Austro-Athenian Empire » Therapeutic State

Cordial and Sanguine, Part 18

Roderick — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 19:24:39 +0000

My BHL post on Ron Paul’s healthcare answer is receiving favourable comment from both Andrew Sullivan and the National Review, and less favourable comment from Matt Yglesias. (CHT Matt Zwolinski.) I posted the following comment at Yglesias’s blog:

This response is pretty drastically missing my point. Suppose there are two possible ways of helping a patient, one much more effective than the other. The better way, A, is forbidden by law; the question is then asked whether the inferior way should be mandated by law. The libertarian (or at least the good libertarian) says: “no, don’t mandate B; instead, stop forbidding A.” That hardly counts as saying the patient should die; on the contrary, the libertarian thinks (rightly or wrongly) that the patient is less likely to die if the government stops forbidding A.

Now what the conservative generally says is “don’t mandate B, but don’t stop forbidding A either.” So I think it would be fair to charge the conservative with being willing to let people die. But that’s just a different position.

Part of the problem here is that non-libertarians tend to treat “let’s do something about X” and “let’s have a government program for X” as equivalent, and so tend to hear anyone who rejects the latter as rejecting the former. By contrast, libertarians generally think of governmental solutions as the least effective ones, and so for them treating “let’s do something about X” as equivalent to “let’s have a government program for X” would be like treating “let’s do something about X” as equivalent to “let’s sacrifice some babies to the moon god in order to address X.”

Cordial and Sanguine, Part 17

Roderick — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 03:30:55 +0000

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.

An Ambiguous Dystopia

Roderick — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 07:19:28 +0000

Going through old papers I find this gem from my Randian past: a very short sf story that I wrote in (but not for) college, titled “Under the Violet Sun.”

Some of my stories actually had plots (hopefully I’ll dig them up eventually). This one, not so much.

The Atrocity of Hope, Part 13

Roderick — Sun, 01 May 2011 16:09:23 +0000

Charles covers it.

Hunt the Wild Justice

Roderick — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 02:27:26 +0000

C. S. Lewis’s article “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment” is simultaneously an excellent argument against the rehabilitative or therapeutic approach to punishment, and a lousy argument in favour of the retributive approach to punishment. Lewis makes a compelling and eloquent proto-Szaszian case for the thesis that punishment not based on responsibility is wrong; but, never examining his implicit premise that punishment must be justified somehow or other, he then slides without much reflection into the conclusion that punishment based on responsibility must be right. So when I read this article I’m cheering half the time and tearing my hair out the other half.

Of course that’s often my reaction when reading Lewis – as when reading Nietzsche, another writer who to my mind tends to mix together equal parts of the magnificently right and the horribly wrong (though his points of rightness and wrongness seldom coincide with Lewis’s). Anyway, Lewis, like Nietzsche, is generally worth reading even when he’s wrong.

While we’re at it, here’s another fine Lewis piece, “The Inner Ring,” that has a good deal less wrong in it.

The Cats in the Walls

Roderick — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 17:27:48 +0000

It was the rats;
the slithering scurrying rats whose scampering will never let me sleep;
the dæmon rats that race behind the padding in this room
and beckon me down to greater horrors than I have ever known;
the rats they can never hear;
the rats, the rats in the walls.

– H. P. Lovecraft

So Chris Muth gets dragged off to the psych ward to treat his “bizarre delusion,” because he hears a cat behind his wall that no one else can hear. Then they finally have to let him out – after his neighbours start complaining about that darn cat behind the wall. (CHT Gavin in a comment on Charles’ blog.)

I guess Straczynski is luckier than he knew.