April 02, 2010

Political fragments

I was asked this by a super-intelligent young lady whom I accuse of being brainwashed into her illiberal liberalism:
Btw, I'd be genuinely interested to read your manifesto if you're willing to engage in debate without using ad hominem arguments or suggesting I'm brainwashed.

I'd be particularly interested to hear how your system deals with natural monopolies (air traffic, transport, broadband, post, police, courts, army)
and things that affect the vulnerable (health care for poor children/parents, education) and whether you legislate for and enforce laws around things like farming of animals, insider trading.
So I dashed off this fragment:
Air traffic - not a natural monopoly.
transport - ditto.
broadband - ditto
post- ditto

If you're thinking of the 'pipeline' for broadband, water, power, etc as a natural monopoly then one way to handle it is as it's done now - combination of public regulator and private franchisee monopolist, but it's a technical rather than political question.

Air traffic control may be a natural monopoly and should be state regulated tho privately run perhaps.

Courts should be in the public sector, but have become corrupted by social engineers in the Anglosphere, cf atrocities like Roe v Wade, atrocious for it's substance, yes, but intellectually atrocious as having no basis in law other than an invented right to privacy which is then tendentiously extended to the right of a mother to kill her baby as tho any of the Framers would have contemplated anything of the sort.

Police should be in the public sector probably, tho not necessarily. Again control by social engineers has been disastrous.

Army ditto.

The question is not whether a private corporation runs something, but who appropriately regulates that corporation - the free market or the state. The principle is that all activities should be free from state interference other than enforceability of voluntary contracts.

The exceptions should be few and have compelling ideological or practical justification such as 'the state should have the monopoly of force' or 'children must be protected.'

The reason for that is ideological - freedom is an absolute good - and practical - the government is sometimes useless, but more often worse than useless at effecting good results. It has neither the skills nor the correct motivation. Your suggestion that the answer to that is better government has been so comprehensively disproved in practice and theory, in history and in the present, all over the world and probably on Jupiter, that it takes cognitive dissonance to persist with it.

Children are the reason for society to exist and should be protected consistent with minimal displacement of the family by the state.

Other animals should be protected by law. Factory farming and vivisection should be crimes. How to get from here to there is discussable, but that's what 'there' looks like.

Insider trading is fine providing everyone knows it might happen and there are no voluntary contracts - eg contracts of employment - to bar it. Risks are far more manageable when they are in the open.

I'd add that anybody should be sackable for any reason and there should be no state healthcare other than fallback provision for children and those injured in the front line of military service.

Yes the government should ensure that water is clean and power stations don't blow up.

This will sound ruthless to you, but the outcomes are much better spiritually, politically and practically except IN ONE RESPECT: it doesn't allow liberals to feel good about themselves at others' expense. But that's not a bug, it's a feature.