Sometimes, the word 'voluntary' is a little complicated…
Cass Sunstein wants to "nudge" us. - NYT I wonder how folks over at Democratic Underground feel about this? Like Gloria Estefan says, it cuts both ways.
excellent critique of the method here.
...the belief in a system of government regulations that amount to creating government incentives for people to do the right thing (as per how the government or Professor Sunstein see it, of course). Instead of coming down on what government considers objectionable or undesired human conduct with a sledge hammer, nudging works by setting up various tricks by which people are lead to act in the way the government intends for them to act.
Call it behavior modification or libertarian paternalism, the gist of Sunstein’s type of government meddling in people’s lives is to use a kind of Skinnerian program of stimulus-response (after the late Harvard behaviorist psychologist, B.F. Skinner), whereby what government officials want the citizens to do isn’t commanded but made the result of various more or less subtle prompters....
What Professor Sunstein and his co-author Stephen Holmes claimed, in their 1999 book, “The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes,” is that “individual rights and freedoms depend fundamentally on vigorous state action” and “Statelessness means rightlessness.” This is the pre-revolutionary, pre-Lockean - and pre-Jeffersonian - idea that governments grant us rights; that there are no natural rights but mere privileges we get from government which can also promptly take them away. It isn’t just the protection of our rights for which government is needed but their very existence is due to government as Sunstein & Co. see things!
Instead of the citizens having rights that government is instituted to secure, all governments, like monarch, czars, dictators and such, give people rights, which they can promptly take away at their discretion.
excellent critique of the method here.
...the belief in a system of government regulations that amount to creating government incentives for people to do the right thing (as per how the government or Professor Sunstein see it, of course). Instead of coming down on what government considers objectionable or undesired human conduct with a sledge hammer, nudging works by setting up various tricks by which people are lead to act in the way the government intends for them to act.
Call it behavior modification or libertarian paternalism, the gist of Sunstein’s type of government meddling in people’s lives is to use a kind of Skinnerian program of stimulus-response (after the late Harvard behaviorist psychologist, B.F. Skinner), whereby what government officials want the citizens to do isn’t commanded but made the result of various more or less subtle prompters....
What Professor Sunstein and his co-author Stephen Holmes claimed, in their 1999 book, “The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes,” is that “individual rights and freedoms depend fundamentally on vigorous state action” and “Statelessness means rightlessness.” This is the pre-revolutionary, pre-Lockean - and pre-Jeffersonian - idea that governments grant us rights; that there are no natural rights but mere privileges we get from government which can also promptly take them away. It isn’t just the protection of our rights for which government is needed but their very existence is due to government as Sunstein & Co. see things!
Instead of the citizens having rights that government is instituted to secure, all governments, like monarch, czars, dictators and such, give people rights, which they can promptly take away at their discretion.