A lot of people in politics, particularly political theory, have used the objection “this doesn’t feel right” as a counter to logical arguments. The primary victims of this line of emotion-led reacting have been the utilitarian and consequentialist moral theorists. “This is conducive to the general welfare for reasons X, Y, Z” is often met with “well sure, but I just don’t like that”. This sort of reaction is typically treated as a legitimate argument, but does it deserve this level of standing? Today, I intend to argue that it does not.
Author: Benjamin Studebaker
Misconceptions: “Obama has Vastly Increased the Size of the Government”
It is a commonly held belief that the Obama administration has been spending money all over the place, increasing the size of the government and the number of people it employs. There is a bit of a problem with this, though–it is factually inaccurate. Today I intend to illustrate and prove that this belief is not in line with reality.
Continue reading “Misconceptions: “Obama has Vastly Increased the Size of the Government””
Scottish Independence: The Spectre of Nationalism
Recently, the British government agreed to allow Scotland to hold a referendum on whether or not it desires independence from the United Kingdom. Interestingly, the Scottish government is seeking independence despite one, shall we say, minor hiccup–it is against the interest of Scotland and the Scottish people to become independent from the United Kingdom. Even if you’re not Scottish or any kind of British, this matters, because it demonstrates how very powerful nationalism remains as a force for getting people and nations to do things they absolutely should not do.
Continue reading “Scottish Independence: The Spectre of Nationalism”
A Critique of Property Rights
Property rights can be immensely helpful to society, increasing our collective productivity, motivating and inspiring people to work harder, and consequently augmenting our standard of living. There is however, another side to that coin–property rights can create a distribution of wealth that undercuts economic demand and leads to the replacement of wage-financed consumer demand with credit-financed consumer demand, leading to, as we recently collectively experienced, economic crises fuelled by unsustainable levels of private household debt. Clearly there is a balance with property–we need to maximise the benefits of this institution while minimising the societal costs. The trouble is that the political theory that lies at the foundation of right wing thinking in the Western world does not allow for this balancing, and these ideas continue to hold sway. Today I’d like to address where the difficulties in the right’s theory of property lie and what sort of negative consequences these difficulties have for the rest of us.
Freedom versus Voting
Often times freedom is viewed as good in itself. Why is it good to allow freedom of speech, freedom of expression, assembly, religion, autonomous decision making, that whole boatload of fun stuff? Generally the liberal response is to just assert that freedom is itself good for no other reason than it just is. The argument for freedom is too often made on the basis of self-evidence than on any sort of consequentialist grounds. We all believe freedom to be a good thing because we have all been brought up socially to believe that this is the case from childhood. Don’t mistake my aim–I am not going to claim that freedom is not a good thing. I am, however, going to claim that there is an external source from which the goodness of freedom derives, and that this external source provides some separation between voting and freedom that begins to show how we might have the latter without the former.
Benjamin Studebaker 