Comment by pdonis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pdonis | Hacker News Reader

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> the right to "freedom from harm" immediately conflicts with speech, gun ownership

You don't have a right to "freedom from harm" if that means not hearing any speech you don't like.

You do have a right not to be shot, but "gun ownership" by itself does not conflict with that right. Being shot by someone who owns a gun does, but then the rights violation is the shooting, not the gun ownership.

> If you don't think there's a right to freedom from harm that competes with those other rights, I don't know what to tell you.

Your position, that all rights are inherently in conflict with each other, means nobody really has rights; what you call "rights" are really just at the mercy of the legislature:

> The real work of governance and legislation requires carefully negotiating trade-offs between competing priorities in an ever-changing world.

No, the real work of governance and legislation requires protecting the basic rights that everyone has to have to have a free, civil society, and stopping there. A government that has more power than that has too much power.

Your position reminds me of the old saying: no one's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.

> The fact that positive rights are "leftist" in some parts of the world reflects a degree of deep ideological incoherence and immaturity in those parts, more than anything, I think.

It reflects a degree of deep ideological incoherence and immaturity on the part of leftists who advocate for such "positive rights", yes. That's a recipe for eternal conflict. Which is indeed what leftism of that variety leads to.

> protecting the basic rights that everyone has to have to have a free, civil society, and stopping there. A government that has more power than that has too much power.

What's your empirical evidence for thinking that such a setup is better and that going further than that brings "eternal conflict"? Since all prosperous democratic countries in e.g. north america and europe combine private property with taxation for public provision that goes beyond what you desire. Furthermore in empirical studies of life satisfaction and happiness the top of the list is consistently held by countries with extensive welfare states funded by taxes[0]. How does that square with your claim?

[0] https://happiness-report.s3.amazonaws.com/2024/WHR+24.pdf#pa...

> What's your empirical evidence

What if you gave the same happiness survey to people in Saga period Iceland, which had no government at all?

Or to people in some of the American colonies in the late 1600s and early 1700s, such as Pennsylvania, which had governments, but those governments did virtually nothing?

The fact that all first world countries today have governments with vastly more power is no evidence at all that such a system is the best. All it means is that that's the only kind of system that's being evaluated for first world countries. It's easy to place first if you're the only one in the race.

Hard to tell what those people would report if we had a time machine and could go and ask them. I sure as hell wouldn't want to switch position with them. Would you? On objective measures of health, nutrition, longevity and prevalence of violence they would score much worse.

> The fact that all first world countries today have governments with vastly more power is no evidence at all that such a system is the best.

It is some evidence. Since if a system with a less extensive state that offers less of public services like schooling, infrastructure and health care is what is really better for people, why haven't people made it happen already? See here also my previous point that gradual steps towards such system should, if they are really an improvement for people, show up as higher scores in happiness surveys. Absence of that trend is some evidence against your claim.

> Hard to tell what those people would report if we had a time machine and could go and ask them.

Yes. Which means it's impossible to use such reports to make general claims about what kind of government is better.

> if a system with a less extensive state that offers less of public services like schooling, infrastructure and health care is what is really better for people, why haven't people made it happen already?

Because "people" can't make it happen in societies where the government controls all those things. Governments have huge advantages over private providers in terms of protecting themselves from competition, without having to actually provide better service.

And even with all those advantages, people still do try to opt out. If government-run schools in the US, for example, were really so great, there wouldn't be so many people trying to get their kids into private schools, or home schooling. But because such people still have to pay taxes to support public schools, those options are only open to the affluent. And schemes like school vouchers to try to level the playing field somewhat never gain any real traction because politicians don't have to answer to the people as a whole, only to special interests--and teachers at government-run schools are a huge special interest.

> gradual steps towards such system should, if they are really an improvement for people, show up as higher scores in happiness surveys.

Only if they exist to be surveyed.

> it's impossible to use such reports to make general claims about what kind of government is better.

Across 1000 years of history, yes. But as already noted in those cases objective health/longevity differences can settle the issue. The report can then be used as a one source of evidence in comparison between the setup in countries today.

> Because "people" can't make it happen in societies where the government controls all those things.

People can vote for parties and candidates with an agenda to abolish public funding of education and infrastructure, but people choose not to. Very few vote for the libertarian party in the US for example.

> And even with all those advantages, people still do try to opt out.

In the countries that score best in terms of happiness and life satisfaction there is wide and strong popular support for an extensive welfare state with tax funding of schools, infrastructure and health care. Is your view that large majorities of people in those countries over decades are consistently mistaken about both their reported happiness and their support for their welfare state?

> If government-run schools in the US, for example, were really so great, there wouldn't be so many people trying to get their kids into private schools, or home schooling.

The US is not in the top of the report I cited and has many problems in the schooling system. One underpinning factor is segregation (ethnic and socioeconomic).

> school vouchers

... are tax funded, so is a variant of an extensive welfare state on the funding side. A drawback with such a mixed setup (public funding of private provision) for schooling is that it often requires even more regulation, oversight and middle men activities due to for profit and competition dynamics. The US health care system is a prime example of how cost-ineffective such systems can become compared to more straightforward public provision of health care in other countries.

> Only if they exist to be surveyed.

Are you saying you don't think there's any gradual differences in how extensive the welfare state is among the countries listed in the report?

> empirical studies of life satisfaction and happiness

Are subjective. People's responses will be relative to what they're used to and what possibilities they see for their lives. These studies give no evidence at all that you could not have people whose subjective satisfaction and happiness was just as high, or higher, in a country with a minimal government along the lines I've described. They also give no evidence that such a country could not do as well or better in objective terms.

> Are subjective. People's responses will be relative to what they're used to and what possibilities they see for their lives.

People report how well they experience their lives as going. Not perfect, people can be mistaken and you might now better than them how happy they really/objectively are I suppose. But then again, do you have any better empirical evidence in support of what you proposed? If not how confident can you really be about it?

> These studies give no evidence at all that you could not have people whose subjective satisfaction and happiness was just as high, or higher, in a country with a minimal government along the lines I've described.

They don't prove that it is impossible, true, but if your proposed setup really was so much better wouldn't gradual steps towards it also be somewhat better in ways that made people report greater life satisfaction and happiness? And wouldn't then that show up in the ranking so that the top scoring countries would be those that come closest to (or least far from) your ideal? But that's not what we're seeing, the top scorers have the most extensive welfare states. That's some evidence against your claim.

> They also give no evidence that such a country could not do as well or better in objective terms.

What's "objective terms"? Do you mean longevity? Health outcomes? The top scoring countries in terms of happiness score very high there too.

Note also that you claimed that all systems going further than what you suggested would have "eternal conflict", which sounds really serious and awful and thus would realistically affect how people report how well their lives are going. Isn't the report evidence against that claim of yours?

If you think there's an inviolable set of Ur rights that aren't intrinsically in conflict, then articulate them. Your inability to articulate them cogently suggests that they don't exist... not that every argument to the contrary is false because they must exist.

Refusing to think critically and insisting "muh absolute rights must be real" isn't an argument, it's a (peculiarly male, American, sad) fantasy. Yeehaw, cowboy fantasy land.

> If you think there's an inviolable set of Ur rights

I made no such claim. Of course any right can be violated, since rights aren't laws of physics, they're agreements that citizens of a civil society make with each other in order to be able to build wealth through cooperation, specialization, and trade. And people always have the ability to violate agreements. That doesn't mean they should, it just means they can. And of course there are always people who do. But that doesn't mean there has to be conflict between the rights themselves. It just means there are always at least some people who refuse to respect other people's rights, and we have to have some kind of plan for dealing with them.

> Your inability to articulate them cogently

I don't know where you're getting that from, since the old saying I mentioned already contains the basic answer: life, liberty, property. (I might also add the pursuit of happiness, from the Declaration of Independence.) But it's true that it's easy to misunderstand what those rights mean, particularly "liberty", and to think that they must be in conflict because, for example, my "liberty" has to include the right to take your life if I feel like it. But that's nonsense, and there is plenty of literature in philosophy, ethics, and political science expounding a proper concept of "liberty" that includes the obvious point that your right to liberty does not include violating the rights of others.

> Refusing to think critically

Is exactly the problem with people who can't understand how there can be a set of basic rights that aren't in conflict, because they can't, for example, imagine any concept of "liberty" that isn't "I can do whatever I feel like".

> a set of basic rights that aren't in conflict

Do you have a reply to the arguments in these linked texts that property is inherently coercive? https://mattbruenig.com/2015/10/01/capitalism-is-coercive-an... https://mattbruenig.com/2014/05/07/property-and-conflict/

Yes: the definition of "coercive" used in those texts is an example of what I described at the end of my post, the inability to imagine any concept of "liberty" that is not "do whatever I feel like"--or in this case, "grab whatever external resource I feel like".

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