1. When the small/large government argument turns to what level of government is permitted to restrict activity in what area, you're not even playing on the same field anymore. Now you're talking about pragmatism rather than principle.
2. I didn't say our present understanding should have no consideration for what the authors thought; I said that we shouldn't privilege a centuries-old interpretation over a plausible interpretation just because some old dudes said so. They lived in a world where interstate commerce was something sufficiently different from commerce, where some commercial activity in one state could be said to have no effect on commerce in another state. We don't live in that world.
We do, however, live in a world where the right to be protected from unreasonable search and seizure is important. We understand the long history of law enforcement overstepping their authority. We can look at the founders' supposed intentions, and we can look at our interpretation of the text, and we can look at what happens in practice. There's no reason to constrain our sources of information to the old dudes who wrote it.
To what degree do you allow private security to use force? How can we hold them accountable for overstepping that authority? Whom do we hold liable?
I'm not saying that it's either protect racist business owners or prevent home robberies; you clowns said that. I'm saying that allowing discrimination, in addition to being morally disgusting, requires a significant amount of government action, and letting people do whatever they want with their own property is not automatically a small government position; therefore, talking about small and large government is not actually illuminating.
OK, I misspoke. The amount of government is a quantity, it's just a useless one.
I talked about segregation because I think it's a good example of a change in government action causing a large change in society without an appreciable change in the size of government. I talked about libertarians because I think they oversimplify issues like the one in my example.
There is most definitely prioritization happening. A person has the right to run a business. Then they have the right to sell what they want (within certain legal limits). Then they have the right to refuse service to people.
Now imagine another person. He has the right to engage in commerce, i.e. mutually beneficial exchange of goods and services. Say he wants to eat at a restaurant. Does he have the right to?
Well, not necessarily. The restaurant belongs to the owner, and he can determine whom he welcomes onto his own property.
To many libertarians, this is as far as we need to go. For a liberal, there are a few more steps. Imagine a town where no business will serve you. They have the right to refuse you service. And it's not only you, it's a huge chunk of the population, and they don't really have a reason to refuse you; they just do it.
What is the role of government in this situation? Is the collective right of business owners to arbitrarily exclude an entire class of people for capricious reasons more important than the right of that class to live their lives? To patronize restaurants? To drive to a new city without having to find out in advance where to find hotels and restaurants and dry cleaners?
Because if the business owners' rights are more important, the government has to enforce them. If the rights of the class receiving discrimination are more important, the government has to enforce them. Both situations require a whole bunch of government. One is morally awful, and one requires making racists mildly uncomfortable.
*****
I think your last paragraph really illuminates the difference of opinion here. I don't agree that each person begins with total freedom, because in the no-laws state, each person's freedom is dependent on everyone else's constant choice not to infringe upon it. Government can be used to prevent one person from taking away another's freedom. I don't believe there's a clear correlation between the number of laws and the amount of freedom.
I also think it's important to think about positive freedom in addition to negative freedom. The government does not prohibit you from quitting your job to start a business, but if you won't be able to get care for a chronic disease ever again (a pre-existing condition), that will inhibit your freedom. The government, by requiring insurers to provide care, can be seen as enhancing your freedom, because only through that government action would it be feasible for you to start a new business.
Basically, nothing is as simple as a libertarian makes it out to be.
This discussion is getting sidetracked. The point is, segregation required government just as much as ending it required government; some of the major policy battles of the last half century don't have a clear more/less government axis.
Also, why shouldn't our current understanding of the Constitution and government authority be different from the understanding of a bunch of white dudes who didn't even have electric lights and shit outside?
Public policy is about prioritizing rights. Your right to not get robbed is ranked higher than your right to keep black people out of your store. The process by which resolve these questions is called government. There are actually people whose job it is to figure this stuff out; they're called legislators and judges.
Am I really explaining how preventing robbery is different from declining to enforce the preferences of racist people?
Uh, have you seen photographs and film of police arresting people for sitting at the Woolworth's lunch counter? Getting sprayed by fire hoses and attacked by dogs for being in the wrong place? This happened, it's history, there are pictures, you can find them on the internet and in books as well.
In Portland, there's a years-long battle going on, where business owners try to pass a law allowing homeless people to be arrested for sitting on the sidewalk, and the law is ruled unconstitutional. Then they refine the language of the law and pass it again, and it's ruled unconstitutional. Loitering inside a store is a different question, businesses have a lot of discretion to exclude people for whatever reason, just not race. If they have a plausible reason, they can do it, basically.
Yep, it's bigotry that prevents minors from buying liquor and pornography, and the fire marshal is a raging bigot. Police kicking black people out of a lunch counter is the exact same thing as writing tickets to bars that serve alcohol to minors.
I think the difference between a private residence, which is generally occupied or locked, and a retail business, which is necessarily open for anyone to walk into (at least physically), is pretty obvious.
It can, if the existing spectrum is near totally used. And the amount of subsidy a local PBS/NPR affiliate receives is pretty small, and the rest is made up of viewer/listener contributions and private donations (the programming, however, is more centrally produced, usually by the local affiliates in large markets, such as Boston or New York). As long as you have a competitive process for allocating the licenses, you are choosing the highest-value broadcasters.
"Margin" means the effect of a small change from a specific starting point, like the top tax rate changing from 36% to 39.4%.
I bet I would still have to work full time if I didn't have to pay taxes, because an employer isn't going to let someone work 68% of full time just because he wants more free time. The tax rate is far from the only constraint on how you spend your time.
I was talking about customer and not employees, and I was using an example to illustrate my point about the size of government, but I'll bite...
Practically, your assumptions are too weak. You also need to assume the lack of really really racist people. The situation in the South before the Civil Rights Act was a minority of people hated black people, a smaller minority wanted full integration, and the plurality wanted order. (I'm leaving out the black people, whose opinions were given no credence.) Integration would have caused strife, so the majority was practically in favor of segregation, even though a majority knew it was wrong.
More generally, the idea that human freedom should be subordinate to the "market" and discrimination will eventually disappear as it becomes less profitable is morally repugnant. There will always be a small racist stump of haters, and allowing them to maintain their own racist economy would require a whole host of stupid regulations, way more than just forcing them not to act too racist.
"Big government" is a talking point, and often the alternative to a "big government" intervention in the economy is often a huge body of laws and regulations in service of preserving inequality.
If you want to discriminate in your place of business, then you are relying on the government to enforce that discrimination. If a large number of discriminated-against people attempt to patronize businesses that discriminate, you more or less require a constant police presence. That is more government than a situation where anyone can patronize any business, and police presence is unnecessary.
The point is that your one-dimensional big/small government metric is not useful in a lot of situations.
Or a person works less because an hour of work has a smaller marginal reward, and leisure is marginally more attractive. Or they keep working the same amount because their employer doesn't allow them to go from 40 hours to 39.6 hours, which is the scale of the effect you're talking about.
The "amount" of government is not a quantity. Libertarians who believe that the Civil Rights Act was unconstitutional, such as Rand Paul, Senator-elect from Kentucky, are essentially saying that private businesses have the right to use state and local law enforcement to exclude black people. After 1965, the federal government prohibited businesses from excluding black people. Which situation has more government, and which has more freedom?
Also, "The larger government is, the fewer choices the individual has" is not obvious and requires a ton of proof. For example, does the existence of publicly funded TV and radio stations decrease the number of sources for TV or radio programming?
Microsoft has more to gain from the destruction of the system of software patents than anyone. Already being in the dominant position in market share, they would be free to implement any good ideas from other pieces of software, and Windows and Windows Server and Office and all their other products would be able to concentrate on features. They would save a ton of money from their legal department and could reallocate that to their development staff. With as much code as they have, I would bet they could technically infringe on the largest number of patents.
I tried to teach my grandpa how to use his cell phone, so I programmed in my number, showed him how to access it, and told him to call me. He pulled his reading glasses and an index card out of his pocket and dialed my number manually.
He literally wants the old Bell phone that he can carry around with him. It's what he's used to, and he's not going to learn how to use anything newer than his VCR.
Fedora bills itself as "bleeding edge" as I recall. Anyhow, it's definitely not aiming at enterprise quality, it's trying to push the desktop feature base forward.
Because you implicitly agree to the structure of government by living somewhere. If your support of a system of government is contingent on people you like being in charge, then you don't really support it. This is why the USA is not devoid of reasonable people after the events of the last decade.
Nobody's inflicting anything on you, it's called republican democracy. (Assuming for the sake of argument you live in the US.)
Slashdot Mirror
1. When the small/large government argument turns to what level of government is permitted to restrict activity in what area, you're not even playing on the same field anymore. Now you're talking about pragmatism rather than principle.
2. I didn't say our present understanding should have no consideration for what the authors thought; I said that we shouldn't privilege a centuries-old interpretation over a plausible interpretation just because some old dudes said so. They lived in a world where interstate commerce was something sufficiently different from commerce, where some commercial activity in one state could be said to have no effect on commerce in another state. We don't live in that world.
We do, however, live in a world where the right to be protected from unreasonable search and seizure is important. We understand the long history of law enforcement overstepping their authority. We can look at the founders' supposed intentions, and we can look at our interpretation of the text, and we can look at what happens in practice. There's no reason to constrain our sources of information to the old dudes who wrote it.
To what degree do you allow private security to use force? How can we hold them accountable for overstepping that authority? Whom do we hold liable?
I'm not saying that it's either protect racist business owners or prevent home robberies; you clowns said that. I'm saying that allowing discrimination, in addition to being morally disgusting, requires a significant amount of government action, and letting people do whatever they want with their own property is not automatically a small government position; therefore, talking about small and large government is not actually illuminating.
OK, I misspoke. The amount of government is a quantity, it's just a useless one.
I talked about segregation because I think it's a good example of a change in government action causing a large change in society without an appreciable change in the size of government. I talked about libertarians because I think they oversimplify issues like the one in my example.
There is most definitely prioritization happening. A person has the right to run a business. Then they have the right to sell what they want (within certain legal limits). Then they have the right to refuse service to people.
Now imagine another person. He has the right to engage in commerce, i.e. mutually beneficial exchange of goods and services. Say he wants to eat at a restaurant. Does he have the right to?
Well, not necessarily. The restaurant belongs to the owner, and he can determine whom he welcomes onto his own property.
To many libertarians, this is as far as we need to go. For a liberal, there are a few more steps. Imagine a town where no business will serve you. They have the right to refuse you service. And it's not only you, it's a huge chunk of the population, and they don't really have a reason to refuse you; they just do it.
What is the role of government in this situation? Is the collective right of business owners to arbitrarily exclude an entire class of people for capricious reasons more important than the right of that class to live their lives? To patronize restaurants? To drive to a new city without having to find out in advance where to find hotels and restaurants and dry cleaners?
Because if the business owners' rights are more important, the government has to enforce them. If the rights of the class receiving discrimination are more important, the government has to enforce them. Both situations require a whole bunch of government. One is morally awful, and one requires making racists mildly uncomfortable.
*****
I think your last paragraph really illuminates the difference of opinion here. I don't agree that each person begins with total freedom, because in the no-laws state, each person's freedom is dependent on everyone else's constant choice not to infringe upon it. Government can be used to prevent one person from taking away another's freedom. I don't believe there's a clear correlation between the number of laws and the amount of freedom.
I also think it's important to think about positive freedom in addition to negative freedom. The government does not prohibit you from quitting your job to start a business, but if you won't be able to get care for a chronic disease ever again (a pre-existing condition), that will inhibit your freedom. The government, by requiring insurers to provide care, can be seen as enhancing your freedom, because only through that government action would it be feasible for you to start a new business.
Basically, nothing is as simple as a libertarian makes it out to be.
This discussion is getting sidetracked. The point is, segregation required government just as much as ending it required government; some of the major policy battles of the last half century don't have a clear more/less government axis.
Also, why shouldn't our current understanding of the Constitution and government authority be different from the understanding of a bunch of white dudes who didn't even have electric lights and shit outside?
Public policy is about prioritizing rights. Your right to not get robbed is ranked higher than your right to keep black people out of your store. The process by which resolve these questions is called government. There are actually people whose job it is to figure this stuff out; they're called legislators and judges.
Am I really explaining how preventing robbery is different from declining to enforce the preferences of racist people?
Uh, have you seen photographs and film of police arresting people for sitting at the Woolworth's lunch counter? Getting sprayed by fire hoses and attacked by dogs for being in the wrong place? This happened, it's history, there are pictures, you can find them on the internet and in books as well.
In Portland, there's a years-long battle going on, where business owners try to pass a law allowing homeless people to be arrested for sitting on the sidewalk, and the law is ruled unconstitutional. Then they refine the language of the law and pass it again, and it's ruled unconstitutional. Loitering inside a store is a different question, businesses have a lot of discretion to exclude people for whatever reason, just not race. If they have a plausible reason, they can do it, basically.
Yep, it's bigotry that prevents minors from buying liquor and pornography, and the fire marshal is a raging bigot. Police kicking black people out of a lunch counter is the exact same thing as writing tickets to bars that serve alcohol to minors.
I think the difference between a private residence, which is generally occupied or locked, and a retail business, which is necessarily open for anyone to walk into (at least physically), is pretty obvious.
It can, if the existing spectrum is near totally used. And the amount of subsidy a local PBS/NPR affiliate receives is pretty small, and the rest is made up of viewer/listener contributions and private donations (the programming, however, is more centrally produced, usually by the local affiliates in large markets, such as Boston or New York). As long as you have a competitive process for allocating the licenses, you are choosing the highest-value broadcasters.
"Margin" means the effect of a small change from a specific starting point, like the top tax rate changing from 36% to 39.4%.
I bet I would still have to work full time if I didn't have to pay taxes, because an employer isn't going to let someone work 68% of full time just because he wants more free time. The tax rate is far from the only constraint on how you spend your time.
I was talking about customer and not employees, and I was using an example to illustrate my point about the size of government, but I'll bite...
Practically, your assumptions are too weak. You also need to assume the lack of really really racist people. The situation in the South before the Civil Rights Act was a minority of people hated black people, a smaller minority wanted full integration, and the plurality wanted order. (I'm leaving out the black people, whose opinions were given no credence.) Integration would have caused strife, so the majority was practically in favor of segregation, even though a majority knew it was wrong.
More generally, the idea that human freedom should be subordinate to the "market" and discrimination will eventually disappear as it becomes less profitable is morally repugnant. There will always be a small racist stump of haters, and allowing them to maintain their own racist economy would require a whole host of stupid regulations, way more than just forcing them not to act too racist.
"Big government" is a talking point, and often the alternative to a "big government" intervention in the economy is often a huge body of laws and regulations in service of preserving inequality.
You're missing the point of my example.
If you want to discriminate in your place of business, then you are relying on the government to enforce that discrimination. If a large number of discriminated-against people attempt to patronize businesses that discriminate, you more or less require a constant police presence. That is more government than a situation where anyone can patronize any business, and police presence is unnecessary.
The point is that your one-dimensional big/small government metric is not useful in a lot of situations.
Or a person works less because an hour of work has a smaller marginal reward, and leisure is marginally more attractive. Or they keep working the same amount because their employer doesn't allow them to go from 40 hours to 39.6 hours, which is the scale of the effect you're talking about.
Let's see everyone's financial aid application, I'm sure we'll learn a lot from that.
Also, the word is "renounced," as in gave up, not "denounced," as in spoke disapprovingly of.
Fox wouldn't, because they employ most of the nationally known conservative politicians. I don't think salary counts as a political contribution.
LOL
The "amount" of government is not a quantity. Libertarians who believe that the Civil Rights Act was unconstitutional, such as Rand Paul, Senator-elect from Kentucky, are essentially saying that private businesses have the right to use state and local law enforcement to exclude black people. After 1965, the federal government prohibited businesses from excluding black people. Which situation has more government, and which has more freedom?
Also, "The larger government is, the fewer choices the individual has" is not obvious and requires a ton of proof. For example, does the existence of publicly funded TV and radio stations decrease the number of sources for TV or radio programming?
Microsoft has more to gain from the destruction of the system of software patents than anyone. Already being in the dominant position in market share, they would be free to implement any good ideas from other pieces of software, and Windows and Windows Server and Office and all their other products would be able to concentrate on features. They would save a ton of money from their legal department and could reallocate that to their development staff. With as much code as they have, I would bet they could technically infringe on the largest number of patents.
I tried to teach my grandpa how to use his cell phone, so I programmed in my number, showed him how to access it, and told him to call me. He pulled his reading glasses and an index card out of his pocket and dialed my number manually.
He literally wants the old Bell phone that he can carry around with him. It's what he's used to, and he's not going to learn how to use anything newer than his VCR.
Beaten by the actual quiz, which included Skynet as an option on that question.
I heard they mail you DVDs if you want.
oh snap
Fedora bills itself as "bleeding edge" as I recall. Anyhow, it's definitely not aiming at enterprise quality, it's trying to push the desktop feature base forward.
Because you implicitly agree to the structure of government by living somewhere. If your support of a system of government is contingent on people you like being in charge, then you don't really support it. This is why the USA is not devoid of reasonable people after the events of the last decade.
Nobody's inflicting anything on you, it's called republican democracy. (Assuming for the sake of argument you live in the US.)
Who keeps following me around, modding everything I say "Troll?"