Topic: Political Philosophy

Election Pamphlets Raise Questions

By
Chris Edwards

I live in Virginia, which is a battleground state, and my mailbox has been littered with political propaganda in recent weeks. Here are some questions for the candidates:

  • George Allen (R) for Senate promises to “protect defense jobs from devastating cuts” while “restoring fiscal discipline in Washington.” But Allen was already in Washington and his party didn’t restore discipline. Is he proposing anything different this time?
  • Rep. Jim Moran (D) promises to “stand up for women” and protect their “rights” by ensuring they “have access to affordable contraception.” But what about men? Shouldn’t they get a tax credit for condoms or something?
  • Romney/Ryan (R) promise to “begin reducing the deficit and balancing the budget.” But how? Apparently not with defense savings because they will “protect and strengthen Virginia’s military jobs,” nor with Medicare savings because they will “preserve and strengthen” that program.
  • Romney/Ryan (R) promise to “champion small business.” But what about big business? Big business employs tens of millions of Americans and is subject to more intense global competition than is small business. So why do R/R want to specially favor small businesses?
  • Tim Kaine (D) for Senate says that he “dramatically increased the percentage of state contracts issued to small, women-owned and minority-owned businesses.” But are women’s businesses more important than men’s businesses? And is Kaine saying that he will use government power to favor minority businesses over other businesses? How does that square with his promise to create opportunities “for all”?
  • Tim Kaine (D) for Senate also promises to “strengthen Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid.” Is he saying that even though rising spending on these programs will cause government finances to implode in coming years, he wants to spend even more on them? Does Kaine think it’s fair to enslave young people with even more debt from these programs just to gain votes from greedy geezers?  

In sum, I’m seeing a lot from both parties about “strengthening” spending, “protecting” big government, and “championing” some groups of Americans over others. What about voters who want their leaders to strengthen individual rights, protect equality under the law, and champion the United States Constitution? 

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Political Philosophy

Segmenting the Libertarian Vote: Tea Partiers, Civil Libertarians, and Libertarian Independents

By
David Kirby

Last week, I posted data from the latest Reason-Rupe poll showing 77 percent of libertarians supporting Romney—the highest percentage share of the libertarian vote of any Republican presidential candidate since 1980.

Many commenters on Twitter and Facebook were horrified! Surely, many reasoned, this large vote share is a measure of antipathy for Obama rather than affinity for Romney. Others commented that any libertarian supporting Romney doesn’t deserve to be considered a “true” libertarian.

I wanted to reflect on this last comment. Who should count as a libertarian?

In our Cato research, David Boaz, Emily Ekins and I have taken to using a relatively broad definition of a libertarian. Why? Compared to other political words like “capitalism” or “socialism,” fewer know the word “libertarian.” Many who hold libertarian views call themselves “moderate” or “independent” or even “conservative.” Few polls even offer respondents an option to identify themselves as “libertarian.” Those that do reveal confusion about what the word means.

Given all this, we have preferred to probe respondents’ basic background beliefs about the role of government, using questions commonly asked on national polls. Libertarians give different answers than liberals or conservatives. For instance, in the Reason-Rupe poll, we chose three questions to screen libertarians. This gives us a 20 percent group of libertarian likely voters. Other methods and questions produce slightly higher or lower estimates.

But what if you define libertarians more strictly, say, only libertarians who self-identify as such? Or libertarians who also prioritize civil liberties, like support for the legalization of marijuana? Or libertarian independents? Or tea party libertarians? The chart below breaks out these different segments of the broader libertarian vote.* (Thanks again to Emily Ekins for sharing the crosstabs.)

  • Civil liberties libertarians – among libertarians (by our broader definition) who also favor “legalizing small amounts of marijuana for personal use,” Romney support drops to 63 percent. If you add Gary Johnson to the list of candidates, Johnson wins 17 percent, pulling mostly from Obama voters. While many civil libertarians held out hope for Obama, he has continued many of the Bush era policies. For instance, Obama’s Justice Department continues to raid medical marijuana dispensaries in California and support Bush era surveillance policies.
  • Tea party libertarians – the data show that half of tea party is libertarian. Among libertarians who also support the tea party, Romney would win his largest percentage vote share at 93 percent. Though interestingly, tea party libertarians seem as willing as other libertarians to consider voting for a third party candidate Gary Johnson. Johnson wins 13 percent of tea party libertarians, if you add him to the candidate list.
  • Libertarian independents – among libertarians who also consider themselves “independent” (like the voters Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie profile in their book Declaration of Independents), 71 percent would vote for Romney, 23 percent Obama. Interestingly, among libertarian independents, Gary Johnson pulls a larger share away from Obama voters than Romney voters.
  • Self-identified libertarians – respondents who self-identify as “libertarian” are the smallest of these groups at only 4 percent of likely voters. Among self-identified libertarians, Romney would win 66 percent of the vote and Obama 32 percent. Perhaps not surprisingly, self-identified libertarians are most willing to consider voting for a Libertarian Party candidate, with 51 percent saying they’d vote for Johnson, if he is offered him as an option.

So who are the true libertarians? Take your pick!

My own perspective is that the libertarian brand seems broader and more self-aware today than ever before—and that’s a good thing. Ron Paul has certainly played a big role in this. It also may be that in confusing economic times, people are more open to the libertarian ideas long espoused by Cato, Reason, FreedomWorks, and other free-market organizations. In interviews at the grassroots level, Emily and I found more and more voters who act like libertarians, talk like libertarians, and reason like libertarians.

And who knows—as pollsters, strategists, and pundits pick up on the importance of the libertarian vote, more politicians may start to behave like libertarians.

————

*Note: One should be cautious when comparing such small subsets of voters, as the statistical margin of error increases, making comparisons problematic. For instance, Reason polled only 787 likely voters with a margin of error +/- 4%. Among the broadest 20 percent of libertarians, the margin of rate increases to +/- 7%. Among self-identified “libertarians,” who represent only 4 percent of likely voters, the margin of error increases to +/- 15%. For instance, given this large margin of error, we cannot say that Romney’s vote share among self-identified libertarians is statistically different than Romney’s vote share among libertarians more broadly. But among self-identified libertarians, the jump in support for Johnson is large enough to be statistically significant.

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Political Philosophy

Another UN Push for Global Taxation

By
Daniel J. Mitchell
But I guess I’m not very persuasive. The bureaucrats have just released a new report entitled, “In Search of New Development Finance.”
As you can probably guess, what they’re really searching for is more money for global redistribution.
But here’s the most worrisome part of their proposal: they want the UN to be in charge of collecting the taxes, sort of a permanent international bureaucracy entitlement.
I’ve written before about the UN’s desire for tax authority (on more than one occasion), but this new report is noteworthy for the size and scope of taxes that have been proposed.
Here’s the wish list of potential global taxes, pulled from page vi of the preface:

Below is some of what the report has to say about a few of the various tax options. We’ll start with the carbon tax, which I recently explained was a bad idea if it were to be imposed on Americans by politicians in Washington. It’s a horrible idea if imposed globally by the kleptocrats at the UN.

…a tax of $25 per ton of CO2 emitted by developed countries is expected to raise $250 billion per year in global tax revenues. Such a tax would be in addition to taxes already imposed at the national level, as many Governments (of developing as well as developed countries) already tax carbon emissions, in some cases explicitly, and in other cases, indirectly through taxes on specific fuels.

Notice that the tax would apply only to “developed countries,” so this scheme is best characterized as discriminatory taxation. If Obama is genuinely worried about jobs being “outsourced” to developing nations like China (as he implies in his recent attack on Romney), then he should announce his strong opposition to this potential tax.

But don’t hold your breath waiting for that to happen.

Next, here’s what the UN says about a financial transactions tax:

A small tax of half a “basis point” (0.005 per cent) on all trading in the four major currencies (the dollar, euro, yen and pound sterling) might yield an estimated $40 billion per year. …even a low tax rate would limit high-frequency trading to some extent. It would thus result in the earning of a “double dividend” by helping reduce currency volatility and raising revenue for development. While a higher rate would limit trading to a greater extent, this might be at the expense of revenue.

This is an issue that already has attracted my attention, and I also mentioned that it was a topic in my meeting with the European Union’s tax commissioner.

But rather than reiterate some of my concerns about taxing financial consumers, I want to give a bit of a compliment to the UN: the bureaucrats, by writing that “a higher rate … might be at the expense of revenue,” deserve credit for openly acknowledging the Laffer Curve.

By the way, this is an issue where both the United States and Canada have basically been on the right side, though the Obama administration blows hot and cold on the topic.

Now let’s turn to the worst idea in the UN report. Its authors want to steal wealth from rich people. But even more remarkable, they want us to think this won’t have any negative economic impact.

…the least distorting, most fair and most efficient tax is a “lump sum” payment, such as a levy on the accumulated wealth of the world’s richest individuals (assuming the wealthy could not evade the tax). In particular, it is estimated that in early 2012, there were 1,226 individuals in the world worth $1 billion or more, 425 of whom lived in the United States, 90 in other countries of the Americas, 315 in the Asia-Pacific region, 310 in Europe and 86 in Africa and the Middle East. Together, they owned $4.6 trillion in assets, for an average of $3.75 billion in wealth per person. A 1 percent tax on the wealth of these individuals would raise $46 billion in 2012.

I’ll be the first to admit that you can’t change people’s incentives to produce in the past. So if you steal wealth accumulated as the result of a lifetime of work, that kind of “lump sum” tax isn’t very “distorting.”

But here’s some news for the UN: rich people aren’t stupid (or at least their financial advisers aren’t stupid). So you might be able to engage in a one-time act of plunder, but it is naiveté to think that this would be a successful long-term source of revenue.

For more information, I addressed wealth taxes in this post, and the argument I was making applies to a global wealth tax just as much as it applies to a national wealth tax.

Now let’s conclude with a very important warning. Some people doubtlessly will dismiss the UN report as a preposterous wish list. In part, they’re right. There is virtually no likelihood of these bad policies getting implemented any time in the near future.

But UN bureaucrats have been relentless in their push for global taxation, and I’m worried they eventually will find a way to impose the first global tax. And if you’ll forgive me for mixing metaphors, once the camel’s nose is under the tent, it’s just a matter of time before the floodgates open.

The greatest threat is the World Health Organization’s scheme for a global tobacco tax. I wrote about this issue back in May, and it seems my concerns were very warranted. Those global bureaucrats recently unveiled a proposal—to be discussed at a conference in South Korea in November—that would look at schemes to harmonize tobacco taxes and/or impose global taxes.

Here’s some of what the Washington Free Beacon wrote:

The World Health Organization (WHO) is considering a global excise tax of up to 70 percent on cigarettes at an upcoming November conference, raising concerns among free market tax policy analysts about fiscal sovereignty and bureaucratic mission creep. In draft guidelines published this September, the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control indicated it may put a cigarette tax on the table at its November conference in Seoul, Korea. …it is considering two proposals on cigarette taxes to present to member countries. The first would be an excise tax of up to 70 percent. …The second proposal is a tiered earmark on packs of cigarettes: 5 cents for high-income countries, 3 cents for middle-income countries, and 1 cent for low-income countries. WHO has estimated that such a tax in 43 selected high-/middle-/low-income countries would generate $5.46 billion in tax revenue. …Whichever option the WHO ends up backing, “they’re both two big, bad ideas,” said Daniel Mitchell, a senior tax policy fellow at the Cato Institute. …Critics also argue such a tax increase will not generate more revenue, but push more sales to the black market and counterfeit cigarette producers. “It’s already a huge problem,” Mitchell said. “In many countries, a substantial share of cigarettes are black market or counterfeit. They put it in a Marlboro packet, but it’s not a Marlboro cigarette. Obviously it’s a big thing for organized crime.” …The other concern is mission creep. Tobacco, Mitchell says, is easy to vilify, making it an attractive beachhead from which to launch future vice tax initiatives.

It’s my final comment that has me most worried. The politicians and bureaucrats are going after tobacco because it’s low-hanging fruit. They may not even care that their schemes will boost organized crime and may not raise much revenue.

They’re more concerned about establishing a precedent that international bureaucracies can impose global taxes.

I wrote the other day about whether Americans should escape to Canada, Australia, Chile, or some other nation when the entitlement crisis causes a Greek-style fiscal collapse.

But if the statists get the power to impose global taxes, then what choice will we have?

Topics: 
Finance, Banking & Monetary Policy, International Economics and Development, Political Philosophy, Tax and Budget Policy

The First Amendment and Zombies

By
Jason Kuznicki

I’m pretty much a free speech absolutist. I know that’s an epithet, but to me it’s kind of like being an arithmetic absolutist: There are right and wrong answers. Emotional attachment to the right answers might be kooky – but it sure beats being attached to the wrong ones.

In Slate, Eric Posner reminds us that the rest of the world doesn’t love the First Amendment. Even Americans weren’t always free speech absolutists, Posner notes; for much of our history, the state blithely ignored the First Amendment whenever it became inconvenient. American governments cheerfully arrested anarchists, communists, pacifists, and purveyors of birth control literature. They prosecuted publishers of works by James Joyce and William S. Burroughs.

It might be better, Posner suggests, if we went back to the good old days.

That’s what we call an argument from authority. Arguments from authority are like placeholders. They say, “Someone else made this argument for me.” As a result, an argument from authority can only ever be as good as the argument that the authority has actually made. It can’t be any better. If it’s a placeholder for a good argument, that’s sometimes allowed. If it’s trying to hide a bad argument, that’s a problem.

So what’s the real argument here? Posner is vague. He just says a whole lot of people have made one.

That’s true. But it’s also a tricky move on his part, because it’s hard for me, or for anyone, to refute all of the anti–free speech arguments that billions of different people have made all over the world during the last several centuries. To say nothing of the arguments that people might make in the future.

In cases like this, the burden of proof is on the person who wants to argue for a restriction in liberty: It’s what philosophers, notably Anthony de Jasay, refer to as the presumption of liberty.

Some arguments for restricting liberty might be plausible, even convincing. But if they are, then surely they can and should be made explicitly. Bear in mind that some liberty-restricting arguments are going to be fallacious, and we need to sort these out before we can act with any justification. Until we do, liberty is what we have to go on. Those who wish to restrict will need to meet the burden of proof.

Digging a little deeper, Posner offers what might be called half an argument:

A totem that is sacred to one religion can become an object of devotion in another, even as the two theologies vest it with different meanings. That is what happened with the First Amendment. In the last few decades, conservatives have discovered in its uncompromising text— “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech”—support for their own causes. These include unregulated campaign speech, unregulated commercial speech, and limited government. Most of all, conservatives have invoked the First Amendment to oppose efforts to make everyone, in universities and elsewhere, speak “civilly” about women and minorities. I’m talking of course about the “political correctness” movement beginning in the 1980s, which often merged into attempts to enforce a leftist position on race relations and gender politics.

Let’s grant for the sake of discussion that the freedom of speech is just another totemic religion. (It’s absurd to say so, for reasons I’ll soon explain. But bear with me.) Granting Posner’s claim, I might very well ask: Why should my religion – the bare, unmitigated, absolute freedom of speech – yield to someone else’s religion, which has at best an equal (and not a greater) moral force? That is, even if we admit Posner to be correct, all we have is an irresolvable dilemma. In cases of irresolvable dilemma, the tie goes to my bliss. Why not?

But Posner does have a bit of a point here. Sometimes defending free speech is a little too easy. To get personal here: I’m a gay atheist who loves bacon, martinis, and compound interest. Hooray for capitalism! I also think women’s hair is awesome, and they should be able to wear it however they please. I’m not exactly going to be sympathetic to the Muslim religion, and if The Innocence of Muslims had any wit or cleverness about it, I’d be laughing my ass off. (Spoiler alert: It doesn’t.)

In other words, this particular film isn’t such a great test for me. A better one, both for me and for lots of others, might be the building of a mosque in downtown Manhattan, not far from the site of the World Trade Center. Or the protests of the Westboro Baptist Church. Or Slate publishing an odious article suggesting that we capitulate to violent thugs on the other side of the world.

Any of those might do. In each, I’ve got some serious disagreements with the message. And I support free expression anyway. If you do too, then congratulations. You’re probably a free speech absolutist.

But is free speech absolutism a religion? No. It’s not. It’s not even an ordinary aspect of public policy. It’s a meta-political commitment.

I’m sorry for the fancy term. Sometimes they’re actually helpful. Free speech is a thing that we do because we trust that, by doing it, we get better politics (and better religion, and better art, and better science, and…). The airing of different ideas, even of bad ideas, is not something that we hold as a revelation from God, or from the mystical Founders, or from the high authority of the Supreme Court in the era of Earl Warren. We support free speech because we believe it conduces to all sorts of other good things – including good public policy.

Posner has to deny that, and he does:

Suddenly, the disparagement of other people and their beliefs is not an unfortunate fact but a positive good. It contributes to the “marketplace of ideas,” as though we would seriously admit that Nazis or terrorist fanatics might turn out to be right after all. Salman Rushdie recently claimed that bad ideas, “like vampires … die in the sunlight” rather than persist in a glamorized underground existence. But bad ideas never die: They are zombies, not vampires. Bad ideas like fascism, Communism, and white supremacy have roamed the countryside of many an open society.

This is some weak argument. The point of free speech is not and has never been that Naziism is a “positive good.” That would be a bare self-contradiction, because Naziism entails censorship. Nor do we necessarily admit that Nazis can be talked out of their beliefs (although, on the margins, some certainly were).

We air odious beliefs so that each of us – who are not Nazis or otherwise fanatics – may learn to argue properly against them. Are they zombies? Yes! Do you remember how every single fantasy video game used to start with killing, like, a whole bunch of zombies? That’s political education in a free society. You kill zombies until you acquire the skills to do more interesting things.

Posner ends with a nod to the protesters in Cairo and Islamabad, whose grievances, he implies, must go beyond a stray YouTube video. What would we say to them?

In some cases, I would protest the very same things. Like them, I too am concerned about American drone strikes. I don’t like how they are changing international relations. I don’t like what they are doing to American civil liberties. I certainly don’t approve of killing innocent bystanders in Pakistan.

I protest these things. Peacefully. Can they peacefully protest as well? Overwhelmingly, the answer is yes. Well then. Come, let us reason together.

Topics: 
Law and Civil Liberties, Political Philosophy

Michael Gerson’s Pimply Adolescence

By
David Boaz

Michael Gerson, the former Bush speechwriter who gave us big-government conservatism and is now the #2 neocon columnist at the Washington Post, writes more about libertarianism than any other writer of such prominence. That would be great if he understood it, or could represent libertarianism fairly in his criticisms. Over the past few years he has denounced libertarianism as “morally empty,” “anti-government,” “a scandal,” “an idealism that strangles mercy,” guilty of “selfishness,” “rigid ideology,” and “rigorous ideological coldness.”

And here’s today’s entry:

A few libertarians have wanted this fight [Mitt Romney’s reference to 47 percent of Americans being “dependent on government”] ever since they read “Atlas Shrugged” as pimply adolescents. …

Republican politicians could turn to Burkean conservatism, with its emphasis on the “little platoons” of civil society. They could reflect on the Catholic tradition of subsidiarity, and solidarity with the poor. They could draw inspiration from Tory evangelical social reformers such as William Wilberforce or Lord Shaftesbury. Or they could just read Abraham Lincoln, who stood for “an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.”

Instead they mouth libertarian nonsense, unable to even describe some of the largest challenges of our time.

Well, let’s see here. Burke’s little platoons get a whole chapter in Charles Murray’s libertarian book In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government and a good bit of attention in this Cato essay based on it. They’re people, not governments. The Catholic principle of subsidiarity, as explained by Pope Pius IX in Quadragesimo Anno, holds that “Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do.” Which sounds pretty libertarian to me. And it doesn’t seem to recommend turning local schools and individual marriages over to the federal government, as Messrs. Bush and Gerson endeavored to do.

Libertarianism is a philosophy of individual rights, civil society, and limited government. Those may be unfamiliar concepts to Mr. Gerson, but he really should, you know, read a book before presuming to criticize them.

I wonder what Gerson read when he was a pimply adolescent. Maybe the Bible, Burke, and Lincoln? Does he think that those ideas can be dismissed by referring to their readers as “pimply adolescents”? Is that what passes for conservative argument these days?

And why oh why can’t the Washington Post add a libertarian columnist to its array of lefties, welfare liberals, conservatives and neocons?

Topics: 
Political Philosophy

It’s Roy Childs Week!

By
David Boaz

Over at Libertarianism.org, we’re celebrating our old friend Roy Childs, once the anarchist enfant terrible of the mostly Objectivist libertarian movement, later a Cato foreign policy analyst, editor of Libertarian Review, and editorial director of Laissez Faire Books. Libertarianism.org has published its first ebook, Anarchism and Justice, a collection of Roy’s essays on anarchism available in book form for the first time. And they’re posting never-before-seen videos, including this one on the history of the libertarian movement from the Cato Summer Seminar in Political Economy:

Today I posted my own reminiscences about Roy at the Libertarianism.org blog, Free Thoughts:

When I got involved in the tiny libertarian movement back in the early 1970s, I had the impression that its two leading intellectuals were Murray Rothbard and the much younger Roy Childs. Rand, Mises, and Hayek were out there as great thinkers; Milton Friedman was regarded with some skepticism as a “Chicagoite”; but the fledgling movement seemed centered around Rothbard and Childs….

In two stints as editor of Libertarian Review and as editor of Laissez Faire Books, Roy brought his keen insight and radical vision to a dazzling range of topics: the nature of rights, neoconservatism, foreign policy, Third World land reform, Iran, Ayn Rand’s influence on libertarianism, and much more. He seemed to have read everything and to know how it fit into his overall worldview. And he knew everybody. What fun it would be to read his correspondence – or better yet, listen to his phone calls – with Rothbard, Friedman, Nathaniel Branden, Barbara Branden, Thomas Szasz, and Robert Nozick. You can read his formal interviews with some of those people in the Libertarian Review archives….

Watch for more videos this week.

Topics: 
Cato Publications, Political Philosophy

The ‘47 Percent’ and the Fundamental Attribution Error

By
Julian Sanchez

There are a number of things wrong with Mitt Romney’s now infamous suggestion that the 47 percent of Americans who don’t pay federal income tax will automatically support larger government, because those “who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them” can never be persuaded to “take personal responsibility and care for their lives.” For one, as both Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein note, the people who aren’t paying income tax are overwhelmingly either college-aged or elderly retirees who aren’t making much taxable income, not able-bodied layabouts in their 30s and 40s. In other words, they’re mostly not some distinct parasite class, but rather ordinary, hard-working people who either already have paid or will soon be paying quite substantial taxes.

The deeper mistake, however, is what social psychologists have dubbed the “fundamental attribution error”: the nigh universal human tendency to ascribe actions and outcomes to immutable personal characteristics rather than situational factors. We assume too quickly that someone behaves kindly or callously because they are a “kind person” or a “callous person”—yet research suggests that minor variations in circumstances can elicit either type of behavior from the very same people.

Presumably there are some people out there who really do just shun responsibility and think others should work to provide them with life’s necessities—but it’s hard to believe they’re more than a very tiny fraction of the millions who depend in some way on government benefits. Most of them are just responding rationally to the circumstances of the world they live in. In a society where young people know they’ll soon be taxed to support educational subsidies, of course they’ll accept the government college loans they’ll later be expected to fund. In a society where the payroll taxes that support a government pension system leave workers with 15.3 percent less in their paychecks to save and invest for old age, of course they’re going to rely heavily on the system they’ve been paying into when they retire. But to infer that this reveals something about people’s desire for big government is a little like wondering why 18th century Americans were so much fonder of agriculture than we are. People mostly live in the world that’s presented to them.

This is an equal opportunity observation, however. Progressives, after all, often make essentially the same fallacious argument as Romney, though usually not put quite as offensively: if you benefit from government largesse—whether in the form of direct supports like Social Security and Medicare, or because the state “generously” offers to spare your earnings through tax credits or deductions—then obviously you’re logically required to fall to your knees in gratitude, and you must be either confused or some kind of hypocrite if you perversely persist in supporting smaller government. Net recipients of government aid, in this view, ought to have the political commitments Romney wrongly ascribed to them.

All of this seems confused. People want goods like health care and financial security. In a social and political environment where those things are provided by government, people will accept them from government. In an environment where they’re provided by the private sector, people will acquire them privately. In the long run, the nature of the broader system will probably influence the frequency in the population of deeper character traits and dispositions like responsibility or resilience—but you can’t legitimately infer a whole lot about people’s preferences between systems from their behavior within systems.

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Political Philosophy

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