Show me the proof! Also, look at the multitude of predictions made under the assertion of global warming, and you will find them to be false. I have believed global warming to be false since it became world-wide news. No scientist could show proof that global warming existed. In spite of the facts, our government wastes billions of dollars on research and protection from global warming.
The government is in fact spending over 20 billion dollars a year for 18 different agencies engaged in global warming. Number 7: Abortion, abortion, abortion! I am going to make this short and sweet. I am tired of talking, and even more than that, of hearing about abortion. I stated in an earlier post though, that if my daughter were ever raped and became pregnant that I could not oppose her if she chose to abort the child.
I am against abortion, but I am not going to make many points here. Abortion is murder. If your for it I think you have issues. I do not believe it is right to murder a fetus. I think its sick. I wish it was not an issue, but it will always be. I will say this though; I believe this should be left to the states, as well as gay marriage. I do not believe the federal government should be tied up in social issues such as these. Each state should decide whether to legalize both of these issues or not.
The federal government should butt out. Then if a state votes for one or both of these issues, deal with it however you see fit. Number 6: Next I want to talk about government welfare. Under President Franklin Roosevelt the social security act was signed in Since then it has mutated and conformed to changing times and added payouts from the government.
Now let me say I agree that social security was a needed proposal, but it again should have been given to the states. The federal government took control and completely mishandled our money. Now were being told that social security is going bankrupt from borrowing and spending of the trust fund. Millions of Americans count on that money and millions more pay into that fund everyday in the hopes of receiving their own slice of that pie in the future.
Honestly, state funded social security pensions would be a better solution. I also have to mention food stamps. No one can really tell me the exact number of Americans that are on food stamps being that it is constantly changing. I do know though that a person on welfare is twice as likely to abuse drugs or alcohol. I know several people receiving food stamps. This portion of welfare was put in place to help out families with struggling incomes, get groceries to feed their family. It was intended to help buy a portion of a families monthly groceries.
I have however seen, with my own eyes, families on food stamps receive hundreds and even over a thousand dollars a month in food stamps.
Again this is federal government mismanagement. I do not agree with receiving food stamps, but only as a last resort. I think this also could be a good program, but I do not believe it should be a means to buy a families entire months worth of food.
It should also be regulated to ensure illegal immigrants, and habitual drug users are not receiving a benefit, while selling narcotics, and not paying taxes. The states could take this program and manage it properly, and even tax it if they choose. Before I go on I just want to say that it may seem that I have all the faith possible in the state government, and that is just not true. My point here though is that the constitution was established with small fed and big state government, and we have swayed away from that.
Instead the three branches are slapping us with their power and there is nowhere to run to avoid their legislation. If the states had the power they would make laws and regulations that would ultimately attract citizens.
So with that being said let us digress. Number 5: Liberals believe in world peace! This is unfortunately a very naive notion. Liberals would have you believe that America is a bully and that everyone else in the world falls victim to our might. This is of course ridiculous. There is no showing them reason though. If you can look me in the eye and honestly tell me that we do not need a strong military to fight off those that wish to destroy us, then I will immediately consider you foolish.
There are multiple terrorist organizations in the world that would kill an American on sight alone if they could. If you dare to question me I have seen it first hand. I wish that world peace was a realistic hope, but the fact is, that it is not.
Many liberals would have you believe that we are free and safe from harm, so do not need a strong military. In all actuality though, the reason we are free and usually safe from harm is because of our strong military.
I believe history speaks for itself on this matter, so I will not trouble you with reading statistics; although, I do love statistics. Number 4: If you do not watch the news, then my next view may not make much sense to you. Our greatest ally, and the only democracy in the hostile middle east is currently involved in a war with Gaza.
Yes that is right Israel is at war; and what is America doing to aid the Holy Land? Yes, the administration is standing by while Israel is being attacked everyday. Such a person is not subject to compulsions, critically reflects on her ideals and so does not unreflectively follow custom, and does not ignore her long-term interests for short-term pleasures.
And today it is a dominant strain in liberalism, as witnessed by the work of S. In the words of the British socialist R. On this positive conception, a person not prohibited from being a member of a Country Club but too poor to afford membership is not free to be a member: she lacks an effective power to act. Positive freedom qua effective power to act closely ties freedom to material resources.
Education, for example, should be easily available so that all can develop their capacities. An older notion of liberty that has recently resurfaced is the republican, or neo-Roman, conception of liberty, which has roots in the writings of Cicero and Niccolo Machiavelli [].
According to Philip Pettit,. On this view, the opposite of freedom is domination. The ideal liberty-protecting government, then, ensures that no agent, including itself, has arbitrary power over any citizen. This is accomplished through an equal disbursement of power.
Each person has power that offsets the power of another to arbitrarily interfere with her activities Pettit, The republican conception of liberty is certainly distinct from both Greenian positive and negative conceptions. When all dominating power has been dispersed, republican theorists are generally silent about these goals Larmore Thus, in contrast to the ordinary negative conception, on the republican conception the mere possibility of arbitrary interference is a limitation of liberty.
Republican liberty thus seems to involve a modal claim about the possibility of interference, and this is often cashed out in terms of complex counterfactual claims. It is not clear whether these claims can be adequately explicated Gaus, ; cf.
Larmore, Some republican theorists, such as Quentin Skinner , Maurizio Viroli 6 and Pettit 8—11 , view republicanism as an alternative to liberalism. When republican liberty is seen as a basis for criticizing market liberty and market society, this is plausible Gaus, b. However, when liberalism is understood more expansively, and not so closely tied to either negative liberty or market society, republicanism becomes indistinguishable from liberalism Ghosh, ; Rogers, ; Larmore, ; Dagger, Liberal political theory, then, fractures over the conception of liberty.
In practice, another crucial fault line concerns the moral status of private property and the market order. From the eighteenth century right up to today, classical liberals have insisted that an economic system based on private property is uniquely consistent with individual liberty, allowing each to live her life —including employing her labor and her capital — as she sees fit. Indeed, classical liberals and libertarians have often asserted that in some way liberty and property are really the same thing; it has been argued, for example, that all rights, including liberty rights, are forms of property; others have maintained that property is itself a form of freedom Gaus, ; Steiner, A market order based on private property is thus seen as an embodiment of freedom Robbins, Unless people are free to make contracts and sell their labour, save and invest their incomes as they see fit, and free to launch enterprises as they raise the capital, they are not really free.
Classical liberals employ a second argument connecting liberty and private property. Here the idea is that the dispersion of power that results from a free market economy based on private property protects the liberty of subjects against encroachments by the state. Although classical liberals agree on the fundamental importance of private property to a free society, the classical liberal tradition itself is a spectrum of views, from near-anarchist to those that attribute a significant role to the state in economic and social policy on this spectrum, see Mack and Gaus, Most nineteenth century classical liberal economists endorsed a variety of state policies, encompassing not only the criminal law and enforcement of contracts, but the licensing of professionals, health, safety and fire regulations, banking regulations, commercial infrastructure roads, harbors and canals and often encouraged unionization Gaus, b.
Although classical liberalism today often is associated with libertarianism, the broader classical liberal tradition was centrally concerned with bettering the lot of the working class, women, blacks, immigrants, and so on. The aim, as Bentham put it, was to make the poor richer, not the rich poorer Bentham, []: vol. Consequently, classical liberals treat the leveling of wealth and income as outside the purview of legitimate aims of government coercion.
Three factors help explain the rise of this revisionist theory. Believing that a private property based market tended to be unstable, or could, as Keynes argued [] , get stuck in an equilibrium with high unemployment, new liberals came to doubt, initially in empirical grounds, that classical liberalism was an adequate foundation for a stable, free society.
Here the second factor comes into play: just as the new liberals were losing faith in the market, their faith in government as a means of supervising economic life was increasing. This was partly due to the experiences of the First World War, in which government attempts at economic planning seemed to succeed Dewey, —60 ; more importantly, this reevaluation of the state was spurred by the democratization of western states, and the conviction that, for the first time, elected officials could truly be, in J.
Ritchie proclaimed:. They entrench a merely formal equality that in actual practice systematically fails to secure the kind of equal positive liberty that matters on the ground for the working class. And in his Principles of Political Economy Mill consistently emphasized that it is an open question whether personal liberty can flourish without private property , vol.
For Rawls, the default is an equal distribution of basically income and wealth; only inequalities that best enhance the long-term prospects of the least advantaged are just. As Rawls sees it, the difference principle constitutes a public recognition of the principle of reciprocity: the basic structure is to be arranged such that no social group advances at the cost of another — Many followers of Rawls have focused less on the ideal of reciprocity than on the commitment to equality Dworkin, And in one way that is especially appropriate: in his later work Rawls insists that welfare-state capitalism does not constitute a just basic structure — Then someone offers Wilt Chamberlain a dollar for the privilege of watching Wilt play basketball.
Before we know it, thousands of people are paying Wilt a dollar each, every time Wilt puts on a show. Wilt gets rich. The distribution is no longer equal, and no one complains. Must you then prohibit everything—no further consuming, creating, trading, or even giving —so as not to upset the perfect pattern? Notice: Nozick neither argues nor presumes people can do whatever they want with their property.
Nozick, recalling the focus on connecting property rights to liberty that animated liberalism in its classical form, notes that if there is anything at all people can do, even if the only thing they are free to do is give a coin to an entertainer, then even that tiniest of liberties will, over time, disturb the favored pattern.
Nozick is right that if we focus on time slices, we focus on isolated moments, and take moments too seriously, when what matters is not the pattern of holdings at a moment but the pattern of how people treat each other over time. Even tiny liberties must upset the pattern of a static moment. By the same token, however, there is no reason why liberty must upset an ongoing pattern of fair treatment. A moral principle forbidding racial discrimination, for example, prescribes no particular end-state.
Such a principle is what Nozick calls weakly patterned, sensitive to history as well as to pattern, and prescribing an ideal of how people should be treated without prescribing an end-state distribution. It affects the pattern without prescribing a pattern.
And if a principle forbidding racial discrimination works its way into a society via cultural progress rather than legal intervention, it need not involve any interference whatsoever. Some may promote liberty, depending on how they are introduced and maintained. See Schmidtz and Brennan chap. Accordingly, even granting to Nozick that time-slice principles license immense, constant, intolerable interference with everyday life, there is some reason to doubt that Rawls intended to embrace any such view.
It is the arrangement of the basic structure which is to be judged, and judged from a general point of view. Rawls was more realistic than that. Instead, it is the trend of a whole society over time that is supposed to benefit the working class as a class. To be sure, Rawls was a kind of egalitarian, but the pattern Rawls meant to endorse was a pattern of equal status, applying not so much to a distribution as to an ongoing relationship. Nozick showed what an alternative theory might look like, portraying Wilt Chamberlain as a separate person in a more robust sense unencumbered by nebulous debts to society than Rawls could countenance.
And respecting what Wilt brings to the table is the exact essence of respecting him as a separate person. Schmidtz and Brennan, chap. If it is to serve as the basis for public reasoning in our diverse western societies, liberalism must be restricted to a core set of political principles that are, or can be, the subject of consensus among all reasonable citizens.
Liberal theories form a broad continuum, from those that constitute full-blown philosophical systems, to those that rely on a full theory of value and the good, to those that rely on a theory of the right but not the good , all the way to those that seek to be purely political doctrines. Nevertheless, it is important to appreciate that, though liberalism is primarily a political theory, it has been associated with broader theories of ethics, value, and society.
Indeed, many believe that liberalism cannot rid itself of all controversial metaphysical Hampton, or epistemological Raz, commitments. Following Wilhelm von Humboldt [] , in On Liberty Mill argues that one basis for endorsing freedom Mill believes there are many , is the goodness of developing individuality and cultivating capacities:.
This is not just a theory about politics: it is a substantive, perfectionist, moral theory about the good. On this view, the right thing to do is to promote development or perfection, but only a regime securing extensive liberty for each person can accomplish this Wall, This moral ideal of human perfection and development dominated liberal thinking in the latter part of the nineteenth century, and much of the twentieth: not only Mill, but T.
Green, L. Hobhouse, Bernard Bosanquet, John Dewey and even Rawls show allegiance to variants of this perfectionist ethic and the claim that it provides a foundation for endorsing a regime of liberal rights Gaus, a.
That the good life is necessarily a freely chosen one in which a person develops his unique capacities as part of a plan of life is probably the dominant liberal ethic of the past century. On this view, respect for the personhood of others demands that we refrain from imposing our view of the good life on them. Only principles that can be justified to all respect the personhood of each. We thus witness the tendency of recent liberal theory Reiman, ; Scanlon, to transform the social contract from an account of the state to an overall justification of morality, or at least a social morality.
A moral code that could be the object of agreement among such individuals is thus a publicly justified morality. Morality, then, is a common framework that advances the self-interest of each. The claim of Hobbesian contractualism to be a distinctly liberal conception of morality stems from the importance of individual freedom and property in such a common framework: only systems of norms that allow each person great freedom to pursue her interests as she sees fit could, it is argued, be the object of consensus among self-interested agents Courtland, ; Gaus a: chap.
The continuing problem for Hobbesian contractualism is the apparent rationality of free-riding: if everyone or enough complies with the terms of the contract, and so social order is achieved, it would seem rational to defect, and act immorally when one can gain by doing so.
Turning from rightness to goodness, we can identify three main candidates for a liberal theory of value. We have already encountered the first: perfectionism. Insofar as perfectionism is a theory of right action, it can be understood as an account of morality. Obviously, however, it is an account of rightness that presupposes a theory of value or the good: the ultimate human value is developed personality or an autonomous life. Competing with this objectivist theory of value are two other liberal accounts: pluralism and subjectivism.
In his famous defence of negative liberty, Berlin insisted that values or ends are plural, and no interpersonally justifiable ranking among these many ends is to be had.
More than that, Berlin maintained that the pursuit of one end necessarily implies that other ends will not be achieved. In this sense ends collide. In economic terms, the pursuit of one end entails opportunity costs: foregone pursuits which cannot be impersonally shown to be less worthy.
There is no interpersonally justifiable way to rank the ends, and no way to achieve them all. Each person must devote herself to some ends at the cost of ignoring others. For the pluralist, then, autonomy, perfection or development are not necessarily ranked higher than hedonistic pleasures, environmental preservation or economic equality. All compete for our allegiance, but because they are incommensurable, no choice can be interpersonally justified.
The pluralist is not a subjectivist: that values are many, competing and incommensurable does not imply that they are somehow dependent on subjective experiences.
But the claim that what a person values rests on experiences that vary from person to person has long been a part of the liberal tradition. To Hobbes, what one values depends on what one desires []: The perfectionist, the pluralist and the subjectivist concur on the crucial point: the nature of value is such that reasonable people pursue different ways of living.
To the perfectionist, this is because each person has unique capacities, the development of which confers value on her life; to the pluralist, it is because values are many and conflicting, and no one life can include them all, or make the interpersonally correct choice among them; and to the subjectivist, it is because our ideas about what is valuable stem from our desires or tastes, and these differ from one individual to another.
All three views, then, defend the basic liberal idea that people rationally follow different ways of living. But in themselves, such notions of the good are not full-fledged liberal ethics, for an additional argument is required linking liberal value with norms of equal liberty, and to the idea that other people command a certain respect and a certain deference simply by virtue of having values of their own.
To be sure, Berlin seems to believe this is a very quick argument: the inherent plurality of ends points to the political preeminence of liberty see, for example, Gray: It is here that subjectivists and pluralists alike sometimes rely on versions of moral contractualism. Those who insist that liberalism is ultimately nihilistic can be interpreted as arguing that this transition cannot be made successfully: liberals, on their view, are stuck with a subjectivistic or pluralistic theory of value, and no account of the right emerges from it.
These vague and sweeping designations have been applied to a wide array of disputes; we focus here on controversies concerning i the nature of society; ii the nature of the self. Liberalism is, of course, usually associated with individualist analyses of society. I, sec. In the last years of the nineteenth century this individualist view was increasingly subject to attack, especially by those who were influenced by idealist philosophy.
Liberals such as L. Hobhouse and Dewey refused to adopt radically collectivist views such as those advocated by Bernard Bosanquet , but they too rejected the radical individualism of Bentham, Mill and Spencer.
F Mummery and J. Hobson, ; J. Moreover, liberalism consists of principles not only for a just society but also for the design of a state capable of sustaining that society in a world that is far from ideal. This concern for creating a capable and effective state is critical to understanding how and why liberalism works. Constitutionalism itself, and even more so a liberal constitution with its emphasis on the protection of individual rights, is a system of enabling constraints.
The constraints shield individuals from tyranny, but they also strengthen the state's power to act on behalf of its citizens. Checks and balances, requirements for transparency in decision making, and public accountability for performance reduce the odds of capricious, reckless, or self-interested decisions by those in power.
Public discussion invites ideas and information that autocrats do not receive or are unlikely to heed. A constitutional state that observes the rule of law is more likely to abide by its promises, pay its debts, and enjoy better credit and lower interest rates. Guarantees of rights, including property rights, enable individuals to make long-term plans and investments and create a more productive economy that redounds to general advantage.
Guarantees of religious freedom allow people of different faiths to cooperate under a political order that does not threaten to extinguish any of the various theological doctrines they support.
In short, it is an error to see guarantees of liberty as a source of state weakness. From its beginnings in 17th- and 18th-century England and America, constitutional liberalism contributed to the development of states that proved not only economically but also militarily successful, even when challenged by regimes more devoted to martial values.
The classical liberal tradition, however, had severe limitations. The liberalism of the 18th and early 19th centuries was not democratic in a sense we would recognize today: The majority of people -- men without property, racial minorities, and women -- were denied political rights and full citizenship.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, laissez-faire economics provided a framework of law and policy for industrial capitalism's dynamic growth, but it left most working people in insecurity and poverty.
In the same era, while often favoring social reform at home, liberal imperialists supported Western colonialism. The resulting conflicts and disasters nearly brought liberalism to ruin. The old liberal order of limited government, classical economics, and colonialism went up in flames amid total war and the Great Depression, and fascism or communism could easily have emerged from the wreckage to dominate the world.
Modern liberalism, however, transformed its classical inheritance into a genuinely democratic politics that proved stronger and more effective in both war and peace than its critics expected. Liberals now called for true political equality for all, aimed to bring raw capitalism under control in the interests of an expanded circle of opportunity, and supported national self-determination for all peoples and new forms of cooperation among states to promote democracy, human rights, and international peace and security.
Every step of the way, conservatives objected to these movements toward a wider democratic partnership, but as of the midth century, liberals had won the argument decisively and had built an electoral majority in support of it. The prevailing view in the liberal democracies held that the extension of political and social rights and economic regulation was not only just but also the basis of a more productive society.
And cooperative international organization, far from being a naive delusion, was plainly necessary to meet the twin threats posed by communism, on the one hand, and nuclear extinction, on the other. Liberals differ from conservatives today not just about government's proper role but more fundamentally about how to produce power and wealth and advance equal rights to freedom in the process. Liberals have insisted that government can take on broader functions without sacrificing individual freedom as long as the law provides strong safeguards against arbitrary power.
Modern liberalism, therefore, calls not just for broader social protections but also for stronger guarantees of civil liberties and less government regulation of private moral life. In contrast, modern conservatism has become a combination, in varying degrees, of devotion to the free market and social traditionalism.
Each side of conservatism has provided a justification of inequalities that liberalism has attempted to reduce or eliminate. The two political philosophies offer contrasting ways of resolving conflicts among liberties.
Conservatives have generally given higher priority to property rights and, accordingly, to the rights of those with property, whereas liberals have given higher priority and broader scope to other constitutional liberties and civil rights, often those of the historically disadvantaged.
Conservatives and liberals have also responded differently to a phenomenon that did not exist in the 18th century when constitutional liberalism took shape: the modern corporation.
While conservatives have treated private corporations as analogous to individuals and deserving of the same liberties, liberals have regarded corporations as a phenomenon of power, needing control like government itself. The discipline of power that constitutional liberalism imposes upon the state modern liberalism attempts to impose on the corporation, albeit not in the same way. As liberal reforms gained ground during the past two centuries, conservatives predicted that they would be morally destructive, economically ruinous, and politically suicidal, while socialist critics maintained that the socioeconomic changes advocated by liberals were merely cosmetic and would make no difference at all.
Modern liberalism's historical record turned out to be better than either of these camps anticipated. With increased social expenditures, labor and environmental regulation, and other reforms, the liberal capitalist democracies became more productive, mortality as well as birth rates fell, per capita income rose, and the circle of prosperity expanded. Rather than destroying private wealth, the modern liberal state made it more secure.
In describing these changes, I do not mean to suggest that liberals from the start had a clearly developed theory guiding reforms, much less all the right answers. Rather than formulating policy from speculative axioms, reformers beginning in the midth century increasingly devoted themselves to the gathering and analysis of socioeconomic data.
In America, the measures adopted during the Progressive era, New Deal, and Great Society were often ad hoc and experimental, and many failed. But partly through better knowledge, partly by trial and error, liberal governments discovered that certain forms of limited state intervention could help bring the promise of a free and just society closer to fulfillment while reducing the waste of human and physical resources and improving economic performance.
Modern liberalism has never been ruled by a theory in the way that free-market conservatism and Marxian socialism have been. A pragmatic emphasis on experience and evidence -- on how things work in practice -- has been critical in making liberalism work.
Part of the explanation for continued economic expansion during the long rise of public expenditure in the capitalist democracies is that much of the spending has represented investment that otherwise would not have been made. The underlying principle is no different from the one that Adam Smith enunciated in writing of the legitimate role of the state in financing public works and institutions, "which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or small number of individuals, to erect and maintain … though it may frequently do much more than repay [the expense] to a great society.
What Smith failed to anticipate, however, was how broadly this principle would apply. The development of an urbanized, industrial economy and, more recently, the increased centrality of knowledge and innovation require investments in public goods and services that only government is in a position to make. These are typically complementary to private investment, rather than competitive with it, and involve not just tangible capital assets such as roads, ports, and other aspects of physical infrastructure, but intangible assets as well such as scientific knowledge, education, and public health.
The general point here is that much of what democratic liberalism calls for on grounds of equal rights to opportunity and security also provides a return in economic productivity. In the United States and many other countries, universal primary schooling came on the heels of an expanded franchise. This historical connection between democracy and public education was one of the main reasons that rising taxes and public expenditures did not harm economic growth.
The redistributive state turned out also to be, in critical respects, a productive, developmental state, generating wealth as well as power. If we want to know why modern liberalism has worked out economically as well as it has, this is a large part of the answer. Moreover, social benefits such as unemployment insurance proved not only to stabilize individual incomes but also to function as "automatic stabilizers" for the economy. Because government outlays on benefits rise whenever the economy sags, social spending helps to blunt recessions and prevent a self-reinforcing spiral of decline.
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