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u/ergopraxis · 1 pointr/badpolitics

Well, if you want help with any of it, I am happy to discuss it in some more detail. I am aware that some of the things I mentioned (especially the conservation of liberty hypothesis) are not easilly understood when stated this abstractly. If you want any help finding anything, I can point you to resources.

That being said, the distinction you made is not between negative and positive rights, neither is it between negative and positive liberty. It is the distinction between formal and effective negative liberty, which is also a credible distinction used by some philosophers (especially P.Van Parijs, who argues that liberty should be made effective in his Real Freedom For All).

This distinction was first made by I.Berlin himself. We have noticed that negative liberty consists in the absence of interference (I am unfree to X if I a) Can't X b) because someone else or some group of people stop me. Conversely I am free to X if and only if no one makes it physically impossible for me to X). The point here is this: Unfreedom is a special kind of social inability, inability caused by others. That's because freedom is a social relationship. Freedom is not my capacity to access an alternative. It's my relationship with others with reference to that alternative (it has to do with how others influence my capacity to access it). This means that there are two kinds of factors that can restrict my access to an alternative: agent-reducible / social / political factors (interference) and agent-irreducible factors (strong passions, disabilities, natural obstacles) and only the first interpersonal obstacles restrict my freedom.

Two notes can be made on this: While I might be free to X because there are no interpersonal obstacles to my doing so, I might nevertheless still be unable to X for other reasons that aren't agent-reducible (for example: I might be free to run a marathon in the sense that no one is disposed to stop me, but nevertheless illness may have confined me to my bedroom so that I am unable to run in it, regardless). The second observation follows from the first: I might be free to do something (due to the absence of man-made obstacles) but I might still be unable to do the same thing for other reasons (due to the presence of other non-man-made obstacles), or in the phrasing of I.Berlin, I might be free to X even though I can't excercise that freedom.

What Berlin noticed immediately after observing this is that a liberty that can't be excercised has no value or worth for the person that has it. In this way of putting it, to lack the conditions for the excercise of your freedom, even when you are free, makes that freedom worthless to you. A concern for the value of freedom would imply that we not only have to ensure people are free, but that they can also excercise their freedom. In other words, someone concerned with the value of freedom (someone concerned with effective freedom) would want to remove both agent-reducible / social (such as interference) and agent-irreducible / asocial (such as natural or internal) obstacles to an alternative.

My point above was not to deny this particular distinction is meaningful but in particular to show a) that the naive distinction between "freedom from" and "freedom to" is incoherent, b) that the distinction between negative and positive liberty shouldn't be conflated with that between negative and positive rights, c) that the distinction between effective and formal negative liberty should not be conflated with the distinction between positive and negative liberty and d) that the absence of material means, relative poverty, doesn't render someone's existing freedom to use those objects ineffective (non-excerciseable) and therefore worthless to them, but it directly restricts their formal negative liberty (because private ownership is also a social relationship, and therefore one's inability to use things owned by others is owed to human interference. People stop them. They aren't merely unable to use these objects due to agent-irreducible factors, they are unfree to use them due to the interference of others).

u/Snugglerific · 15 pointsr/badpolitics

This sort of "analysis" really plagues political charts regardless of ideology in that it takes rhetoric and propaganda at face value and lacks any historical perspective, taking ideologies in a vacuum. Here, the way liberty is defined is completely loaded to make libertarians appear the most in favor of "liberty," whereas that concept of liberty seems to me to be complete subjugation to the whims of business interests with a few frills thrown in (4/20blazeit!).

If we look at the history of right-libertarianism, it becomes clear why it is generally called right-wing as opposed to the anarchist and socialist tendencies of left-libertarianism. In Europe, it is more valid to say that libertarians would not fit into the definition of conventional conservatism in that European conservatism has had monarchist streaks and, since von Bismarck, an element of welfare statism. It is in this sense that Hayek wrote his essay "Why I Am Not a Conservative." However, libertarianism is not as much of a presence in Europe with parties and people sharing this ideology calling themselves liberals. In fact, Hayek does this as well, stating:

>I will nevertheless continue for the moment to describe as liberal the position which I hold and which I believe differs as much from true conservatism as from socialism.

In the US, liberalism obviously changed meaning and conservatism lost its monarchist connotations with the American Revolution's basis in the ideology of republicanism. Hayek perceptively remarks on this:

>Conservatism proper is a legitimate, probably necessary, and certainly widespread attitude of opposition to drastic change. It has, since the French Revolution, for a century and a half played an important role in European politics. Until the rise of socialism its
opposite was liberalism. There is nothing corresponding to this conflict in the history of the United States, because what in Europe was called "liberalism" was here the common tradition on which the American polity had been built: thus the defender of the American
tradition was a liberal in the European sense.

In this way, liberalism became the "status quo" of American politics. Fast forward to the 20th century and the beginnings of the right-libertarian movement proper. Libertarianism in this sense developed largely in reaction to the New Deal. Libertarianism was initially seeded in the post-war era by the William Volker Fund, which paid and disseminated the writings of liberals such as Hayek, von Mises, and Aaron Director.

Over time, a fleet of libertarian and conservative think tanks were nurtured by business interests -- there is too much to cover here but Kim-Phillips Fein's book Invisible Hands does so in detail. The Libertarian Party itself was notoriously built with the backing of the Koch brothers, as was the Cato Institute, probably the most famous libertarian think tank.

This ended up leading to a split within the movement, with Koch-funded projects being derisively referred to as the "Kochtopus." However, these critics, as opposed to the urbane "Beltway libertarians," were generally even farther to the right, being anarcho-capitalists, or paleolibertarians. Paleolibertarianism carries a heavy element of social conservatism. As defined by Lew Rockwell:

>Paleolibertarianism holds with Lord Acton that liberty is the highest political end of man, and that all forms of government intervention–economic, cultural, social, international–amount to an attack on prosperity, morals, and bourgeois civilization itself, and thus must be opposed at all levels and without compromise. It is “paleo” because of its genesis in the work of Murray N. Rothbard and his predecessors, including Ludwig von Mises, Albert Jay Nock, Garet Garrett, and the entire interwar Old Right that opposed the New Deal and favored the Old Republic of property rights, freedom of association, and radical political decentralization. Just as important, paleolibertarianism predates the politicization of libertarianism that began in the 1980s, when large institutions moved to Washington and began to use the language of liberty as part of a grab bag of "policy options." Instead of principle, the neo-libertarians give us political alliances; instead of intellectually robust ideas, they give us marketable platitudes. What's more, paleolibertarianism distinguishes itself from left-libertarianism because it has made its peace with religion as the bedrock of liberty, property, and the natural order.

http://www.fact-index.com/p/pa/paleolibertarianism.html

Socially conservative elements of paleolibertarianism have attracted various other right-wing causes, such as neo-confederacy, white supremacy, and dominionism (see e.g., RJ Rushdoony).

In sum then, American right-libertarianism represents the appropriation of classical liberal rhetoric by business interests to attack New Deal welfare statism. Social liberalism has generally taken a back seat, or is rejected outright by paleolibertarians. Libertarianism today is merely a concentrated form of hegemonic neo-liberal ideology and does not challenge it in any substantial way. This is why right-libertarianism is called as such and does not "transcend" the left-right spectrum in any way.

u/Edgy_Atheist · 15 pointsr/badpolitics

Per Nisbet and Deneen, it does logically follow that a hyper-liberal view of immigration (it is immoral to bar people from moving across states, open-borders), would require an expansion of the state to uphold order and replace the stability and social trust original communities had a priori the effective dissolution of them via widespread immigration. Individualism and the state march hand in hand.

But this political compass is fucking absurd, on that I think we can all agree.

u/cptjeff · 4 pointsr/badpolitics

> Is the psychology of moral values a legit way to tell the Left and the Right apart, or are those terms really just applicable to economics?

Short answer? Yes, the psychologically of moral values can fairly reliably predict left/right orientation. You may want to read this.

u/[deleted] · 1 pointr/badpolitics

F. Copleston was a great read from my philosophy classes 20 years ago.

Amazon Link

u/obenjab · -2 pointsr/badpolitics

Very easy to read & follow kindle is only $5. 5 star reviews


The Five Thousand Year Leap
Verity Publishing https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00F3MXKKW/ref=cm_sw_r_sms_awdb_t1_mViaBbPYFAGAY

u/selfhatingyank · 6 pointsr/badpolitics

R2: True politics is angsty. [Tropes warning] There are plenty of conservative pessimists and progressive optimists, and the diagonal "axis" seems to be pure shade-throwing, not actual criticism.

u/The_Old_Gentleman · 5 pointsr/badpolitics

>Magic/Communal sharing

Yes, because it's not like Mutualism exists, it's not like anarcho-communists and Marxists have not discussed different ways to organize the economy (directly social labor, worker's self-management, organized gift economy, federalism; those concepts literally don't exist) and no economy that wasn't Capitalist that wasn't "communal sharing" (however they picture it) has ever existed. The only other option is "Magic"

Also need i point out that "anarcho-socialism" is a redundancy?

>Tragedy of the Commons

Everytime i read an AnCap mention the tragedy of the commons on any context i feel the urge to beat an Elinor Ostrom book against my head in frustration. Do they honestly think this field was never developed beyond Hardin's paper? Do they even know what were Hardin's assumptions? Of course not, that would require reading this stuff.

u/fourcrew · 15 pointsr/badpolitics

There's also this follow-up. I'll repost the comment I wrote on /r/fantanoforever.

>Political discourse in the 21st century: regurgitating existing American political narratives on YouTube. I mean, not to be a total apologist for vulgar Internet Marxists, but if you're going to be highly critical of Marxism, please take Anthony's own advice and read a book instead of speaking in discourses that only really reveal a profound lack of understanding of the subject. Kolakowski, I hear, is profoundly revealing here.

>>Read a book man, a book Marx wrote, not by anyone else

>Well that's not fair Anthony, Marxists are rather partial to Engels, Luxemberg, (if they're a tankie) Lenin, and others. If they are non-orthodox, you might also see some Debord, Lukacs, Adorno, Althusser, Jameson, Zizek, and others.

u/frsp · -12 pointsr/badpolitics

It's widely considered to be right-wing by academics because it's the most embarrassing non-Stalin-related moment in the history of leftist thought. It's damage control. Mussolini was ex-Socialist, Mosley was ex-Labour, Hitler rants and raves about his hatred for the Habsburgs and their multiethnic cosmopolitan empire in Mein Kampf, FDR praised Mussolini, pretty much all progressives were fawning over totalitarianism and eugenics. "Eugenics and Other Evils" was written by a conservative Catholic, not a progressive. I would trust Oswald Mosley's opinion on what his on movement is sooner than the opinion of academics trying to shoehorn fascism into the right that it never belonged to for any reasons beyond convenience.

This is the best book on the subject by far. Every single claim is documented with over one hundred pages of thousands of endnotes.