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Chris
05-13-2012, 09:30 AM
This talk is in political science but I believe the solution is economic. (IOW, I'll stretch anything away from politics and to economics!)

Here's the video:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=E_oeFjycTE4#!

Here is a good synopsis if you don't have 40 minutes interest:

http://i.snag.gy/m1N3b.jpg

Two points.

First, political science. Politically I'm libertarian but economically I'm classical liberal so it's good to see the two grouped. I'm not a high liberal by any means, too abstract for me. But to my point: Where do conservatives fit in? I kept asking that throughout the video. I'll get to that...

Second, economic. I have always believed that, despite the high liberal emotionalism classical liberals and libertarians are heartless and selfish, both camps have as goals the betterment of the world and society around them, that is, like Tomasi in the video argues, we all seek social justice. Where we differ is the means. High liberals (and quite a few conservatives (point one)) seem to seek political means* to coerce social justice while classical liberals and libertarians seem to seek economic means to voluntarily achieve that end. I just don't see how the moral end of social justice can be attained by coercive means. While only a moral people can be free, only a free people can be moral.


* Oppenheimer, The State:
There are two fundamentally opposed means whereby man, requiring sustenance, is impelled to obtain the necessary means for satisfying his desires. These are work and robbery, one's own labor and the forcible appropriation of the labor of others. Robbery! Forcible appropriation! These words convey to us ideas of crime and the penitentiary, since we are the contemporaries of a developed civilization, specifically based on the inviolability of property. And this tang is not lost when we are convinced that land and sea robbery is the primitive relation of life, just as the warrior's trade - which also for a long time is only organized mass robbery - constitutes the most respected of occupations. Both because of this, and also on account of the need of having, in the further development of this study, terse, clear, sharply opposing terms for these very important contrasts, I propose in the following discussion to call one's own labor and the equivalent exchange of one's own labor for the labor of others, the “economic means" for the satisfaction of needs, while the unrequited appropriation of the labor of others will be called the "political means."

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