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””
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.
Though history, states have been getting bigger. From tribes, we expanded to city-states, from city-states to feudal states, and from feudal states to the consolidated modern states of today. This process has never been easy, however. There has always been resistance to the expanding, consolidating state. The unifications of Germany and Italy required extensive military campaigning, the United States fought the civil war over the south’s resistance to a strong federal government, the French monarchs struggled to break the back of the nobility for generations, and the British struggled with rebellions from Scots, Welsh, and Irish. Yet, in the end, all of these countries unified and centralised, because it was economically necessary–as more territories became economically interlinked, the same economic laws needed to apply to larger swathes of territory. There was no other way to keep the medieval guilds in line, to achieve coordinated economic policies in the interests of the whole of society, rather than for one region against others, to reduce the need of every town and region to be self-sufficient in every economic category. The economy is the horse driving the cart of the enlarged state, but there are always people dragging behind the cart, and they’re usually the very sort of people behind setting up the previous, smaller state. But this is not merely an historical tale–states are getting bigger right now for economic reasons, impeded by people who are, once more, dragging behind the horse.
Continue reading “Dragging Behind the Horse: Making States Bigger”
If there’s one thing that international relations theorists love to do, it’s criticise each other’s theories. Unfortunately, in the course of that noble goal, the distinction between “important” and “unimportant” criticisms is often lost, and sometimes even deliberately disregarded. It is forgotten that our theories are models, that they cannot possibly be all-inclusive without their logical lessons being lost in the chaos, without losing their subject specificity. Consider this example–many theorists have made a name for themselves criticising a dominant theory in international relations, the neorealism of Kenneth Waltz. Today I’d like to discuss Waltz’ theory and some of its criticisms, and question how helpful or effective those criticisms really are.
Continue reading ““Silences and Exclusions”: How we Waste our Time with Little Things”
It is often overlooked how democracy changes the nature of politics from a question of “what is best for society, what leads to harmony?” to a question of “how can my faction or voting block get its way over other factions or voting blocks, how can I best exploit dichotomy?”. Philosophers and theorists often see politics as a question of how to create the good state, the good society, but this view does not correspond to the larger population’s understanding. As most voters are not philosophers or theorists, the entire political process becomes designed around this alternate, inaccurate understanding. Let us elaborate on the differences between the harmony of the philosopher and the dichotomy of the voter and see how truly dangerous and destructive the latter’s perception is to wider society.
Benjamin Studebaker 