Lessig: We Are Squandering Away The Future

Illissius writes "Lawrence Lessig has a new article up on Wired, with the title Our Kids Are in Big Trouble. I suck at summarizing, so here's a choice quote: 'Gone is the sense of duty that made so compelling Kennedy's demand "ask what you can do for your country." We don't even ask what we, as a nation, can do for our kids. The rhetoric of self-interest so deeply pervades politics that an ideal as fundamental as building a better future has been lost.'"

Comments

Libertarianism and the failure of selfishness

[revscat]

I know it's fashionable these days to claim to be a libertarian of one stripe or another, but the fundamental philosophy of libertarianism -- "greed is the ultimate good" -- is to share a large part of the blame here. The almost exclusive focus libertarianism gives to short-sighted individual gain has had grave consequences to the environment our descendants, and what almost all cultures throughout history have come to realize constitutes the "good". It is also, I believe, a large reason why so much of the planet considers Americans to be almost completely immoral.

I believe that there are larger and ultimately more beneficial (personally and socially) virtues than some dogmatic worship of greed and belief that the market, left to its own devices, is perfect and holy, not to be touched by the Satanic hands of government bureaucrats. We *are* sacrificing the ability of future generations to succeed, to live on a planet that is substanaible for human life, and are moving towards a nation where our elders live our their final years in poverty.

Re:Libertarianism and the failure of selfishness

[Golias]

but the fundamental philosophy of libertarianism -- "greed is the ultimate good"

Your entire argument is flawed because you are beginning with a false premise. That is not the fundamental philosophy of libertarianism. If you ever have read Adam Smith and Voltaire (the two most important writers on any libertarian's bookshelf), you clearly did not understand tehm correctly, and need to study them further.

Re:Libertarianism and the failure of selfishness

[Illissius]

Well, as I see it, the fundamental philosophy of Libertarianism isn't "greed is the ultimate good" as you say. Rather, it recognizes that people are fundamentally greedy, and attempts to design a functioning society with that in mind. That's what I like about Libertarianism -- in stark contrast to other 'idealist' philosophies like, for example, communism, it designs for the worst rather than the best case scenario; rather than assume that human nature will conveniently step aside, it specifically exploits it. It's as if it were designed to actually work in practice.
Now, so far I've just been trying to clear up a misconception; I'm not saying a Libertarian government/society would necessarily avoid the pitfalls mentioned in TFA. We don't have a Libertarian government, nor has there been one recently; there's no way to know. However, it's certainly possible that one of the reasons for the current situation is that people are fundamentally greedy, and we currently have a system that doesn't account for it.

Re:Libertarianism and the failure of selfishness

[Anonymous Coward]

As a libertarian, I don't base my politics on anything or anyone. My politics is as simple as this:

Grown adults can do whatever they want to themselves or other consenting adults and the government should be as minimal and non-invasive as possible. It's not that difficult and considering that's essentially the point of the entire constitutional and the federalist papers, I don't see how anyone can want anything different. Stop trying to push your agenda and just leave people alone.

Re:Libertarianism and the failure of selfishness

[Captain Rotundo]

oh and I looked it up, from the party platform:

"We should eliminate the entire social welfare system." ... "Individuals who are unable to fully support themselves and their families through the job market must, once again, learn to rely on supportive family, church, community, or private charity to bridge the gap."

Which is pretty much exactly what I said. Libertarians expect people who have spent hundreds of years not giving a fuck about each other to pick up the slack.

Democrat and Republican spending patterns

[Futurepower(R)]

Government data shows Democrat and Republican spending patterns.

Cultural and social issues..

[CashCarSTAR]

The real problem, of course, is not in the politics of it. If it was, it would be easy. Just elect the right people and the problem is fixed. But no, these are real cultural and social issues that really need to be taken care of, and it's going to take time, effort and a whole lot of work.

The further problem, at least in America, has to do with the whole idea of patriotism, and what it means to be a patriot. Conservative types have had a LOT of success of changing the definition of patriotism to a very childish one, where you love your country for what it is. The problem with that, is that it makes change virtually impossible. Because you want America to change? You must hate it!

That's the big problem.

Fortunately, there's a growing number of patriots who are actually getting active in making change, with a more mature love of their country (We love it, so lets make it even better!). Maybe it's too late. Maybe we've let too much ground slip to the single-issue interest groups..let them do all the work..ignore the larger cultural issues.

The second part of it, is the idea that younger people are stupid and inexperienced, so therefore #1. Shouldn't vote and #2. Older people know what's good for them, so they should just shut up. You're seeing this is the media word war between Penn and Stone/Parker. The thing is...it doesn't really matter WHO young people vote for. But the idea is, by getting younger people out en masse to vote..period..it gets more of their issues out. It no longer becomes a government by the baby boomers and for the baby boomers. It has to become something more...substantive and long-reaching.

The third part, in my mind, is the economic problems of an economy based on fraud. The current investor economy for the overwhelming most part, is based upon a big ponzi scheme, where the actual invested in companies are paying very little back to the investors, and the money that's actually being made is coming from OTHER investors. The problem with that, is that it basically kills the insurance industry as their business model is made up in a large part in investments, forcing them to raise prices to keep with the..well..immature investor expectation of forever rising profits as far as the eye can see....

It's a system that's built for instability. And that needs to be fixed.

Step #1. Know fact from fantasy/opinion.

[khasim]

Something tells me that if we didn't go in to begin with, we'd be in a worse position after a generation or two of no consequences to committing terrorist acts.

But Iraq wasn't involved in any anti-US terrorist attacks. Wasn't that what the 9/11 commission wrote in their report?

Before you can assess the risks of any action (and taking no action is an action), you have to have the facts. Opinions and fantasies and nightmares don't count as facts.

Re:Step #1. Know fact from fantasy/opinion.

[Anonymous Coward]

In the State Department's assessment, Iraq was one of the few Middle-Eastern countries which didn't have a significant al-Qaeda presence before we invaded. The only al-Qaeda associated terrorists that we know of in Iraq were in Kurd controlled territory, inside the Northern US No-Fly Zone. Three times the military presented plans to take out those terrorists before the invasion. Bush refused 3 times, because it would undermine the case for war. There are more terrorists being "harbored" in Iraq now than there were before we invaded.

If offering moral support to al-Queda is your bar for invading a country, there are a lot more countries we're going to have to invade.

The preponderance of evidence was that Iraq had no meaningful ties to al-Qaeda. The preponderance of evidence once the inspectors were in Iraq was that Iraq had no significant WMD program. The preponderance of evidence was that Iraq's conventional military capability had been signifcantly degraded since the end of the Persian Gulf War. The preponderance of evidence is that Iraq was no threat to its neighbors or the United States. The preponderance of evidence is the Bush Adminstration made one of the greatest strategic blunders in history by invading Iraq.

List of significant challenges for kids

[justanyone]

Significant challenges for our children's generation will include:

• loss of biodiversity, especially oceanic
• at least one more large-scale nuclear "meltdown" (my suspicion, given current trends);
• Complications of Global warming
• Shifting from petroleum-based energy to other sources (inevitable) causing (yet) more instability in arab socio-political structures
• U.S. Social Security baby-boom-bubble shifting demographics placing a very, very high tax burden;
• increasing speed and longevity of communications means a silly photo at a high-school or college party or an ill-thought-out possibly-anti-(insert-minority-group-here) comment posted on a newsgroup can last until your first senate candidacy;
• Inability or reduced ability to 'reinvent' oneself after a life change due to increasing availability of personal info;
• possible deflation in U.S./world due to U.S. trade imbalance and rise of EU and China as global powers;
• economic and geographic dislocation if a bioweapon or other epidemic causes mass evacuations near population centers;
• Rising pro-"American Empire" (neoconservatism) causing wars that kill them;
• Rising religious fundamentalism (Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, Seikh, etc.) again causing inter-religion and intra-religion wars as there were in the 1600's and 1700's;

Yah, this list is kind of scarey, but I'm sure you can think of others more and less likely.

Re:Progressive Income Tax

[Marxist Hacker 42]

And do you think this boom had more to do with the tax structure? or the fact the rest of the worlds manufacturing capacity was devistated in ww2 while ours grew at an astounding rate?

Ours grew at an astounding rate because the government had the money to invest in buying up the output- which we gave away free to the countries we were trying to rebuild. We wouldn't have had the money to do that if it wasn't for the top tax rate- and the opportunity to get middle class jobs wouldn't have been there without our government doing the buying. Europe and Japan were devistated- but they were devistated economically as well (and what is this about the whole world? Southern Africa, Australia, and South America were barely touched- and thier industrial systems were quite robust- yet they didn't see the expansion we did).

The manufacturing (and not IT) base leaving has nothing to do with tax structure it has to do with lower prices and increasing capacity overseas.

Yes and no- the base leaving has to do with lower prices and increasing capacity overseas. But if our federal government had the extra money to invest into R&D by going back to the tax structure of the 1950s, we'd also have a slew of new technologies to move our workforce into. As the old saying goes: They copied everything they could, but they couldn't copy my mind- so I left them plotting and schemeing, a year and a half behind.

The real problem isn't that these jobs are going overseas; they were bound to eventually. The real problem is that our government is now the slave to short term business interests, instead of being the driver of long term research and development of the type that built the Internet.

A Canadian Perspective

[Txiasaeia]

For better or worse, I keep on hearing this up here in Canada: Americans are concerned with individual freedom, Canadians are concerned with the freedom/good of the whole society. This is reflected in our subsidised child care, free health care, social programs for the poor, etc. I'm not sure if I agree with this blanket statement, but this dialectic is *everywhere* - media, higher education, politics, etc. Anyway, my point is that we, as Canadians, give up certain things (i.e. our money, as we're taxed to death) so that those who are well-off don't have to suffer as much.

I was watching SpikeTV yesterday & saw that they were having a contest for men: go to the doctor, get a checkup, and try to win a trip to Carnival. Apparently some people haven't seen a doctor in 10 years! I'm not well off by any stretch of the imagination (student, young family), but I also happen to be sick quite a lot and see a doctor once every month or so. I cringe at the thought of paying $100 per visit to the doctor (this is how much my folks in the US pay - middle class, no health coverage).

I know that /. is US-centric, so forgive me for pointing out flaws in the US, but without free health care I don't know what I would do. From the perspective of an outsider, Lessig is absolutely right. I'm glad that my kids, when they're starting out on their own too, won't have to sacrifice their health because of the health care system in Canada (if the current system holds) - then again, the way that we're screwing up the air right now, they're probably going to need it.

Re:Smith, Voltaire, and Libertairanism

[AuMatar]

Actually, Adam Smith would disagree that free markets increase prosperity in many cases. There are chapters in Wealth of Nations that discuss the benefits of protectionism. Remember- he was NOT discussing a political philosophy of privatize everything and free markets are good. Wealth of Nations was a scientific discourse attempting to describe an emergent system, not an endorsement of it.