What I don’t understand about your point moralist is how you connect personal irresponsibility to this. Who are you even comparing the people of today to?
We could be living in the most responsible era known to mankind and removing entrenched government institutions would still be difficult.
Lets also consider that physical violence is at an all time low. Racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination are on decline. In many ways we are doing a lot better than anyone before.
What is the disagreement?
You don’t regard 60% behavior of a group as epidemic… and I do.
So asking you to show how a constant 60% perfectly tracks an upward curve of spending (which you implicitly assign to bureaucracy) is disagreeing that 60% behavior of a group is epidemic?
Really? Then account for “nasty, brutish and short”
I don’t know what you mean by “account for” this phrase.
Again, the question is whether or not we accurately protray historical philosopher’s works, or if we embarrass ourselves by repeating mythological versions of them.
I don’t know what you mean by “account for” this phrase.
Again, the question is whether or not we accurately protray historical philosopher’s works, or if we embarrass ourselves by repeating mythological versions of them.
I quoted directly from Hobbes. Hobbes saw the natural state of man living without any law or authority as leading to brutality and making industry and culture above mere survival impossible. He advocated the State precisely to control the violence and to give some safety to the possession of property.
I quoted directly from Hobbes. Hobbes saw the natural state of man living without any law or authority as leading to brutality and making industry and culture above mere survival impossible. He advocated the State precisely to control the violence and to give some safety to the possession of property.
Well again, I already posted in a different thread about a few of my disagreements with Hobbes’ politics. I don’t think his arguments are successful. Austrians, and in particular Mises, emphasizes the fact that men cooperate because they are able to recognize that production under division of labor is more productive than self-sufficient isolation. Imagine just that we would withdraw from division of labor, and you would immediately recognize that we would be desperately poor and most of mankind would immediately die out. So nothing more than self-interest, even in a narrow sense of prefering more over less, is necessary to explain social cooperation.
Sure, Hobbes advocated the state to control violence among the subject population, since without a state, men are like two wolves preying on each other. Hobbes assumes that, because of innate depravity (Hobbes uses the Latin phrase Homo homini lupus est) people would be permanently at each others throats if it were not for some independent third party, that is the State of course, to make peace among them. Well this is certainly very curious. People are assumed to be bad wolves, and they can be turned into sheep if another third wolf is made to rule above them. If this third party is also a wolf, as he must be since he is also a human, then even if he can make peace between two individuals, this obviously implies that there would be a permanent war between the ruling wolf and the two wolves that are now peacefully cooperating with each other like sheep.