How To Keep Voters With You Forever, or What We Talk About When We Talk About Duverger's Law

[maradydd]

So I'm a bit late to the game with this trifecta of links, and maybe what I have to say has already been said elsewhere, but what the hell:

How To Keep Someone With You Forever -- a concise guide to some extremely effective techniques for stringing someone along in a shitty job or relationship by placing them into a "sick system". There's some

Comments

[whswhs]

I looked around at the five-values site for a while, and found that, first, the people who are doing that survey have noted "libertarian" as a possible separate category, and second, they note that an interest in the universalizable moral principle of liberty may be a sixth general moral norm separate from the other five

[heron61]

I looked around at the five-values site for a while, and found that, first, the people who are doing that survey have noted "libertarian" as a possible separate category, and second, they note that an interest in the universalizable moral principle of liberty may be a sixth general moral norm separate from the other five.

Hmm, I'd not encountered more than brief mentions of adding liberty onto the value list, I'd love to see more data. I'm guessing that adding that dimension would be a useful way to separate right and left libertarians from one another and to distinguish left-libertarians from progressives. I hope someone pursues this data.

[whswhs]

I'd be interested to see it. Of course my own perspective is not one of "values" but on one hand, one of class analysis (starting from Rothbard's basic idea that the two fundamental classes are those who profit from the political system and those who pay for it), and on the other, one of discourse modes. But any approach that sees libertarians as a distinct group worth understanding in its own terms has merit in my view; I know libertarians are a comparatively small group, but I don't feel any great sense of belonging when I interact with conservatives, which is where a lot of people place libertarians.

[heron61]

I know libertarians are a comparatively small group, but I don't feel any great sense of belonging when I interact with conservatives, which is where a lot of people place libertarians.

I found reading about the history of anarchism to be exceptionally illuminating for understanding libertarianism and libertarian ethics and ideals. From what I've read, the 70s split between right and left libertarianism in the US had a lot to do with the current perception of the allegiances of libertarians.

[maradydd]

I'd like to hear more about this, as I've read a bit about the history of anarchism but haven't run into much on the right/left-libertarian split. I'm quite familiar with some of the anarchocapitalist writers, e.g. Friedman and Nozick, but have always seen them as quite divorced from their anarchosyndicalist counterparts.

[heron61]

As I think back about reading I did almost 15 years ago, what it can more accurately be called a split between libertarians and anarchists, which were more integrated in the during the 1960s and early 1970s. I'll attempt to dig up some references if you are interested. I started with the old usenet anarchy faq and did some further reading.

Hmm, I just looked over my copy of the anarchy faq, and there's rather less historical info than I remember. I remember getting the info I mentioned online in the late 90s, but don't remember from where. I'll dig further.

[whswhs]

I was in the libertarian movement then, and I don't think there was ever a right/left split. What I saw going on was this: The Goldwater candidacy of 1964 and the Objectivist movement, between them, attracted a lot of people who came to identify themselves as right libertarians. Their opposition to the military draft (and secondarily to the Vietnam War) led them to try outreach to other people who shared that opposition, and thus to their trying to form an alliance with various left libertarians. As a result, a lot of right libertarians became sympathetic to drug legalization (the classic first step argument was, "Well, if you believe in the free market, does that apply to the drug market too?"), sexual freedom, gay rights, and the like . . . and of course the Objectivists had always been opposed to theism and supernaturalism. But there wasn't really ever a unified movement that I saw; there were two groups looking at each other, and seeing that they agreed on specific issues, but never really forming a solid alliance. Though

[heron61]

Interesting. The articles I read were written from an anarchist perspective and from what I remember, the authors seemed to believe that the libertarians and the anarchists had been close allies during the 1960s and early 70s (and I remember, albeit vaguely, that there were suggestions that the two groups were largely one group at this time), and that the libertarians split off in the late 70s in what seemed to the anarchists to be a strong turn to the right. Given that what I read was written well after all this happened, I'm not certain if the differences between what I read and what you just posted were due to regional differences (I have no idea where the authors of the pieces I read were from), different perspectives on identical events, selective memory, or all of the above.

[xthread]

Rothbard's basic idea that the two fundamental classes are those who profit from the political system and those who pay for it

Are you making the argument that plutocrats derive their wealth from the labor of the peasants? I have a hard time reconciling that with two observed realities -

• In the US, while the wealthy may not pay as steeply progressive income tax as some would like, they do, as a population, pay a larger fraction of income taxes than the fraction of overall GDP that they receive as income. I would think for the wealthy to be living on the backs of the poor, that would imply that the poor are paying much more of their incomes than the wealthy (which is false in the aggregate, even when it is true in the particular) or that the poor's income is being even more directly transferred to the wealthy.
  
• The point of most concern to the public at the moment seems to be unemployment, that is to say, that too many people in the middle and working classes aren't earning money at all; precisely how do you then conclude that the

[maradydd]

I don't want to put words in whswhs's mouth either, but the way I read it is that there are two classes of people: those who regard the political system (whatever it might happen to be at the time) as a means of determining the will of the people (well, in many modern cases anyway) and effecting policy, and those who regard it as a vehicle for making a buck. These correspond to honest actors and cheaters/"prudent predators" in a game-theoretic representation.

There can of course be honest plutocrats and prudent-predator peasants; the latter is where the notion of "welfare queens" comes from. But, critically, the divide is not merely between haves and have-nots, but rather between actors based on their willingness to play by the same rules as everyone else

[xthread]

Huh.. That sounds like a much more useful construction than the Rothbard quote.

I would argue that one of the great objectives of representative democracy is to channel the excesses of the pursuit of ambition to the benefit of the common good. Certainly that's the sense I've always gotten from Madison - the point is not to strive to employ Angels, but to structure Governance so that we get good outcomes from imperfect, greedy, lazy, dishonest people. That is to say, the sort we have on offer already.
I think of your examples of Belgian policies that tilt the cost-benefit curve of cheating to be precisely examples of that principle - I don't want to suppress humans chasing self-interest, I want to maximize both their own and the collective benefit from their chase. So when I think about policy analysis, my framing paragraph tends to be 'Posit an opportunistic, dishonest actor..'

[maradydd]

they note that an interest in the universalizable moral principle of liberty may be a sixth general moral norm separate from the other five.

I hadn't seen that part of the site, and will have to dig deeper. (I actually encountered Haidt for the first time about a month ago, and read a couple of his papers, but apparently not that one.)

Distinguishing liberty from fairness is an interesting problem. Demonstrably, there are implementations of fairness that steamroller all over liberty -- "Harrison Bergeron" is a fine reductio of that -- but the two are very closely linked, and indeed I'll argue that a notion of liberty that doesn't rely on fairness doesn't make sense.

[whswhs]

I think that illustrates the problem with all of these: How are they reduced to specifics? I mean, for example, in my perspective, if I offer to copy edit your next paper for $25 an hour, and you agree to pay it, that's a fair price . . . it's made fair by the fact that we both agreed to it, without coercion on either side. That is in fact the legal definition of fair market value: The price at which something passes from a willing buyer to a willing seller. In my definition, then, fairness simply reduces to liberty. But I know many people who are convinced that there is a "fair wage" for a job, a minimum amount that should be paid for it (or, often, for any job), and that anyone who is offered less is being treated unfairly, even if they willingly accept it. Those can't both be true. Yet they are both passionately adhered to by different people. We've already discussed a similar point about harm

[maradydd]

That is in fact the legal definition of fair market value: The price at which something passes from a willing buyer to a willing seller. In my definition, then, fairness simply reduces to liberty. But I know many people who are convinced that there is a "fair wage" for a job, a minimum amount that should be paid for it (or, often, for any job), and that anyone who is offered less is being treated unfairly, even if they willingly accept it. Those can't both be true. Yet they are both passionately adhered to by different people.

Yep, all of it. Though what's interesting to me here is that someone who operates on the "fair wage" principle and someone who operates on the "non-coercive agreement" principle can (and often do) still come to a mutually agreeable contract, despite their differences in premises. What are the mechanisms at work which result in such negotiations succeeding, while the harm discussion that heron61 brought up falls apart