No comments? I'm surprised! I love this rumination Aaron. It's so well presented it's hard to disagree with what you have laid out.
I think a lot if the "woes of the world" exist because the individual likes to transfer their responsibility onto others. There is a tendency to pass the buck and say, I don't have to care about the interests of others, I hired/elected/chose "so- and-so" to do that for me.
If all individuals live as if they are but one essential thread in an intricately woven cloth of many threads and if they do not do their "threadly part", the entire cloth will unravel, we'd have a much different collective experience.
A nation's rights are the sum of the rights of its people. A nation without people cease to be.
Thanks for that info. I think the “free to choose” stuff from Friedman works until it doesn’t. We’re certainly there now. Madison’s point about the need for government being to protect against the nature of man is forgotten with the Ayn Rand / Austrian world view where self service is the only objective. Thanks for reading and subscribing!
No worries mate. Fun fact. As Australia has a lower and upper house - but Representatives (lower) and Senate (higher) with a Prime Minister drawn by convention from the Reps and different powers of both (and voting systems) but no President- the Governor General represents the monarch as notional head of state - but has no veto power it’s a combination of US and UK - called the “Washminster System”. Combined the best of both. And avoids (a) an unelected upper house (Lords in UK) or a President issuing exec orders and having a veto power.
I think you are right on this. We have some responsibility to our neighbors to participate in the experience together. It does not entitle me to their rights or their stuff, it does require that I see them as my equal and as someone I have a responsibility towards. Thanks for reading and commenting!
This is a very powerful comment, and I was once asked, being Australian, why we tend to take a more collective view, as a majority (excludes far right and far left nutcases) - we’re all on this island together. However in the US there is a very individualized, as I described it, world view.
Many things feed into that but “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” evoked a sense of the primacy of the individual, rather than the collective whole - which taken to it’s extreme can be either a sovereign citizen or anarchist.
In our own Constitution it is framed differently - s.51 articulates the matters in respect of which the Commonwealth of Australia - the collective whole, as represented by its Parliament (with other matters being State and Territory responsibility can make laws:
“for the peace, order and good government of the Commonwealth” - very similar to Canada etc.
Worth bearing in mind that an individualized sense is most prevalent in the more conservative view. I note what Margaret Thatcher once said “there is no such thing as society, there are only individual men and women. And I’ll just note there that Thatcher made it her life’s work to destroy societies and communities, particularly in North of England.
No comments? I'm surprised! I love this rumination Aaron. It's so well presented it's hard to disagree with what you have laid out.
I think a lot if the "woes of the world" exist because the individual likes to transfer their responsibility onto others. There is a tendency to pass the buck and say, I don't have to care about the interests of others, I hired/elected/chose "so- and-so" to do that for me.
If all individuals live as if they are but one essential thread in an intricately woven cloth of many threads and if they do not do their "threadly part", the entire cloth will unravel, we'd have a much different collective experience.
A nation's rights are the sum of the rights of its people. A nation without people cease to be.
Thanks for that info. I think the “free to choose” stuff from Friedman works until it doesn’t. We’re certainly there now. Madison’s point about the need for government being to protect against the nature of man is forgotten with the Ayn Rand / Austrian world view where self service is the only objective. Thanks for reading and subscribing!
No worries mate. Fun fact. As Australia has a lower and upper house - but Representatives (lower) and Senate (higher) with a Prime Minister drawn by convention from the Reps and different powers of both (and voting systems) but no President- the Governor General represents the monarch as notional head of state - but has no veto power it’s a combination of US and UK - called the “Washminster System”. Combined the best of both. And avoids (a) an unelected upper house (Lords in UK) or a President issuing exec orders and having a veto power.
I think you are right on this. We have some responsibility to our neighbors to participate in the experience together. It does not entitle me to their rights or their stuff, it does require that I see them as my equal and as someone I have a responsibility towards. Thanks for reading and commenting!
This is a very powerful comment, and I was once asked, being Australian, why we tend to take a more collective view, as a majority (excludes far right and far left nutcases) - we’re all on this island together. However in the US there is a very individualized, as I described it, world view.
Many things feed into that but “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” evoked a sense of the primacy of the individual, rather than the collective whole - which taken to it’s extreme can be either a sovereign citizen or anarchist.
In our own Constitution it is framed differently - s.51 articulates the matters in respect of which the Commonwealth of Australia - the collective whole, as represented by its Parliament (with other matters being State and Territory responsibility can make laws:
“for the peace, order and good government of the Commonwealth” - very similar to Canada etc.
Worth bearing in mind that an individualized sense is most prevalent in the more conservative view. I note what Margaret Thatcher once said “there is no such thing as society, there are only individual men and women. And I’ll just note there that Thatcher made it her life’s work to destroy societies and communities, particularly in North of England.
When it comes to evil, libertarians being to mind the 'underpants gnomes" of South Park.
Libertarians do not handle evil very well at all. It's as though it doesn't exist, banished by the "invisible hand" to irrelevancy.
Nope.