On a related note, Jonah Goldberg writes his G-File on Urban Dismay. On his way to make a point about that:
“The government” and “the state” are often used interchangeably by political scientists, journalists, lawyers, and politicians. And that’s often fine. But philosophically, I think there’s a real difference. Or at least the two words are good stand-ins for two very different things.
For our purposes, government is the legal institution that enforces the laws, provides for the common defense and public welfare and collects taxes for those ends. It doesn’t necessarily collect the garbage and run the sewers, but it’s the thing that makes sure those things happen.
The state is a more mystical concept. It’s like the guiding hand of society. All of those European eggheads—Hegel, Comte, Marx et al—saw it as the replacement for God, the means of shaping and directing society toward some destination. It’s the “vision” thing. What was it Hegel said? “Are you going to eat your fat?” No, I think that was Radar in M*A*S*H. But he did say the “state is the march of God on Earth.”
Various statist experts, politicians, activists, intellectuals believed they had a gnostic access to this vision and took it upon themselves to use the powers of the state to transform the people, collectively or individually, into an aesthetic or spiritual conception of what society should look like. […]
This kind of statism is a huge problem in national politics, and I reserve the right to continue to criticize it, endlessly, in both its right-wing and left-wing forms (because nationalistic statism and socialistic statism are both forms of statism). But at least it’s understandable at the national level. The psychology makes more sense to me. It’s more human to believe that the leaders of the whole country should have a vision of what the whole country should be like. I disagree with that worldview, passionately. But I get it.
I get it too. So maybe, given the useful distinction between "government" and "the state", Mr. Ramirez shoulda written "Statism" on Murthy's pill bottle instead.
Or we could just keep blurring the distinction, which I've been doing here for about twenty years. Mea Culpa, Jonah.
To be relentlessly topical, the devastating Los Angeles area fires reminded me of Andrew Koppelman's facile book Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed; his leading example of "delusion and greed" was a 2010 Tennessee episode where a fire department refused to fight a house fire because the owners had not paid their subscription fee.
Now: This was hardly happening in Libertopia: the fire department was city-owned, following the rules laid down by the city government's democratic processes.
But as we've seen in LA, an even more government-besotted area, the local fully-socialized fire departments do an obviously lousy job of fire prevention and suppression. So much so that people who can afford it are hiring private firefighters to protect their homes.
Which, predictably, caused widespread resentment of "the rich", not the inept response of government.
Also of note:
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Good question. Answer: meh. Deirdre McCloskey wonders What to Call Liberalism? She'd like a term that doesn't needlessly offend her friends, so…
So what to call the liberalism of Adam Smith and Mary Wollstonecraft and early J. S, Mill, and then people like Milton Friedman? What is often called “classical” liberalism, or in the U.S. “libertarianism,” both have their own problems. “Classical” makes liberalism sound out of date, which is incorrect. And “libertarianism” has never become clear in the minds of most Americans, even though its policies are in fact what most Americans want. My grandmother, born in the 1890s, had a good classical-libertarian principle: “Do what you want, but don’t scare the horses.” Yet some self-labeled libertarians in the U.S. these days are so coercively against any socialism that they’ve tilted fascist, and support Trump. Amazing. They scare the horses, and certainly me.
What’s my new label? “Sufficient” liberalism. I mean an equality of permission, not equality of income or opportunity—both of which involve coercion, and anyway are unattainable even roughly. But we can start giving people permission, tomorrow, by taking away the millions of regulations that clot the U.S. and the Brazilian economy. A woman can become an airline pilot, a Black can get a job in South Africa, poor people are allowed to live where they can pay the rent, without the state intervening, as it has, to segregate poor people in favelas.
No masters, no coercions. It suffices.
I don't think it's gonna catch on, Deirdre, but my respect for trying.
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It's not a floor wax either. Jacob Sullum looks at a insidious meme: 'The Constitution Is Not a Suicide Pact'. And we can blame SCOTUS Justice Robert H. Jackson, who started it of in his dissenting opinion in Terminiello v. Chicago:
"This Court has gone far toward accepting the doctrine that civil liberty means the removal of all restraints from these crowds and that all local attempts to maintain order are impairments of the liberty of the citizen," Jackson complained. "The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the Court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact."
In the decades since, that formulation has taken on a life of its own, cited as a justification for expanding government power and restricting individual freedom in situations far afield from the original case. The continuing influence of the "suicide pact" meme in legal and political debates is remarkable for two reasons. First, Jackson was expressing a view that the Supreme Court has emphatically and repeatedly rejected. Second, his concluding admonition was a rhetorical flourish, not a logical argument. Confusing the two invites shortcuts that sacrifice liberty on the altar of order.
Nevertheless, it wormed its way into the public discourse as if it were a winning argument. Jacob tells the interesting story.
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At least the pay is decent. George Will has advice for some of the folks under the dome: Republicans, enjoy ineffectual control of Congress while you have it.
How are you coping with the stress of life during today’s 43 “emergencies”? That’s how many of the 79 declared by executive orders or proclamations since 1979 are still extant. Several statutes empower the president to declare emergencies, thereby acquiring (by the count of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s law school) more than 130 standby statutory powers. The Cato Institute’s Gene Healy, in 2024 Senate testimony, said a 1934 law empowers the president to seize or close “any facility or station for wire communication” once he proclaims a threat of war. This, Healy said, is “a potential internet ‘kill switch.’”
The incoming president will be able, on a whim, to unilaterally discombobulate international commerce — and the domestic economy — with tariffs. Congress has lost interest in exercising its constitutionally enumerated power “to regulate commerce with foreign nations.”
In the meantime, my CongressCritter, Chris Pappas, is being effectual by…
Chief Maloney’s tragic death in the line of duty is remembered to this day, as is his legacy as a leader who worked with passion to make NH safer and stronger.
— Rep. Chris Pappas (@RepChrisPappas) January 11, 2025
It is a small token of our gratitude that we name this Post Office in Chief Maloney's honor.https://t.co/eH1yX6CTluTaking the brave Post Office-renaming stands, Chris. That's why you get the big bucks.
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