Leo,
The three examples you give (slavery, women's vote, civil rights) actually all fall into my exemption to incremental change for eliminating governmental violation of people's rights. For me, human rights fall into a different category than governmental policy. Legitimate governments govern at the behest of the people and as such have no mandate to prevent people from freely exercising their rights. If a government is violating people's rights, it is doing so illegitimately (because it has no right to do so) and therefore should stop immediately. Incremental change in this case makes no sense because a lesser violation of people's rights is still a violation of their rights and therefore illegitimate behavior for a government.
A good analogy here would be a person who is embezzling money from his employer. The theft is illegal and morally wrong. When he is discovered, he should be forced to stop embezzling immediately. He must stop because any ongoing embezzlement (even at a lesser rate) would continue to be a violation of his employer's property rights. However, that doesn't mean that there aren't unintended consequences to forcing him to stop immediately. The employee may have taken out a mortgage using falsified documents that he has been paying with the money he is embezzling. When he is no longer allowed to embezzle he won't be able to pay the mortgage and the lender (who acted in good faith and had no idea the money was stolen) loses its investment because the loan is defaulted. In this case though, we accept the negative consequences to the lender because we do not consider theft to be legitimate and therefore stop it whenever it is discovered. It is the same with government, if it is violating our rights it should stop, damn the consequences.
I think, though, that at this point it might be a good idea for me to define what I mean by a right. When I say "right" here, what I'm specifically referring to is the concept of natural rights. Natural rights are universal and inalienable, and are inherent in our nature as independent moral agents. The specific things that qualify as rights is open to debate, but there are a few minimum requirements that must be met for something to legitimately qualify as a right.
- Free exercise of a right must not violate the rights of someone else. It would be illegitimate, for example, to say that I have a right to force you to follow my religion.
- A right must not force action on someone else. For instance, I cannot have a right to daily free Pearl Jam concerts.
- As a corollary to #2, a right cannot be actively provided by the government. There are many legitimate and valid government services, but it is not my right to have them because they require the use of limited resources and therefore proscribe others to give up some of their resources to provide me with the service. If those resources weren't available then the government couldn't provide me with the service. But since I have said that it is illegitimate for a government to limit the rights of its people then a government that didn't have the resources to provide that given service would become illegitimate. Without the government to provide the service we would still be absent the service. Since natural rights exist even in the absence of government, it is therefore illogical for any government service to be a natural right, regardless of how good an idea it may be.
Now that I've made it clear what I mean by a right, let's go to your comment on the health care debate. I would argue that people have a natural right to seek health care, because it is illegitimate for the government to deny me the right to attempt to cure any sickness or injury that I may receive. It is not, on the other hand, a natural right to receive health care, because that requires a doctor to take action. That means that health care falls under the umbrella of policy not right. That means that I do in fact feel that it should be fixed incrementally (and I do agree that there are things to be fixed). A massive overhaul sounds like a good idea because there are lots of things broken that we want to fix, but such an overhaul would be just as likely to cause new problems as it solves the old ones. By pursuing incremental patches to specific problems we can measure how those specific changes effect the overall metrics of the system and correct where necessary.
One more thing that I'd like to mention is that we have a powerful tool for enacting incremental change at our disposal here in the United States, in the form of our federal system of government. Since state governments are independent of the federal government they are individually free to try different solutions to problems. That actually gives us the ability to apply some degree of scientific method to determining what changes will work and what won't by measuring the success of states that enact a change vs. those that make no change (or enact a different change to address the same problem). When we apply changes (especially grand sweeping changes) at the federal level without state-level experimentation we lose our control and have a much harder time measuring the success of specific changes.
It depends - which is not a cop out - but there is no panacea - theoretically - yes - flat earth the whole shooting match - the way o - but people are not proponents f change - so the populous won't like - important .... Big topic - good posts
ReplyDeleteFractals, you are right, there is no panacea. But there is an opposite--stalemate and inaction. The key problem in our political system is the lack of communication between the parties. The agruments and mudslinging is not new, what is new is the all-or-nothing polarization and that is a lose-lose proposition. And you are also correct that most people are not proponets for change. But change is inevitable and so it is critical to get involved, no matter how inconvinient. Thanks for getting involved ;-)
DeleteThis is actually address to both parties.
ReplyDeleteA society should have a minimum standard. Otherwise, it would cost more to live in a 'free' society. A good example is vaccination. Why should I have one? I could not reject it if I want to attend class.
However, it's good for the society to a large extend. Public good far out weight private right. So, no one should ask for absolute right. Yet, everyone should have right above the minimum sacrifice.
Hello Turtle Finance, you hit on the real issue here--the issue between the private right and common good. These two forces are at odds with each other and human civilizations constantly weigh these against one another. Both are detrimental in excess. I will write a post on this. Thanks for the follow!
Deletea real system is one who learned from mistakes and continuous improve and innovate life of citizens
ReplyDeleteBut how do we shift our system into the learning from mistakes and continuous improvement stage. Right now we are in a continuous stalemate.
DeleteExactly, Terri - its a tough nut to crack, but we need to make sure that that which protects our rights does not violate those of others.
ReplyDeleteThe challenge, osakasaul, is that people have different opinions of what is our right. Some think that taxation is a law that protects rights of some and violate those of others. The issue is with the constant balance between the cultural forces of individual rights and common good. By having common good we AUTOMATICALLY violate some individual rights. That is the challenge. The answer, I believe is in the process of open non-threatening communication. Thanks for the follow!
DeleteI would suggest that we can get inspiration for changes to the healthcare system not just by experimentation at the state level, but also by looking abroad to countries that are very successful, and have been so for decades (Sweden, Canada, etc).
ReplyDeleteAlso, given that our per-capita healthcare spending is roughly double that of developed nations with universal coverage, it seems to me that drastic (rather than incremental) revisions may be worth some short-term clumsiness to achieve even a fair measure of those kind of savings.
Great conversation, guys!
You have a good point Bushonomics, I am with you on this, but a lot of Americans think that our country is better than anyone else. So it is hard for them to look at other countries.
DeleteI am for universal coverage, but that system has its own drawbacks. What is needed more than universal coverage is universal conversation where we do not paint each other as enemies and instead search for best solutions. Thanks for the follow!
I agree with you the health care needs to be reformed a little, however I do not think it needs to be done at the National level. I feel each state should mandate it's own, as each state has their own demographic of citizens and issues.
ReplyDeleteOn a contrary note about your Sweeping changes, how do you feel the countries economy has been historically since going off the gold standard? To me that would constitute a big change without regards to it being a "right" such as the 3 examples your counterpart suggested.
Ahh, the gold standard. I am not an expert on this topic, but as with anything else, there are pros and cons. On gold standard, we would not have been able to grow as fast, innovate as fast, or create credit as fast. So if your goal is for us to go faster, no gold standard is good. But without proper controls, and we have very poor ones in place, the car on non-gold standard, tends to crash alot. And that is what we are seeing.
DeleteThe other point, is that the main beneficiaries of non-gold standard are nations, who can print their own currency and it beeing treated with AAA rating, i.e. US.
Agreed--> "Free exercise of a right must not violate the rights of someone else."
ReplyDeleteIn theory, and between friends, you can have a good talk about things. In reality, the views are different and that will always heat the debate. In this discussion are three major things at stake, people, government and health care. In my opinion, the government should be provider of everything that is needed. What other job would a government have, other than making sure everyone can be productive? It should provide health care, because healthy people are the governments (country's) asset. It should provide infrastructure, because that is the way how the government enables people and companies to make money.
ReplyDeleteInfrastructure is not only road and rails, it is education and other things as well. These should be part of the rights of Americans. Making health care and education a business is not the right way to go, not anymore. It is easy to predict the outcome, if we keep these old hats up. The number of people that can't afford sufficient health care will grow and way more than half will be uneducated, measured by western standards. The result will be, people will die early and people in emerging markets will be better educated. Both are things we can't afford.
There is a number of people that can afford health care and education. In the future, that number will, with no changes, decrease. If this continues to be the way of "light" government, there will be a time when you have to increase law enforcement to keep order. Is that the way to go? Sufficient health care is already in danger, even for those that have a job. The tendency on services, declining. Education is the same.
What's the government to do? Provide the health care and education. No options available, if you want to keep up with the competition. You want jobs back? Here is the way to get them back.
In other words, we must have strong government to make major changes and be competitive in the future. If not, politics as usual will not take us anywhere.
Great points everyone! I particularly like Maxus point that "we must have strong government to make major changes and be competitive in the future." He is referring to a key flaw in having a weak central goverment--that we are competing against other countries whos governments are able to create change in the infrastructure, education, healthcare far more effectively than US right now. We have been able to succeed in the past thirty years as a country in large part because we have the ablity to siphen off some of the best minds and have them work in US, but that is no substitute for educating and supporting our own population here in US.
ReplyDelete