You totally ignored the possibility of abortion being outlawed. Thus you begged the question of means. As I said, that would be like me choosing decentralization with all states opting for abortion choice. Sure, that's a good wishful thinking preferrence, but it doesn't address the question of the better means for achieving liberty - centralized government or pluralism.Darrel wrote:Women enjoy much more liberty now and probably for all time, under the current system. To take 147 million women (plus probably half of the 47 million in the middle category) and take away their hard won liberty is not better for liberty.
You write as if you do. Maybe you believe that the central State usually gets it right, and you're willing to suffer (and for others to suffer) the loss of liberty when it doesn't. I can see how you have the right to sell yourself into servitude, but not others. Can't you see how the ability to switch states gives you (and others) the opportunity to escape local errors? An opportunity denied (or at least made much more expensive) by a centralized State? Your proclivity for putting all your eggs in one basket and hoping for the best is strange. It looks like irrational faith to me. I'll bet you don't invest that way!Darrel wrote:But I don't remotely believe "that the State rulers will always see it your way on every issue."
I don't see a slippery slope to decentralized power. A slippery slope is a meta-argument, which asserts that future decisions will be affected by proximate ones. For centralization, the precedent of a winner-take-all decision makes future such decisions more likely. Whether they work out or not, since generally certain parties benefit from centralized decisions, setting up a constituency and/or net gainers with an interest in perpetuating the statist quo. E.g. The military industrial complex benefits even from stupid barbaric wars which harm most people. And the piss-testers and prison employees benefit from the high incarceration rates of prohibition. Furthermore, the more power rulers and political elites get, the more power they can sell and the more they can profit. Bottom line: There are perverse incentives for centralization, incentives which perpetuate and even ramp up power. A centralized State can be quite incompetent and inept, yet continue on.Darrel wrote:There is no slippery slope with decentralized power?
OTOH Smallness is simply inviable if it gets too small. Production on too small a scale doesn't get the economies of scale, so goes out of business. Legal systems with too few subscribing members similarly disband. There's no perverse incentives analogous to the ones for bigness which allow too small entities to survive, that I can see. In short, no slippery slope. An excellent book on this is The Breakdown of Nations by Leopold Kohr. His theme is "whenever something is wrong, something is too big."
When Bush is gone, everything will be all wonderfulness again, huh? Do you see why you come off as hopelessly naive from my perspective. Here we have the Dems, who will give Bush billions to continue the occupation, putting on a cynical "non-binding" show to gain political power - hoping to make one of their guys ruler. Dem John Kerry, the last Dem candidate for prez, was the NSA go-to guy for the Clipper Chip, the governments dream domestic spying technology. The Dems, at least the elites who run the show, have zero objection to torture so long at their guy is ruler. The notion that incentives don't matter, that reform is simply a matter of changing personnel, different pretty faces, seems incredibly counter-factual to me. It's the institution, stupid! Or as Edmund Burke put it when he was a young punk anarchist:Darrel wrote:Bush will be gone soon and if you listen to C-Span you will hear each day the Demo majorities in the house and senate arguing to change and draw attention to these problems largely Bush created problems regarding torture, war and domestic spying.
Yes - the State itself is the abuse!Burke wrote:Parties in religion and politics make sufficient discoveries concerning each other, to give a sober man proper caution against them all. The monarchist, and aristocratical, and popular partisans have been jointly laying their axes to the root of all government, and have in their turns proved each other absurd and inconvenient. In vain you tell me that artificial government is good, but that I fall out only with the abuse. The thing! The thing itself is the abuse!
