Response to a “Progressive”
A friend recently wrote a very interesting blog post titled “I’m not afraid to admit I’m a progressive” . In this post I will try to respond to some of the great issues he raises in his post.
In this post I’m not really interested at all in dealing with semantics of the word “progressive” and what it means; that is not my purpose. What I really want to do is address some of the core issues that he brings up, and finally to specifically address the questions he poses at the conclusion of his article.
Marco states:
In my opinion, the 2 biggest issues we have is a lack of shared goals and an inability to loosen our narrow definition of “right and wrong”.
I couldn’t agree more. I truly believe that there are basic, fundamental rights that we can all agree on. I believe that if we build logically on these fundamental ideas and values, we may gain some insight into the core of the problems we face today, not only in the United States, but across virtually the entire world. I’ll have more on this later.
“There are hundreds of millions of people in this country alone. And there are just as many definitions of right and wrong.”
Absolutely. But again, I think there are some core fundamental rights/morals/values that virtually every sane person can agree on. In my opinion a right or a moral principle must be universal in order to be valid. An Example of this would be that it is against someone’s fundamental rights (and immoral) to kill them. Again, I’ll discuss more about this topic below.
For the main part of my response, I’ll go through each of Marco’s closing questions one by one, and express my thoughts below. Here they are:
What does it look like in an America where *no one* feels disenfranchised?
I’m not sure this is even possible. I think the goal of our country was to foster a society where no one’s individual rights are violated (obviously our constitution was not perfect, permitting slavery, etc., but we have a process to correct those things, and that is ammending the constitution). People have the right to be disenfranchised/unhappy/complain all they want, but as long as their rights cannot be violated, and are protected, then I think we foster the best, most prosperous society for everyone.
What does it look like in an America with *true* tolerance for the opinions of others, as long as they don’t violate basic rights?
I think this is the crucial issue. In order to have a discussion, we really do need to define what we’re discussing, and in this case, I think it helps to define ‘basic rights’. Our country was not founded on rights such as ‘right to education’, ‘right to healthcare’, and those rights really are paradoxical and thus can’t constitute a ‘basic right’, as I will demonstrate. To make this argument, I will make the assumption that being free from the initiation of force from others is a ‘basic right’, and one that we can all agree on. This means you have a right to not be attacked, murdered, or forcibly pressured to do something against your will by others, but that you also do not have the right to initiate force against someone else who has not first initiated force against you.
Now, in the case of ‘right to education’, or ‘right to healthcare’, these are services. In order to have a right to a service, someone else must provide that service. This means they must put time and effort into it, and spend their time providing these services rather than doing something else. If it is your right to that service, then that means that someone providing the service must be forced to provide that service to you if they are unwilling to do so voluntarily. This inherently violates that persons right to not have force initiated upon them. If that person voluntarily offers you that service (for free, or for a fee), then you can receive the service and the benefits of it without violating that persons rights. It is just like saying you have a right to chocolate, or you have a right to a car. I would argue that rights also need to be universal, which means something so basic as to have applied for all of human history. No cavemen had the ‘right’ to chocolate or healthcare…they didn’t even exist! But they all had the inherent right to not have force initiated upon them by others (of course, their rights may have been violated by another tribe, but I believe humans have progressed to a point where we can move beyond these types of actions if we understand basic rights and respect all of our fellow humans).
It is crucial to come up with a framework of rights that is consistent and non-paradoxical. The right to not have aggressive force initiated upon you is, I believe, one such right. If your idea of a basic right is one that is paradoxical, then the argument must end there because it cannot be a fundamental right if it is inconsistent, and has logical fallacies.
So, from this right to not have force initiated upon us, we can derive certain facts such as no one can steal, murder, commit fraud, etc. These are all ways of initiating force against someone else. Another basic, fundamental, and similar right is that each person fully owns his or her own body. We own our own bodies, and thus we own the fruits of the labor generated from the use of our bodies, as long as it is not the result of using aggressive force against someone else. This encompasses property rights. We have an inherent right to the things we produce with our bodies, and thus we have the right to not have those things taken from us by the initiation of force from others. On these fundamental principles I hope we can all agree.
When you agree that each person owns his or her own body, and that the initiation of force violates a human’s rights, then you realize that what we are left with is a system of voluntary trade and transactions. When no one can forcibly make someone do something against his or her will, all trade and transactions in that society must be voluntary. Adam Smith figured this out long ago when he realized that when transactions are voluntary, both sides benefit, and society as a whole benefits:
As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other eases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.
One very important thing that I think we must realize in this discussion is that our rights are not given to us by government, but rather by our humanity; simply by our existence. Equally important is to realize that governments are not things in and of themselves, but are only made up of other people. If we agree that it is wrong to violate someone else’s rights, then we must see that it is equally as wrong for the government to violate someone’s rights — after all, the government is only comprised of people, no more perfect or wise than you or I!
What this must lead us to realize is that when the government is able to initiate force against its citizens who are not initiating force against anyone else or anyone else’s property, this is a violation of rights. Unfortunately today, we find that governments the world over routinely participate in such actions. In fact, actions such as these make up the majority of government actions worldwide. They don’t protect rights, but instead they have become the biggest violator of rights we have ever seen.
They use force to make us use their currencies, they use force to take our money from us, they use force against us if we ingest certain things into our bodies, they use force to make us pay people certain, arbitrary wages, and the list goes on and on.
This rampant violation of rights numbs us to these things. It has caused us to become blind of the underlying, fundamental rights that we have, and blind to the fact that our system abuses our rights continually on an ongoing basis. This leads to unclear, superficial discussions of rights and morality, because we assume our governments are moral and what they’ve done for centuries must be good and just. We are unable to see the core of the issues, and the governments keep going and taking more and more of our rights while we argue about things such as ‘right to education’, and ‘right to healthcare’, and before long, we won’t have any rights left.
What does it look like in an America where we do have direct impact on how our representatives behave? What does that system look like? How do we prevent it from being gamed and/or corrupted?
I think an important part of this is decentralization of government. This may sound more radical than it actually is (or at least what I mean by it). Our government was founded on decentralization. The federal government has very few powers (check out article 1, section 8 to see them all enumerated), and all other powers are left to the states and the people, respectively. The more local government is, the more say each individual citizen has in that government.
Our federal government has very little responsibility, and even today people don’t realize that there are no federal laws against murder, rape, theft, etc. This is all handled at the state level. I believe more and more should be handled at the state level, and amongst voluntary co-operations amongst states. There will be issues here and there where states dispute things, and that is when the federal government should come in (mostly through the courts system which are already in place) and resolve these disputes. Other than that, the federal government has very little authority. This means that states, counties, and/or cities should be fully in charge of their own public school systems (if they decide to have one at all), they should be fully in charge of their drug laws (if any), and so on. The more local, the better. This way, we also get more competition, and different cities/counties/states can learn from each other and copy each other where things work, and not where they dont.
We certainly have a partial system like this today, but the trend is to move more and more control/authority to the federal level, so that the federal government can mandate to the states to do things all the same way. This destroys innovation, creativity, and improvement. It also takes decision-making further and further away from the citizens of each city/county/state.
I think we need to demand that the federal government restrains itself, and demand that our representatives that we send to DC respect and understand this. We want the power to come home as close as possible, so that we can hev a say.
What does it look like in an America where we retain national pride and identity without ignoring our interdependence with other nations around the globe or bending them to our will?
This is also huge. Adam smith’s arguments for voluntary trade apply (and he argued such) equally well to relations amongst nations. We should have ‘peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none’, as Thomas Jefferson advised. We need to encourage free trade, and discourage sanctions, and bullying of other countries in general. Trying to force our will on other countries, or tell them how to act, does not make people around the world like us, and it ought to make them like us less (and it seems to be doing just that).
Economically, free trade is the most sane policy. Protectionist tarifs and the like that have become commonplace in our nation to ‘protect’ us from cheaper tires from China, etc, are actually counter-productive. If we can get cheaper tires from China, we ought to do just that, and our consumers will save money on tires, and have more money to spend elsewhere. Free trade empowers consumers to have more choice, and be able to get the products they want at the correct market price.
Restoring a policy of true free trade would gain us many friends, and would allow us to set an example for others. The prosperity that we could achieve would also encourage others to immitate us. We can spread freedom and ‘basic rigths’ in this way by example, rather than by force.
How do we create an America where everyone is thinking in these terms rather than exclusion, blame, derision, narrow-mindedness and ultimately impotent anger?
This is probably the toughest one. I think we need to change ourselves from within by talking to everyone we can about these issues of ‘basic rights’, compassion, voluntaryism, and freedom. As the message spreads, we can hopefully have a choice of politicians that understand and believe in these fundamental rights, and begin to change things in the country.
No politician can or will change any of the current problems in government until the people understand the issues and demand a government that respects our basic rights at a very basic level.
In closing, I don’t care if people want to call themselves progressives, liberals, conservatives, libertarians, communist, or anything else. If we can all agree that we each own our own bodies, and cannot initiate force against one another, then I think everything comes together. We can look at these core fundamentals and see where that takes us. This is what I think we need in order to arrive at a moral society that respects people’s ‘basic rights’.
I don’t claim all these ideas are perfect, they are always a work in progress. I would love to hear feedback/thoughts, as I’m always looking for ways to improve my arguments and bring as many people into the conversation as possible. Thanks.