Wife-beating and slavery were once acceptable: How will the future judge us?

Truly, and this too is at the heart of our form of democracy - that our inalienable rights trump any government's power, and that we as a free people have the right to choose the government that best serves us. As our founders made clear when declaring our independence, it is a self-evident truth "that whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness."

That we continue to have, as a people, the natural right and ability as protected by the second amendment to abolish our government when we see fit, is (to me) evidence that our founders chose well. That is not to say, of course, that their choice of government will always be the right one for us.

I'd prefer a lot more decisionmaking to happen at local levels and state levels in the USA, which gives people more options for where they want to live and the kind of government they wish to live under.

I agree, and this is the reason for my comment on abuse of the commerce clause. The states, and their localities as they see fit, have complete control over their governance except where contradicted by federal treaty and law in pursuance of the constitution. Unfortunately, through the commerce clause the federal legislature, with precious few rebuttals from SCOTUS, has long managed to interfere in purely intrastate concerns.

Large scale, broad legislation almost always winds up with devil's bargains that don't quite suit anyone really well, special interests working in coalitions...

Yes, agreed. The constitution makes it clear where authority really lies - but short of SCOTUS revisiting their commerce clause rulings, we'll have to effect this change on the soap box and at the ballot box, by finding, supporting and electing national representatives who want to govern us the least.

The difference is that while it's relatively easy for you to make a decision and then act upon it, in a democratic country it's quite rare for the population to be so unified that the government of the day engages in completely unilateral actions. Not only is the government constrained by disagreements among the governed which affect its capacity for unitary policymaking, it's also usually constrained by constitutional matters which may prevent it from acting in certain ways despite the clear wishes of a legitimate majority.

That's why I suggested that scaling up the behavior of a householder to the size of a country is going to give you a monarchy of some kind. North Korea is governed by someone who seems to believe that the nation's security is best served by sealing off the whole country from its neighbors, but I rather doubt you want to live there.

When and if we actually do establish it with trade

Well this is quite close to what we have now. If you or I decide to start importing stuff from China, the customs people don't give two hoots about which particular things are imported in most cases. Nobody, for example, is going to call you up and say 'we halted your furniture shipment because we don't like tables with built-in drawers, what the economy needs right now is a greater supply of chairs.'

Correspondingly, enforcing internal or external security with absolutist certitude virtually guarantees a serious error sooner or later.

But I agree that the gulf between civilian and government might is fearfully large already, which makes moving to another country a much better option. Of course, your world won't have that option.

It's not about trust, but about choice. It's like with any product. Lots of choice plus little vendor lock-in tends to lead to better products. No or little choice plus strong vendor lock-in leads to worse products.

If you combine lots of countries/governments with more open borders, then people can shop around for a government they like.

What is the last time in living memory that people in a developed country revolted against their rulers?

Each time someone gets tired of the government in their current country and decides to move because of it, that is a revolt against their rulers.

The point is there is no need for me to overthrow my government as long as I'm free to move. Violent revolt is simply not necessary if borders are open. If you really don't like the government you have, pick a different one. There are plenty to chose from around the world, and it's a lot cheaper and easier than staging a violent revolution.

Humanity's had two steady states--hunting and gathering, and governments. It's an interesting question how authority functioned in hunter-gatherer tribes prior to the invention of civilization and government, but since then, government has been the only steady state. It's even more of a steady state than hunting and gathering, because the hunter-gatherers kept realizing they were better warriors than the grain-fed populations of a civilization, so they conquered neighboring civilizations and set up their own government.

From your link, it appears abortion has been controversial for the entire duration of recorded history. It would be accurate to say that some past societies would view current abortion practices as barbaric, but perhaps not all past societies.

I'll admit I didn't really have ancient China or Greece in mind when I referred to the past -- I was thinking more along the lines of the past couple hundred years in the West. You know, that same group of folks that we criticize and feel so morally superior to on account of slavery. I mean, slavery among the Aztecs or the ancient Romans was bad, but somehow we gloss over that. It's just a part of who they were, something they did in moral ignorance. By contrast, we feel that 18th century Americans and Europeans should have known better.

We criticize that group for slavery, but I think they would criticize us for our practice of abortion. The history on that page seems to match my intuition on that; abortion was illegal (for heaven's sake--it was a capital crime in the UK!) and disgraceful, though certainly practiced. I stand by my assertion that the past would be apalled at us. Rightly so, I think.

Looking toward the future, I find the diversity of recent law in many countries interesting. But one pattern I particularly find interesting -- and perhaps I pick it out because it matches my expectation -- is the proliferation of age limits. Legal abortion before eight weeks, ten weeks, twelve, fourteen, even twenty-four, depending on the country; illegal thereafter with exeptions for emergencies. The younger the life in the womb, the more I think reasonable people can disagree on its status. During the first trimester, when 20-40% of pregnancies fail anyway despite our best efforts, when the shape of the body is alien and the activity of the mind couldn't even be called sleep, the degree of tragedy in abortion is debatable. By the third trimester, when the thresholds of viability and ability to react and interact and play and feel joy and pain have all been passed, anyone who thinks it isn't a baby isn't paying attention.

Slavery throughout history has not been a uniform phenomenon. Sometimes it looked a lot like employment does now; sometimes it involved human sacrifice. Even in the antebellum south, the experience was diverse; post-emancipation, there were slaves who loved their masters as family and stayed close and took their names, others who hated them with bitter and justifiable fire. But we remember and criticize the cruelty -- the worst incarnation of slavery. That is what we remember, that is the thing about which we say, "How could they have let that continue for so long?"

So it will be with us. As science advances and viability retreats younger and younger and we discover invisible threads of humanity in younger and younger lives, the window of reasonable disagreement will shrink. Maybe to 20 weeks, maybe to 12, maybe to 8; I don't know. We won't be remembered for our prompt six week abortions--that might always remain a religious question. But the bloody affairs at seven and a half months on tenuous reasoning?

Barbaric. I think future generations will ask, aghast, how we could possibly have allowed that.

I doubt that judicial punishment of strangers is going to end anytime soon, but note how different that is to punishing a family member.

However, now you mention it, there is an interesting similarity. Why does punishment happen? Not for the reasons most people think. For instance, it doesn't (and can't) transmit moral knowledge from the punisher to the punished. Neither does it reliably cause obedience.

In reality, society punishes criminals in order to prevent greater suffering in the form of larger scale rioting and madness.

Similarly, parents punish children to prevent themselves from going mad. But if knowledge spread of how to be a better and happier parent then this sort of punishment would end.

Such knowledge may already exist in basic form:

http://www.takingchildrenseriously.com/introductory_articles...

First off, I don't believe that we should impose a different system for valuing people's salaries, and I didn't mean to imply that if I did. I just think that there are obvious flaws in the current system. I wish I had an answer that would fix all the issues, but, of course, it's not that simple.

Essentially, my impression is that you believe that the market which determines people's salaries is entirely rational, and I disagree. As in most (all?) marketplaces, it's not really about the value, it's about the perceived value. Some people (and they are not evenly distributed across all career paths) are better than others at convincing people they are worth a lot, so they get paid more. This is partly due to proximity to the money making process, which is one of the reasons that salespeople are paid so much (it's easier for them to make an argument based on "look how much money I've made you!").

In addition, people don't value CEOs (or anyone else for that matter) in a vacuum. They look at what other CEOs are being paid and are primed to base their valuation accordingly. If their pay was truly based on value-delivered, this wouldn't be the case.

I wholeheartedly agree with you that government involvement via tariffs and salary management is generally a bad thing. It only makes a messy situation messier. But that doesn't mean the free market is perfect, and examining and understanding its weaknesses can only benefit us.

You are going to have to explain why you think that; I can't understand where that conclusion could come from.

I'm assuming that by 'fundamentally different' you mean something which is naturally a positive liberty in your view, represented (presumably disingenuously in your opinion) as a negative liberty. I don't see how this distinction can be made however.

The right to be free from slavery is framed as a negative liberty, and is considered morally just by reasonable people, but as you point out, it comes to the detriment of a certain segment of the population. This shows that you aren't distinguishing according to whether some individual is harmed by the granting of rights to another - so what is the point at which you consider some other negative liberty to be fundamentally different?

In fact, I believe that argument against socialised healthcare has clear parallels with argument for slavery.

In both cases, one set of people are conspiring to reduce the quality of life for another in order to take home more money for themselves.

In both cases there exists a privileged class who, mostly by accident of birth, lives in relative luxury supported by the exploitation of a disenfranchised underclass.

Those who feel that it is unfair to 'place a responsibility ... to provide for the care of others' are profiting immeasurably from a delicate and complex economic and social system, which provides a framework for the systematic exploitation of those to whom the privileged believe they owe no debt.