@maxdancona,
maxdancona wrote:
This topic is rather personal.
- You are claiming that my lifestyle is harmful to liberty.
- You are stating that I have an obligation to live in a way that you think is "right".
- I think you are claiming that I must follow a religion of some sort to have liberty.
I disagree with all of these things. And my lifestyle, which you have judged to be "irresponsible" works for me. I am healthy and happy. I have accepted that I have a responsibility to the people around me beyond the law, and I live that way. But this is a social responsibility that has nothing to do with liberty.
If I understand you correctly, you are making the claim that people need to stop having sex or else liberty crumbles and the government would have to step in. I don't accept that at all.
I don't want to make this thread about sex. If you want to discuss the relationship between self-governance within a republic of liberty and sexual freedom, start another thread. I will discuss it there. I would just rather reserve this thread for a more general discussion about whether a truly good society/economy can be achieved by giving liberty unlimited reach, or whether liberty will continue to fail because people aren't up to the take of taking full responsibility for all their effects on the world and the future.
Quote:@livinglava,
Apparently I am the only person willing to engage you on the topic. And I disagree with each part of your thesis. To answer your questions...
Well, the thread can wait for other users. The level you're trying to engage the topic on ends up being a diversion from the topic, so you should start other threads to discuss the topic(s) as you see them.
Quote:1. "All men are created equal" was political propaganda. It has no real meaning, other than expressing the view that monarchy is an invalid form of government.
It is a very deep, meaningful statement, albeit simple, about the fact that any and all humans are endowed with the capacity to think and act as well as the greatest king ever could.
When people say things like, "it's above my pay grade," they are dishonoring this fundamental idea that "all men are created equal," and thus equally suited to govern themselves rather than be governed by kings/managers/etc.
Quote:2. What you are saying about personal responsibility and government interventions doesn't make any sense.
It does, but I think you want to squelch it in your mind because it is contrary to how you want to think.
Quote:3. I don't accept that individual liberty is failing anything. Liberty is an intrinsic value... not a means to an end.
Governance is a means to an end; or at least that's one way to look at it and evaluate it. I don't have to like Chinese centralism to evaluate what kind of society/economy it produces and why/how. There can be forms of government that have stellar results in one sense, but alienate humans from their own innate sensibilities and liberty in another. Just think about beating someone into total submission. The person might follow orders perfectly if you broke them in that way, but there would be something wrong in their spirit.
Self-governance by liberty is the best form of government for this reason, but China or some other society might achieve better results and a better (more sustainable future) simply because the people whose liberty is honored and defended by their government fail to progress toward a better way of life.
Quote:You seem to want some sort of dictatorship, where people are only given liberty if they do what some authoritarian figure wants them to do. To me this is the opposite of liberty.
I don't know why you think that. People often seem to attribute motivations like this to me based on things I post, but the truth is that I don't like dictatorship/authoritarianism at all. I much prefer liberty and I would actually like to see liberty expand to eclipse even more authoritarianism in the world than it already has. It just so happens that I am able to see why many people in this world lack faith in liberty as a form of governance, and I am objective/unbiased enough to recognize that liberty is not working as well as it should to cause humanity to move in the directions it should be moving to achieve a better world.
Quote:I am a social libertarian. People have the freedom to figure out for themselves what gives their life meaning. Government should only intervene to prevent one person from doing direct harm to another.
Have you considered that there are situations where people don't seem to harming each other directly in the most superficial sense, but in more subtle ways, and from a longer time frame, they are doing harm to each other and future generations?
Think about in terms of camping: you can have a campground where people are friendly and polite and thus don't appear to be harming each other. But then you might notice that they're breaking branches off the trees for firewood, dumping their waste in streams, running generators and making loud noises that cause nuisance and scare off wildlife, etc. etc.
Or you might notice that all the traffic in and out of the campground has led to many roads being paved, highways built, etc. and that the quality of nature is gradually eroding as a result of how visitors' transport themselves to and from the campground. On one level, people are just getting around in a convenient way to enjoy the natural surroundings, but on another level they are not doing enough to reform their vacation lifestyles to progress toward more sustainable ways of living that can be enjoyed for generations to come without causing degeneration century after century.
Camping may seem like just an example, but really all humans are doing is camping on Earth for the short time we are alive here. So really we have to take the liberty of trying to leave the place better than we inherited it.
