It seems to me that the left is the side supporting freedom right now. I don't think someone is free if they don't have the material resources to make their own decisions. That's to say nothing of minority rights and ending the war on drugs.
>I don't think someone is free if they don't have the material resources to make their own decisions.
So who is the one who is to be forced to provide them with said material resources ? They don't just magically appear. The vast majority of people with material resources have worked very hard to aquire them, very often by working very hard at producing material resources.
>That's to say nothing of minority rights
What rights are being denied to minorities ?
As someone who always saw myself on the left, being a proponent of universal healthcare and focused on class issues, I can no longer recognize myself on the left with them going all in on identity politics, dividing people not by economic class, but by immutable characteristics like race and gender.
Your first point is a sentiment that I hear very frequently. I think the reaction that your hard-earned material wealth is rightfully yours is completely fair. However, it's worth pointing out that other people may also work hard and still live in poverty. Poverty can be systemic, in that things you're born into can limit your opportunity. Further, people are sometimes faced with unexpected situations such as health problems or pandemics that can make them unable to work. Many people have proposed plans that pay to distribute more wealth to these people by taxing corporate profits and the super wealthy. Some people will make a personal sacrifice to do this, but these people may actually have a better life experience if the majority of those around them are suffering less.
> What rights are being denied to minorities ?
Until recently, the right to get married or adopt children, among other things. I see your point though: people of all skin colors are theoretically equal in the law. If by "dividing people" by "race and gender" you mean movements for criminal justice reform or to end police brutality toward minorities, I disagree that these movements should be divisive. They become divisive when non-minorities take offense at them, which can happen due to poor messaging from particular individuals. It can happen due to a lack of clarity about the actual goals of the movement. Some more extreme leftists might simply have views that I would also disagree with. But ultimately, "the left" doesn't hate non-minorities. When a movement is focused on minorities, it is to reaffirm that they suffer discrimination which they should not under the law. These movements focus on minorities not to say that others don't struggle too, but to bring attention to societal issues that continue to affect some types of people just because of their "immutable characteristics".
> So who is the one who is to be forced to provide them with said material resources?
Billionaires.
They took $50 trillion from the rest of us[1]. They are beyond capable of affording it.
> What rights are being denied to minorities?
Safety. Marriage. Financial stability. The list goes on.
> dividing people not by economic class, but by immutable characteristics like race and gender.
It isn't the left that did that. Race and gender were divided into economic classes by racists and sexists. Acting like that didn't happen only serves to perpetuate that oppression.
> Help your fellow man. Do not force others to do it for you at the point of a gun.
An alternative is that we could stop enforcing property rights at the point of a gun. What is more important; property or people? A selfish person in a society that provides for all may feel slighted but they will live comfortably. A selfish person in a society with strict protection of property can cause another person to die without lifting a finger. Frankly, if it's ethical to allow some individuals to die from neglect (thus losing everything of value) then it's at least as ethical to allow redistribution of some personal property (losing less than everything).
I don't see any practical difference between not being free to live life on your terms because of a government restriction or because of poverty.
The whole purpose of society is that people work together for the common good. When resources are not distributed such that that happens then I don't see anything wrong with redistributing them.
Of course there are other ways. I don't understand this myopic perspective.
Society has a problem: poor people exist. There are a UNIVERSE of possible solutions. Charitable organizations, churches, help from family - the list goes on and on and on.
Yet here you are, saying "I can't think of anything we can possibly do except point guns at not-poor people, take their money, and give it to poor people."
The crazy thing is that I believe you when you say it; I think you're saying it in good faith! I just can't fathom how you reached that conclusion. It's utterly nonsensical to me on its face.
> Charitable organizations, churches, help from family
Those "solutions" are as old as the problem.
They didn't work.
> I can't think of anything we can possibly do except point guns at not-poor people, take their money, and give it to poor people.
The gun pointing happens as a last resort, not first.
What you are telling me is that we should just wait around for the greediest people in the world to charitably give enough back.
That's just not going to happen. We all know it.
So what you are telling me is that we should just continue the status quo, because doing something about it is technically immoral.
Meanwhile, the wealthiest 50 Americans collect as much wealth as the poorest 165 million.
Tens of millions of Americans are in poverty[1]. Is that not immoral?
Approximately 14.3 million households had difficulty providing enough food for all their members due to a lack of resources[1]. Is that not immoral?
You are so obsessed with the threat to inconvenience people who have more wealth than you will ever see that you are willing to keep millions in poverty. Get off your high horse. Children are starving.
Absolutely not. I am saying that property, as it is right now, is not ethical, as all property in its current state was originally, or derives from something that was originally, stolen.
As a result, accepting the current order of property can only be justified by utilitarianism, which also dictates that there is no issue with redistribution if it is helpful.
In essence, private property is theft, but there is no feasible alternative (for now), so let's still have private property in a limited sense.
It can absolutely be reasoned away, pretending it's a absolute fact is dogma, not logic. Look at any of the many shady things Nestle has done with water rights and tell me that's ethical.
Pretending that property rights somehow are more real than human need is an unethical action.
The enforcement of property rights is literally the reason why the state was implemented. All property that one owns is theirs and not someone else's (or no one's) ultimately because of unjustifiable violence.
On this basis, property rights are not much more than a social construct and redistribution is not a problem if society deems that it is favorable to do so.
One can easily follow this all the way back to medieval Europe, at least in the Western world: early post-Roman European kings were just well-organized warlords, and for a very long time any idea of 'legitimate governance' was just a thin papering-over of the realpolitik involved in armies based on personal loyalty.
No, like the founders of the USA, I believe in natural rights. The right of people to be secure in their persons and their property being one of those rights.
If you and I get marooned on an unclaimed island and I construct a spear for hunting crabs, you have no right to my spear. I am within my natural rights to defend my property should you try to take it by force.
There is no natural right to private property. There is only something close to a right to your own labour.
You can make a claim to that spear, of course. It's the product of your labour, you would get to own it, and you made it with freely available resources. One would call this "personal property".
However, imagine this scenario. You and I get marooned on an unclaimed island. I claim the island before you get the opportunity. Because of my claim on this land, which now becomes my private property, I force you to give me that spear.
This is exactly what happened in all of the globe. People laid claim to land, resources and capital that they did not build, and this is precisely the base of all private property beforethen. If I were to get any object I own, I could trace my ownership of that object to someone that, at some point, violently decided that some land is theirs, and based on the idea that the land is theirs seized the product of the labour of various people who had no choice but to work it or die.
So, unless you agree that seizing land that was not yours violently is a reasonable way of generating ownership, you come to the conclusion that the ownership of essentially everything in our society is illegitimate, and can only be motivated for utilitarian reasons.
If you do, then you agree that I have a right to your spear :)
If you and I get marooned on an unclaimed island and I construct a spear for hunting crabs, you have no right to my spear. I am within my natural rights to defend my property should you try to take it by force.
The comment you are replying to says nothing about redistributing wealth...only that people should have the material resources they need. To your point, however, when people are not being payed appropriately for their productivity and executives are making excessive amounts of money than what one could ever need in a lifetime that is the truly fraudulent redistribution of wealth.
The left is abandoning enlightenment principles of individualism in favor of skin color. They define people based on external features rather than their actions or thoughts. That doesn't smell like freedom to me.
Ala, I am racist because I am a white person who is not racist.
I don’t know you do I’m not going to pretend to understand your beliefs based on a couple of comments in this thread.
Instead I wanted to try and reframe this in a way that is a lot more inline with how many people on the left talk about this issue which is in my mind fundamentally different from how I read your comments. I hope it offers a less inflammatory way to consider what often gets thrown under the umbrella of “identity politics”.
When trying to understand the root causes of problems and outcomes in society it’s often helpful to cut the data in certain ways to identify where patterns might be emerging or have existed for a long time.
This is basically the attempt to try and apply the scientific method to issues that simply can not be controlled in a lab environment.
If you were to take an issue like poverty or incarceration rates for example and then attempted to break those issues down through the context of education for example you might start to notice some interesting correlations.
However, there is nothing about this approach that does or should stop researchers from also looking at the data in the context of immutable traits either.
A big part of the conversation that is happening around these topics is that certain groups keep appearing again and again in ways that very few other groups do. The follow up question to that is obviously why?
This commonly gets reduced to comments such as the one you made like “I am racist because I am a white person who is not racist.” which is not at all what is being said.
I too am in the straight white male group and I’m not unaware of how often it can feel like that label is thrown around to the point where it can feel like a dirty word but I would beg you to put aside that initial knee jerk reaction and maybe consider that we as a society (not necessarily you personally) do in fact have some pretty serious issues that are going to overlap with immutable traits like gender, sexuality and race.
Critical race theory and its sister anti-racism reject liberalism by assigning blame, power, guilt, victimhood, privilege, etc., to individuals based on their race.
DiAngelo’s thesis [White Fragility]: All white Americans are racist. All white Americans are a product of white supremacy and are actively or unwittingly complicit in maintaining this power structure. If you say you are not racist, that is only proof that you are racist. If you believe you are not racist, same thing. Black people exist in America only to be oppressed by whites. In DiAngelo’s worldview, any progress black Americans have made is because white Americans have allowed such growth as pacifiers.
I think it's not controversial that employer provided health insurance is a silly mechanism. But animosity prevents significant progress away from the status quo.
It's disingenuous to claim that this is purely because of animosity. It is a calculated decision that some people decided that the status quo is better for them that what could be, and in various ways decide to enforce it.
Otherwise, how could you explain Obama (for all the ills he committed) taking Romney's healthcare plan, and then the entirety of the Republican magically turning against the plan that they themselves generated? It's not animosity, it is certainly calculated.
I am certainly not disingenuous. I don't know why you want to impugn my motives in this discussion.
I think there are a multitude of smaller problems to solve and smaller steps to take that would be utterly uncontroversial to the wider public. But they will not be considered because both sides are pushing for their big thing and locked into combative attitudes.
Same goes for immigration reform for that matter. There's plenty of low grade nonsense to clean up with legislation but the culture of controversy derails trying to find where consensus actually exists and acting on it.
A good positive example would be how criminal justice reform was actually attempted recently.
I don't think your motives are wrong, I have certainly myself refrained from facing reality in exactly such matters because the implications are grave.
Now, the main thing is this:
>But they will not be considered because both sides are pushing for their big thing and locked into combative attitudes.
This is not true, as per what I mentioned before. Obama took a Republican healthcare plan, and it was still gridlocked and framed as extremist.
The truth is that there are real interests in this country that actively don't want problems to be fixed, and that's the reason why there is so much low grade nonsense that gives you the idea that it's because both sides are intransigent, but past experiments show that trying to collaborate with the obstructionist party just leads to the ratchet effect [0].
In effect, there can never be consensus because the purpose of some is simply obstruction and dysfunction, which is made evident by what happened to Romney's healthcare plan. The only solution is to use an electoral breakthrough, pushed by a not-so-moderate message, to create a new fait-accompli and change the political landscape, otherwise you either fall prey to the ratchet effect or to gridlock.
I am not so sure that they like the freedom to do that but they see no other way to provide for themselves and their families. Such realities make it rather difficult to prioritize what is better in the long term over the more immediate need to eat.
While that's true, there's still some number of people who would genuinely rather have freelance and 'gig' jobs for one reason or another if they weren't dependent on the healthcare provided by a 'real' job.
The same goes for people who would attempt being entrepreneurs if all they had to worry about losing was money.
Here in the UK we pay literally half as much per person for healthcare for similar outcomes, and everyone gets covered with no cost at the point of use, no medical bankruptcy.
No one is talking about a free lunch, they are talking about a better, more efficient way of doing it.
No; the budget is going into insurance companies' budgets and pharma benefits budgets. There's a trillion-dollar industry that exists in the US solely to take money from people needing healthcare. That's where the money is going - look to the thing that doesn't exist elsewhere.
No, but some things are more efficient than other things. We aren't expecting health care to not cost anything.... we already spend more money than anywhere else on health care, and we get less!
We are saying "it is much more efficient and fair to have single payer health care"... it is not a free lunch... it is a cheaper, healthier lunch.
This is not true, and keeps getting brought up as if it were.
The rest of the developed world has _universal_ healthcare. In many countries it is provided through single-payer, in some it is through mandatory private insurance, in others it is a mix.
Where the United States stands alone is not the lack of a universal government program, but that we have many millions of people not covered by any health insurance system at all.
While it’s certainly true that America is not the most free country in the world, it’s still inside the top 50. What freedoms are you trying to exercise but are being stifled?
It's my opinion that freedom should be of primary importance in America, not feel good authoritarian inducing woo.