no matter what the need—is necessarily corrupting of the whole enterprise. This conviction is, at the very least, unproven. And there are many reasons to believe that it is dangerously wrong.

  16. Public Education

    in Political Philosophy

    Posted

    I will attempt to play devil's advocate so here goes:

    There are good public school teachers. My son has had some fine public school teachers, although he is now in a private school. There ARE totally incompetent parents out there, and it'd be a shame if their kids were just left to fend for themselves. Thus public education is necessary

  17. Conservative Critique of Rand

    in Political Philosophy

    Posted

    Objectivism claims collective entities such as countries, religions and cultures are epistemological and denies they are ontological. It does not deny they exist at all. Because they are epistemological, they cannot be considered ends in themselves and are in no way above individuals. Objectivism broadly denies any form of metaphysical hierarchy, not just that social constructs are more real than the people comprising them. The hierarchy that Objectivism acknowledges and explores is epistemological hierarchy.

    There actually are people who think as Lawrence Auster describes. The real social atomists are the anarchists. Objectivism opposes anarchism.

    The more fully developed argument behind what was linked in the OP is developed here: The Myth of Social Atomism. Note that rightists and leftists both argue in favor of collectivism in similar fashion.

    how are anarchists atomists?

  20. I feel most ethical discussions of abortion are flawed

    in Ethics

    Posted

    "The case for abortion rests on when the fetus obtains rights. Individual rights. I've personally heard arguments from Andrew Bernstein on this matter which in summary state that in order to properly place individual rights onto a fetus, that fetus would have to have reached a point in their development where they’ve achieved individuation as an organism sufficient enough that it could survive independently of its host organism i.e., the mother. The weakness in Bernstein’s argument is that you could have fetus’s that’ve developed conscious faculties being aborted at 8 and 9 months. Babies who could well be able to survive outside of the mother as human beings. In other words his argument is a good one but is flawed in that he bases rights on the event of physical individuation and negates the fact that a conscious being is being terminated."

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