I have a new post up at BHL: The Libertarian Three-Step Program. It addresses good and bad ways of answering the healthcare question that Wolf Blitzer asked Ron Paul.
"Austro" as in Rothbard and Wittgenstein, "Athenian" as in Aristotle and smashing-the-plutocracy.
About Roderick T. Long
The Empirical Me
I’m Roderick T. Long, Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University. I’m an Aristotelean/Wittgensteinian in philosophy and a left-libertarian market anarchist in social theory. (More about me here.) This blog, Austro-Athenian Empire, is a continuation of my earlier blog, archived here.
Prof Long:
I agree with all you say in your post, but wondering about starting with deontological or consequentialist points, do you think the same scheme applies to a topic like drugs (legalization)? I am not sure myself now, althought I prefer to start always with the deontological point (that the state has not the right to control other people bodies and what the put in them…) rather with a consequentialist approach (drug war creates mafias, drug adiction is best treated with prevention rather than coercion etc…).
I certainly think there’s a better case for starting with the deontological point in the drug case than in the healthcare case.
As a strategic matter (as well as a philosophical point), one can also emphasize fairness and downplay personal responsibility. Not all believers in social justice are extreme luck egalitarians. This individual had his sea shells (so to speak) and chose a certain life path based on his own perceptions of risk. In considerations of fairness, it is unfair to others to expect them to pay into and subsidize your risky behavior. Of course, personal responsibility and freedom are at the heart of this matter as well, but considerations of basic fairness also play a role.
I see someone completely dodged your point.
Somehow, they even did it while claiming your point was itself a dodge. I always hated funhouse mirrors…
The paragraph he cites from Roderick runs counter to what he says immediately below it. It looks something like this:
Roderick: We need to change our priorities.
Matt: He said libertarians need to ignore it altogether.
I’ve commented on Yglesias here.
Do you think Matt Yglesias realizes he isn’t very bright, or does the fawning admiration by the likes of Andrew Sullivan give him an imprudent confidence in his own intellect?
Yglesias says lots of things I quite like. He just keeps mixing crazy howlers in among them. It’s like chocolate-n-tripe pie.