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Continued from here.
On closing my review of posts on politics and freedom from the year 2013, I have picked these three entries:
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P029 Enculturated Poverty from 12/05/2013
I gather at least two interesting ideas from reading this post, two and a half years after its initial writing: the wealth associated with freedom can be a resource used to undermine some of the advances of liberty - this, of course, is intricately related to the problem of political choice that attaches to the use of governmental financial and other capabilities - for more see my Economics and the Indeterminacy of Freedom (3) - Joan Robinson on Keynes and the Problem of Political Choice.
In order to make better political choices, however, it is necessary to avoid summary prejudgements. We must look carefully at the facts. For it is one thing to discover and deplore welfare abuse both by the initiating government and its recipients, victims, or receiving abusers; it is another thing to overgeneralise claims of abuse and disutility so as to cover "the" welfare state - hook, line, and sinker-, some of whose elements are in truth indubitable attainments, while other components of it tend to be misrepresented by its detractors unfavourably compared to their true proportions.
I have, rightly or wrongly, always been deeply suspicious of political pontifications about “poverty”. I grew up among people who usually had no cash money in their pockets for days and weeks at a time … folks who would chuckle sardonically at the profligacy of actually painting a barn, or spending good money for store-bought bread or milk … yet none, absolutely none, of those people would have been comfortable with being classified as under some government-devised poverty level.
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P030 The Classical Liberal Constitution (1/2) from 12/07/2013
It is as simple as that:
A good, freedom-regarding political system is an indispensable precondition for a country to have any hope of ever leaving a state of underdevelopment.
... one of the deplorable shortcomings of (the attitude of many in) the freedom movement is an unwillingness to give up the comfortable habit of demonising the state across-the-board for the demanding task of understanding the role of politics and the state in achieving and sustaining the advanced stage of freedom that the privileged population of some 25 countries in the world enjoy, while the rest of mankind languishes in a condition characterised either by insufficiently developed governmental services, or by the exclusion of the vast majority from proper governmental services ...
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P031 Goodbye to Anger - A Christmas Message to Libertarians from 12/24/2013
From reading this post, I take away three thoughts:
Freedom is so successful and ubiquitous that we hardly notice her and thence do not feel a need to praise and celebrate her.
Freedom, unlike the metre, which has an unchanging standard bar placed in a safe in Sèvres near Paris, freedom is not liable to be authenticated by a simple and unique standard.
Freedom comes mixed and enmeshed with plenty of other things that concern us, related in negative or positive ways to freedom or unrelated to her. Even in her most pronounced variants, perhaps especially in those.
It is one thing to have a theory of freedom and share it with fairly congenial characters - even then the concurrence of opinion is illusory once the stage where we rehearse ideological stereotypes, like dogs sniffing one another to check the prospects of a friendly encounter, is left behind; and it is another thing altogether, to measure freedom and position oneself vis-à-vis her when a person has far-reaching stakes, and strongly felt views, and weighty interests to advance and defend. Under concrete circumstances, we experience just how complicated, multi-layered and dispersed the concerns of freedom actually are.
But what about the innumerable and incessant instances of the presence of freedom in our world. Why not smile and feel thankful and happy about them?
It would seem, many libertarians tend to overlook that freedom is not what will happen when all threats and violations of freedom are eventually eliminated. No such situation will ever arise - after all, not even libertarians could agree on the criteria of fulfilment.
Freedom is mixed into the character of the West's political order, which contains other ingredients, many not that agreeable with freedom.
Freedom can only exist as a corrective in a mixed order in which anti-individualism and collectivism have an enthusiastic natural following, too. Freedom can alert us to the detrimental potential of collectivism, it gives us criteria to perceive and understand the dangers of unfreedom, and ways to avoid them. But freedom is incapable of reaching a state cleansed of elements and currents opposite to her.
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Our daily life attests to the enormous progress freedom has been and continues to be making in the face of ongoing contestation. Tip: try to figure out just how many rights of freedom are real-time operative so as to allow you to go shopping the way you do. However, many libertarians apparently need to relearn the knack of making out liberty in their ordinary lifes. Once they get better at it, they will discover:
Friends of liberty have plenty to smile about.
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Continued here.
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