With Anastasia Uglova of Cato, talking about the intellectual crisis in libertarianism. If you have trouble at that link (the page should look almost blank, just click on the play button), go through this page, or the archives.
Short podcast of me
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Is positive liberty anything other than the enabling effects of increased wealth? Isn’t every other form of liberty really negative liberty?
I loved the podcast. On the positive and negative thing, I have always seen Libertarianism as an inherently positive belief. The individual is free to do all of these positive things! The negative issue comes up when defining the extent to which the government needs to limit the vast positive space of liberty.
I also liked your emphasis on the fact that humans really are geared for smaller groups. People like to support big government as it fits in with their concept of how people behave in a small tribe.
The counter to big government one should emphasize that liberty allows people to pursue their own individual altruistic impulses. Most people I no start doing good things for the people in their community when they accumulate enough resources to act.
It would look like a fight over whose whim should rule, and exactly what form the whip would take.
I feel pretty certain that nobody characterizes his own argument that way. If I’m wrong, I’d appreciate the link. If I’m right, I’d note that there are any number of witticisms about libertarianism being merely cover for selfish behavior by those at the top of the food chain fighting to make sure that they continue to wield the whip.
I agree with Professor Daniel Klein about the definition of ‘positive’ liberty as meaningless. Sure, it’s important to have something to do with my liberty. But whatever I could do with my liberty presuposes that I have my ‘negative’ liberty guaranteed.
But I understand, at least I think, the point that Tyler wanted to make. If we have a level Z of regulations, this diminishes our choices on X. But if we became richer, then we’ll have more choices and the regulations will restrict less our liberty.
The problem is that some regulations doesn’t have this kind of effect. Actually, they define too little and open a door to government defines how some sector will work.
I’ll appreciate a lot to read what Professor Cowen thinks about Hayek’s aproach to Public Sector, made in his book “Law, Legislation and Liberty”,
To the anti-positive liberty commenters, I would point out that there is no way to meaningfully create negative liberty without simply presuming what it amounts to. G A Cohen makes this point rather clearly in “Freedom and Money”: positive liberty is the ability to not be interfered with in acquiring wealth or action. You can’t meaningfully place a right of shopowners to coerce, say, shoplifters without some real thesis on why the shoplifter doesn’t have priority with respect to the goods taken. Rather, it is presumed that the shopowner has that right and the shoplifter does not. One reason that Prof. Cowen is correct in saying we need to judge policy based on how many degrees of freedom it allows us is simply that it is difficult to meaningfully dispense freedom otherwise. Everything else comes out as arbitrary.
To Steven Schreiber RE positive liberty:
The logic of “negative” liberty is rooted in ownership, and those claims are not nearly as arbitrary as you seem to make them out to be. Are you really prepared to argue that the stuff in a store belongs to the shoplifter as much as it belongs to the store owner? How about the hands that I use to write this, are they not mine? In liberal civilization, there are fairly clear norms about who owns what, even when it comes to stuff that had been stolen. Sure, holes and gray areas, but far from “arbitrary.”
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