Better living through Big Government?

From ourworldindata.org

U.S. federal debt as percentage of GDP; from wikipedia

Now, I'm not going to say that GDP equates to better living, but it does contribute to higher living standards which, other things being equal, makes for greater opportunities for better living (more leisure time to study/think about philosophy, for example, or improved pharmaceutical technology under 'better living through chemistry' assumptions, for another).  But let's say we look at this from the standpoint of purely economic outcomes (i.e., GDP per capita, perhaps adjusted for levels of inequality assuming that's particularly important to do...).  And look at the two graphs above in combination, covering roughly the same period of United States history.  Assume standard data/knowledge that any informed citizen should know about, concerning the size of government in the USA (spending, regulatory burden) both before and after the mid-20th century.  (The first graph, GDP per capita, is on a logarithmic scale so that we don't get the J-curve effect from exponential growth, i.e., would show a straight line over time for a constant rate of growth.)

Do the graphs show that big government has produced better economic outcomes, without undue or deadweight cost?

I mean, I might understand how the debt incurred by World War II may have been necessary, and relative to the economy was being paid down in the subsequent decades, but since that time the welfare state has ballooned.  Non-military spending since the beginning of the Great Society programs in the 1960s has increased from roughly 19 percent to roughly 28 percent of GDP.  What are the benefits that have come about from these additional costs?  From the GDP-per-capita graph, it appears hardly any benefit has happened compared to what came before.  Meanwhile, the national debt relative to GDP has increased considerably and is projected to go yet higher.  (I can only assume, based on my inquiries over the years into this matter, that this is due to the actuarial deficits in the Social Security and Medicare "trust funds" that those in the know have heard and talked about - the figures running in the tens of trillions of dollars (present value terms) if not over $100 trillion - are beginning to materialize; turning Keynes on his head, as it were, the long run is now arriving.

What the data show, to me, is that Big Government has brought the USA a large cost, without an added economic benefit.  Am I missing something crucial here?  Is it that economic growth rates tend to slow as economies mature, and that Big Government and its associated deficits/debt have kept the growth rate roughly the same, and that perhaps the added costs of Big Government are worth this?    Is there a particularly compelling reason to believe this?  Is it that per capita GDP could manage to keep up its growth rate under the strains of Big Government (greater government spending and regulation as a share of GDP) only if the federal government went into structurally higher levels of debt (as a share of GDP)?  How do we tell?  And how does the dynamic of accelerated globalization in the past half-century affect this analysis?

Is the American layperson in a good epistemic position to decide whether trading off liberty for Big Government (and you'd have to bastardize the meaning of "liberty" to think it's anything other than this) is worth both the economic outcomes as well as the effects on the national ethos and character?  Do the decline and fall of empires throughout history have anything to warn us about here?  Better get that philosophical education going, or risk an intensified shitshow, huh?

A libertarian social safety net

For reasons the merits of which are not altogether clear to me, a great many people have been habituated into the thought that a social-welfare safety net has to be administered, coercively (at the point of a gun), by the state.  We're not even talking here about emergency measures that perhaps only a state-scale entity could take during a deep recession or depression, or during a deadly virus outbreak (there's one I have readily in mind at this very moment), but rather an ongoing, cradle-to-grave, offensive-to-liberty, welfare state.

Consider: the United States had, by today's standards, a very small federal government, outside of wartime, for the first century-plus of its existence.  Somehow the people managed to get by without all of today's largesse; somehow it managed to develop into a world power with a per-capita GDP growth rate not unlike what came after.  As for what has come since, non-military spending at all levels of government (federal, state, local) has steadily increased to over 30 percent of GDP today, even as GDP has expanded many-fold during that time.

On its face, this indicates that it's not some pressing, life-or-death need that feeds the welfare-state mentality, but rather a mentality reflecting a contempt for principles of liberty (to adopt a phrase used in the title of a Walter Williams book).

(As for pressing, life-or-death needs, there will be, for the foreseeable future given foreseeable technological and production frontiers, such pressing needs at the margins.  Even the "successful" (using a specifically statism-inflected moral standard) Nordic-style welfare states still have nonzero poverty rates, e.g., around 5% in "Denmawk!"  And the economically-advanced nations continue to hoard wealth out of the reach of the desperately needy peoples of Africa and elsewhere; part of the prevailing welfare-state mentality is that "universal healthcare as a matter of human rights" doesn't extend to such geographically less lucky peoples.  That is, the pressing-needs-at-the-margins argument that is the wedge in the door welfare-statists use to get us to the 30-percent-of-GDP level we have today, is selectively not expanded to cover the entire world.  The expenses would then supposedly be too unreasonably demanding of the wealth-producers' talents, energies, time, and lives, see - that is, the global top x% selfishly lives high while letting others die.  As for a sustainable, i.e., capital-intensive route to economic development for the geographically unlucky people, transfers of already-produced wealth from altruistic first-worlders, to thereby be consumed by the unlucky ones, won't cut it, however warm and fuzzy it makes the altruistic ones feel.  Only in the era of globalized capitalism has the global poverty rate been declining (dramatically).)

Human beings flourish as members of communities.  That's a point well-recognized by sages like Aristotle.  But it's a category error to lump "community" in with "state" or government.  A sine qua non of state institutions is physical force, i.e., compulsion or threat at the point of a gun.  Under the classic libertarian analysis, physical force must not be initiated or introduced into human affairs; its only proper use is to repel or redress initiated force.  ("But what about x, y, z, this that and the other thing, be it public goods, public health emergencies, depressions, etc.?"  Is it really that such pressing needs and concerns can't be addressed by non-state means, or is there a failure of imagination involved?  And is even a hardcore libertarian analysis not amenable in any way to libertarian interpretations of the invasiveness to human autonomy that is a public health threat?  Are we even really sure that economic depressions come from the operations of a fully free market under fair legal constraints?  Are the likes of David Friedman just out to lunch?)

Now, my vision for an ideal social order is something like this: Aristotelian-eudaimonist-perfectionist ethical norms, under some wide or universal recognition of the idea of better living through philosophy (including philosophy for children), combined with libertarian social-political norms.  (Are there such things as incorporated cities even in an 'anarcho-capitalist' framework envisioned by Friedman et al?  There are incorporated other things, so I don't see why not.  So there may be cities, but perhaps not city-states - presumably the form of polity of primary focus for an ancient Greek philosopher - cities being localized and more under direct control of the territorial participants.  So, would such cities have the (delegated) rights to regulate the size of soft drink you can purchase within the city limits?  More on that in just a moment.)  Under such a social framework, based on eudaimonist or flourishing norms alone, there would be a large private-sector-based social safety net, probably operating under the virtue-based norm of aid that Rand/Galt promulgated in Atlas Shrugged (and which Rand-bashers refuse to acknowledge, having lazily/recklessly caricatured her egoism in base, non-virtue-based terms).

So let's say I am posed the question, "If you could eliminate the ongoing cradle-to-grave welfare state right now, given all its offenses to human liberty, would you advocate for that?"  But under scrutiny, the terms of the question are a moot point.  Hypotheticals or counterfactuals should be treated with all the seriousness they deserve, which is to say, they need to consider not merely the consequent but the preconditions for the antecedent.  (That is to say, hypotheticals or counterfactuals are open to abuse in the absence of proper context-keeping.)  That is to say, there is no conceivable scenario, under proper constraints for conceiving things, in which the welfare state is going to be eliminated right now.  (Properly constrained conceiving - as distinct from, say, imagining - doesn't permit conceiving of pigs who can fly unaided, hence the saying.  No proper concept of "pig" allows for it; it would drop the context of how we came to form and maintain the concept.)  The prevailing norms of American society won't allow for it.  The people would have to be converted to the Aristotelian-etc. principles I note and link to above, or be moved considerably in such a direction, or some such widespread values-alteration.

Would cities or other territorial communities make laws or regulations about soft drink sizes, or sexual practices, or other matters of virtue?  Or is there something about the libertarian norm that reflects and informs how people ought to treat one another generally speaking?  Or more exactly, is it something about what explains, grounds, or informs the libertarian norm (linking again) that involves a perhaps-judgmental yet laissez-faire attitude toward how people conduct their lives?  I mean, let's say that rather than paternistically regulating soft drink purchases, people apply Rand/Galt's virtue-based approach and condition social aid on either past virtuous behavior or on education for future virtuous behavior?  I think that this eudaimonist-libertarian way of thinking, actually present but largely implicit or inchoate in a great number of American people, helps explain what they find so offensive about Mayor Bloomberg's paternalism (which flows over into the mentality behind his highly intrusive "stop-and-frisk" policies, a mentality I don't see being extricated from his worldview all that soon, the same as with the elitist hubris behind his comments about farming skills).  Anyway, eudaimonist-libertarian social norms would emphasize education toward people exercising their best judgment, and then leaving it up to them to exercise their judgment given their own context of knowledge and hierarchy of values.  Like, duh?

To sum up: Like perhaps quite a lot of libertarians, I'm all for a robust social-welfare safety net and other virtues of sociality and community, just not at the point of a gun.  And with enough imagination (fueled by an intellectual perfectionism and/or the kind or quality of thinking behind Nozick's appallingly neglected framework for utopia) as well as ample benevolence, wouldn't it be a better safety net than the one currently existing?

[Addendum: Under a broadly prevailing culture of Aristotelian intellectual perfectionism, would there be even nearly as much need for social safety net institutions, or would people be a lot more self-sufficient in that regard?  I urge much properly-constrained imaginative conceiving in this regard.  Much like Rand, and contrary to the usual lazy caricatures of her, I have a very high view of human potentialities even as regards the less talented; while I don't envision a repeal of the bell curve, I envision a marked 'rightward' shifting of it under culturally Aristotelian conditions.]

Does Bezos exploit Bezos?

(A sequel to the original.)

The enemies of capitalism have a perverse (mis)understanding both of its basic moral principles and of the workings of the free market, which - in light of Rand's integration of the two points in Atlas Shrugged (and in "What is Capitalism?") under the theme of "the role of the mind in man's existence" - come to the same thing.  The way they typically employ the phrase "means of production" indicates their failure and/or refusal to grasp Rand's point that the mind/intellect/reason is the prime mover of the production process, i.e., the source of value-added over and above both technologically primitive means (natural resources excluding the most economically pivotal natural resource, the human mind) and the prevailing economic and technological infrastructure at any given point in time.  (Considerably more than anyone else, there's one man's vision behind Amazon.com.)

The anticapitalist ignorance/fallacies involved are well represented by Bernie Sanders' statement to Bloomberg at the Feb. 19 debate: "You know what Mr. Bloomberg? It wasn’t you who made all that money. Maybe your workers played some role in that as well. And it is important that those workers are able to share the benefits also."  No one said that Bloomberg created the entire value of his company; what economics experts would say, however, is that the people involved in the running of his business were each paid roughly proportional to their marginal value-added contribution.  Bernie's language would indicate that he thinks there's some kind of (exploitative) zero-sum rather than win-win thing going on here; this kind of language/tendency is pretty widespread among socialists, notwithstanding the dramatic rise in both population and living standards in the era of modern capitalism.

(Sanders followed the above statement with the following, also a familiar one from enemies of capitalism; we'll call it the "alienation argument": "When we have so many people go to work every day and they feel not good about their jobs, they feel like cogs in a machine. I want workers to be able to sit on corporate boards as well, so they can have some say of what happens to their lives."  The arguments involved here can't be covered in a brief paragraph of post.  But the gist of this problem, as best as I understand it, is that Bernie and socialists are talking here about a human problem, not a capitalism one, and it's not a problem I see being solved by the traditional socialist solutions about "seizing the means of production (sic)" or other forcible measures of putting "the workers" more in charge of decisions about the running of firms.  That being said, I'm all for voluntary 'worker'-empowerment arrangements that even a Randian 'left-libertarian' like Roderick Long gets behind.  And in any event, how do the rare, entrepreneurial skills of a Bezos get put to their optimal use under socialistic proposals?)

Sanders' statement about the "workers" creating much of the money is standard for socialist-talk and an ingrained tendency toward thinking in terms of a labor theory of value (LTV) under some guise or other.  The most (in)famous proponent of LTV, Karl Marx, had to qualify the LTV in such ways as to make it a truism.  To make a long story short, a CEO of a company qua such (i.e., not qua shareholder in the firm, which I address in a moment) is in the category of highly skilled labor, which represents a multiple of simple or unskilled labor.  And CEOs are known to often make many multiples of the lesser-skilled laborers under his or her command.  But the real villain in the Marxian/socialist framework, the source of alienation and exploitation, is the category of capital (in its privately-owned version, that is).  It's not the CEO that exploits, it's the shareholders (the capitalists) who are in the position to exploit the labor of the CEO and everyone else working in the firm.

Now, Bezos' salary as CEO is a mere $81K.  The vast bulk of his compensation comes from the value of the shares in the company he founded and runs.  IOW, in the Marxist/socialist "understanding," the shareholder-value part of the equation represents exploitation.  And Bezos is only a roughly 1/6 shareholder in Amazon, meaning to the tune of 5/6 of the company's value, Bezos the skilled-laborer-CEO is beholden to shareholder-capitalists.  It's so unfair and alienating.  (Ludwig von Mises among others went through considerable pains to make the point that entrepreneurs and capitalists are beholden to customers.  Is that what's unfair and alienating, in the final analysis?  Is the Marxist/socialist objection really about the inequalities in wealth and income arising from differences in ability to satisfy market demand?)

But the whole Marxian/socialist analysis runs into a problem that Rand solves, when we think through how Bezos qua capitalist/shareholder supposedly exploits the workers (including Bezos qua CEO)?  The question that Marx/socialists fail to answer but Rand does answer, is whether and how Bezos' shareholder-based net worth is a more or less accurate reflection of the value-added he generated as prime mover behind Amazon's success.  Never mind whether or how the net worth of other shareholders in Amazon and other companies reflect how they generated value-added through their skills, savings-and-investing, and savings-and-investing skills or vision.  (Warren Buffett - net worth of roughly $90B or 5th largest in the world - made his fortune through pure investing/finance skills an vision.  What role for a Buffett's finance skills in a socialist-style economy?  And if a highly-and rarely-skilled person holds out not merely for the minimal level of compensation that would bring forth performance, but rather holds out for what the market will bear, is that especially objectionable?)

Anyway, in 2019, Jeff Bezos divorced from his wife, Mackenzie, and as a consequence of the divorce settlement she became currently the 23rd wealthiest person in the world, with a net worth of roughly $44B.  She's not the CEO; she's not usually credited with being the prime mover behind Amazon's success.  From 2019 onward, she draws returns from Amazon's productive capacity qua pure capitalist.

So, using Marx/Sanders/socialist logic, does Mackenzie exploit Jeff?

Authoritarian regimes vs. knowledge/honesty

The basic gist goes something like this: Authoritarian regimes such as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) (see here for some of the horrors they're up to under the current dictator), defunct Communist regimes, the Nazi Party, and the Iranian theocracy rule by heavy censorship and punishment of dissenting voices.  This means, I believe, one of two things:

(1) "Ideas so good that they're mandatory"

(2) These regimes tacitly confess that their ideological dictates can't win in the free, fair and open marketplace of ideas, which means their dictates are likely fundamentally flawed or false, with evil/destructive consequences to be expected for so many concerned/affected.  By being forcibly imposed, these ideological dictates have not received a proper vetting to accountably distinguish mere opinion from knowledge.  This being so, the likes of Xi Jinpeng don't know that they're "leading" their nations in a good or healthy direction; as far as they know, they're doing just the opposite.  The coronovirus outbreak is the tip of the iceberg, and that's just this one authoritarian regime.

You might readily guess which of these two interpretations I subscribe to.  Heck, do any conscientious philosophers disagree about this?

The core libertarian principle explained

I'm using the term 'libertarian' in its specifically political sense, not the (indeterminist) free-will sense, as per the following image:

The basic libertarian principle is often phrased in terms of 'self-ownership' - the principle that one is the rightful owner and therefore has exclusive rights of disposal or control over one's own physical person (body-mind; faculties; abilities; energies; time; life-activities) - and, by further reasoning, exclusive rights of disposal or control over the productive fruits of applying one's personal resources in action (property rights, including the right to start and own/control a business of one's own, or pool capital with others, whatever one freely chooses).

Now, in the header I put the word "explained", and in so doing I'm both giving an essential description of the core libertarian principle as well as a why-account, as in why do people possess an exclusive right of 'self-ownership' and classic, essentially Lockean property rights.

The core libertarian 'self-ownership' principle reformulated is provided in the image above: one person's life is not another's (or others', as in a majority/mob) to dispose of.

I take the libertarian principle to be some kind of undeniable moral truism although its precise specification is a matter of controversy.  Is it consistent with any form of welfare or subsistence rights that Rand explicitly denies?  (And for reasons I will get into shortly I regard Rand as preeminent exponent of the libertarian idea.)  If it is undeniable, then it means that whatever other ethical/moral principles we can all reasonably agree upon after due deliberation, they all must occur within the constraints of libertarian 'self-ownership'.

Now, as to the reformulated wording.  The most directly comparable formulation of "one person's life is not another's to dispose of" or "my life is not yours to dispose of" in the literature is Prof. Hospers' "other men's lives are not yours to dispose of," in his early-1970s article, "What Libertarianism Is."  But it's a safe bet that his primary influence in this regard was his series of conversations and correspondence with Ayn Rand in the early '60s.  And the evidence that it originated with Rand is a passage in Atlas Shrugged (1957) where the hero, John Galt, asks the Head of State (heh heh) Mr. Thompson (heh heh), what he has to offer him, and the panicked (heh heh) and account-overdawn (heh heh) Mr. Thompson says, "I'm offering you your life" or words to that effect, and Galt replies, "It's not yours to offer, Mr. Thompson."  (Of course, anyone who has followed these things knows, Hospers, a widely respected figure in his profession, is recognized in particular for his expertise in aesthetic theory, and he's a big fan of Atlas Shrugged.)

Now, the core libertarian self-plus-property ownership principle is often taken by many scholars and interpreters to imply a rejection of any extensive measures of taxation and governance (a really big, powerful armed forces might be required for a period of time to defeat a mortal foreign enemy?), and especially measures that take property/income/wealth from one citizen and give it to another, or, what's usually called redistributive taxation/spending.  (Self-styled anarchist libertarians or 'anarcho-capitalists' say that you don't need any form of government/taxation to have a stable rule of (libertarian) law, national defense, or other 'public goods' functions usually attributed to a 'minimal state' framework.)

Now, the basic libertarian 'self-ownership' is, I believe, best formulated by Rand and (subsequently) Hospers, but Rand gives an explanatory why-account that Hospers doesn't in his article, although the intuitive appeal of the principle is there aplenty even in his telling.  But it's Rand who really gets to the meat of the why-account, which is the whole theoretical & thematic core of Atlas Shrugged and her entire philosophy: the role of the mind in man's (human) existence and all this entails.

Rand boils down the basic principle in dramatic fashion in the Galt-Thompson scene as much as she does throughout pretty much the whole novel.  The basic opposition comes down to this: Is John Galt's mind properly at Mr. Thompson's disposal rather than (exclusively) his own?  By "mind" Rand means a specifically human, conceptual or intellectual faculty which depends on the volitional  (thereby requiring free or uninhibited thought/action) act of focus, and the ultimate measure of the service to one's life, i.e., ethical or moral perfection, is the degree of one's focusing one's mind as opposed to evading or being otherwise frustrated or negated from within or without (by other actors).  
Put another way: A human is, by nature, a volitional/free conceptual-intellectual being who must make judgments about how to act, and this requires a focused process of thinking and this requires an effort (the basic phenomenon that involves active, free, volitional movement as opposed to a relatively or fully passive or restive state), and it means that one must be able to duly consider the reasons for taking a course of action.  So is it Galt's life to determine by how own free judgment how it is disposed of, or does it belong in part or full to Mr. Thompson/the State?  It's an irreconcilable opposition of basic principles.  Miss Rand is often bashed for putting things like this in such starkly "unrealistically black-and-white" terms, but I don't see any way around it.  It's the basic crux of Nozick's rejection of Rawls' theory (and arguably on grounds Rawls concedes as true when he defends the seperateness of persons against utilitarian appropriation-of-persons-for-collective-benefits).

But the fundamentality or primacy or basic-principle-ness of Rand's role-of-the-mind theme is the why of the libertarian principle.  To state again: the human mind (intellect) must operate freely to act/be what it is, and to be appropriated from outside against the action-directives issued by the exercise of its own free judgments weighing the for/against reasons (etc etc?) is to be treated as a mere instrument or means which falls afoul not just of the libertarian principle as presented here but also a 'Kantian' principle widely considered eminently plausible (the Randian version being stated as: "man is an end in himself and not a means to the ends of others" - which I take to be another alterative formulation of the libertarian principle).

So if Mr. Thompson is to get Galt to willingly cooperate, bother to put forth the effort to act (causally enact an effect, which in human terms is means-ends reasoning), he needs to be shown a reason to do so, and not the muzzle of a gun.  (Oh no, that unbearably black-and-white illustration of the principle, stated for the umpteenth time already in the novel (heh heh - if only the Rand-bashers would just fucking listen for a change, man, they might learn something; Rand's got information, man; not-exactly new shit has come to light (these past 63 years and counting ffs etc. for the umpteenth time)).)

What exactly is a reason for engaging in the effort of an action?  Well, there's a vast literature on that but a lot of it has to do with reconciling the "rational" and the "reasonable," or put another way, between appeals to one's personal preference- or value-set, a so-called egoistic reason-giving or justification for action on the one hand, and what, in arriving at the best principles for governing interpersonal behaviors meet the highest standards of fairness?  (Much of the influence of John Rawls in recent moral-political theory has to do with his understanding of political justice in terms of fairness or what I'm here calling reasonabless.  The idea I'm advancing/advocating here is that the libertarian principle must be able to - and does - satisfy standards of fairness, principles all communicating-in-moral-terms actors can freely and cooperatively agree upon.  Rawls brings in the concept of overlapping consensus to help describe/explain this ideal deliberative-communicative framework.)  The reasonableness-standpoint also suggests something or other about taking a stance of impartiality so that the perspective of all moral deliberators-actors are respected (taken into account).  (Political jab: this is why I loathe today's leftists who constantly caricature their opponents.)  Some sort of principle of human-equality is operative throughout all this ideal, something about equal consideration of all perspectives which means techniques of free, rational, logical persuasion and dialectic.  (Rawls' famous Original Position is a thought-experimenty device for taking the impartial standpoint so that particular circumstances don't affect one's judgments of fairness.)

So, Galt and Rand are saying - or might or ought to say - perhaps not to a slimeball like Mr. Thompson but rather to even an honest interlocutor whom I take Rawls and Nagel (whose 'altruism' or other-person-directed motivation comes from taking an impartial stance) to be, something like the following: "Look, give it your best shot at convincing me to take your so-called impartial stance but it's going to me my own free judgment and not yours that decides, okay?  This constrains you from applying your difference principle and all that stuff in anything other than a voluntary sense, i.e., even then it's not the role of the political to employ physical force in any capacity other than protection from the initiation of force (the introduction of force into human relationships)."

Rand has a lot of very negative things to say about the initiation of physical force.  "Force and mind are opposites" as she would say aplenty.  Then there's the translation of "armed might (of, e.g., the electoral majority)" into "guns and physical force."  Rand ain't fucking around here when she brings up the gun thing, because that's what it comes down to, a tool to threaten you to do things contrary to your own judgment and substitute for that the judgment of others (over how to lead your own life, etc.).  If Rand gets nothing else about her political principles across, it's that all human relationships should be premised on rational persuasion.

Now, there's the introduction of force, and there's the use of force in self-defense in the event that its use is initiated.  So that gives us some idea of when the use of force is ever appropriate.  If one is ever to use force, one should be able to give a damn good reason for doing so.  In the case of self-defense, a life is at stake (we're taking the case of defense against attempted murder here).  Or, we can speak of a portion of one's life (which is one's own to exclusively dispose of, etc.) being defended against less deadly forms of violent assault.  Now, there's also the matter of what are usually termed 'emergency exceptions,' e.g., the shipwreck scenario and breaking into an absent owner's house to obtain food rather than starve - provided compensation is paid to the owner, say.

Some philosophers - James P. Sterba comes to mind - have argued that a combination of reasonableness and libertarianism (or the moral principles that give libertarianism its appeal) leads to subsistence or welfare rights on roughly the 'emergency exception' grounds, although that can probably (surely?) be reformulated in the terms of reasonableness and fairness outlined above.  But there is reasonable disagreement over really (I mean, really, c'mon) how much leeway this gives the government/state to use forcible mechanisms to move resources around on a greater-needs basis.  (Keep in mind that the primary/basic/fundamental/essential productive resource is the human mind/intellect.)  For one thing there is a really large body of economic and political-philosophical literature that speaks of the wisdom of free markets in minimizing human want or suffering across a vast range of goods and services, in raising living standards wherever they're instituted, in making for the development of capital which leads to fewer out-of-resources scenarios, etc.  (Rand famously yet widely-misunderstoodly explains all this in terms of the darn-near-explosive power of the human mind unleashed especially as that has happened in the modern period from the scientific and political Enlightenment and onward, with (in her polemical mode) statist parasites trying to divert all the fruits of that progress to their big-government programs for little or no reason (sic) other than that "the resources are there for the taking [and Rawls tells us that we should go by maximin principles as a justice-as-fairness criterion, so the proper, non-libertarian role for government/force here is to maximally improve the lives of the least advantaged, and that requires about 50% of GDP be government/force-based.]")

(Note, BTW, the implausibility of the Warren/Obama argument that billionaires are created through massive state-created infrastructure - the famously caricatured but still relevant-point-making "You didn't build that" stuff.  So, how do they explain the existence of a billionaire like John D. Rockefeller or an industrialist on the level of a Henry Ford, prior to the rise of post-New Deal big government infrastructure?  Is it the idea that more government-provided infrastructure adds to the per-capta GDP growth rate?  I rather doubt that the data available at ourworldindata.org support such a thesis.  It actually shows a fairly consistent cross-era (pre- and post-New Deal) average growth rate - so doesn't that suggest that all that extra government is just a deadweight-loss superfluity in GDP growth rate terms, thereby recommending a return to a libertarian-ish default government size?

I guess one basic question here, though, is whether the libertarian is conceding as a matter of principle that in the event that misfortune should ever exhaust a person's resources, they have a government/taxpayer-provided safety net, which is in effect conceding that there are welfare or subsistence rights.  Do we get at least this concession on behalf of a "right to well-being" when Gewirth formulates his semi-famous principle of generic consistency (PCG) in terms of rights to freedom and well-being (inasmuch as he's formulating his 'dialectical' moral framework in rights-terms...).  Put differently: is this a principle that even a John Galt could rationally-and-reasonably concede in terms of the value-hierarchy he could rationally endorse, which necesarily includes taking an appropriate stance of impartiality?  What if he's in the shoes of the unfortunate who has exhausted all resource-avenues (somehow)?

I think I'll leave that as an open question for now.  While it is an interesting question whether the kind of subsistence-rights-claim I'm talking about can still be called libertarian in some sense, the more interesting question is whether it's the right position to take.  I happen to think it is, as long as it's properly qualified and constrained.  There is an emergency-exception kind of rationale on the one hand, and then there's the reality of government taxing and spending upwards of 40% of GDP in many advanced economies today on the other hand.  Is there some kind of slippery slope from an emergency-style safety net (what else is "safety net" supposed to connote? it's not supposed to mean a hammock, as many conservatives like to point out) to government taking up half a country's (it's citizens' lives) in GDP?

Okay, to wrap this up: There's a lot of reason to believe that the libertarian principle, widely adopted in all its implications and grounding principles, would be a route to optimal human problem-solving across a vast range of cases (particularly in regard to what I take to be its Randian grounding principles about the free exercise of the human intellect - which adopted/applied universally would meet by definition for an end of history, i.e., a universally or perhaps only near-universally adopted principles of a perfectionistic or 'Aristotelian' approach to human rationality or problem-solving.  I've found the tendency for the most accomplished libertarian theorists (the Aristotelians and Randians) to be barking up that tree quite a bit more than I've been seeing the other libertarians or the non-libertarians doing so.  Communicative rationality, justice-as-fairness, or even the basic libertarian principle itself describe roughly the "form" that human reasoning ought to take on ethical (more specifically, moral or universalistic) grounds - ideas that fall more or less into the Kantian tradition of theorizing.  But the Randian-Aristotelian ground of the libertarian principle is a principle of intellectual perfectionism that applies not only to thinking in terms of mutual deliberative rationality and that cluster of Kantian-ish theories (with reasonabless front and center), but at least as importantly to the issues about how to live one's life and fulfill one's wisely-formed goals, expressed in terms of rationality (preference-satisfaction) and well-being (objective flourishing/actualizing of potentials).  (This is often associated with 'Aristotelian,' teleological, eudaemonist or happiness-oriented, self-actualization (like in David L. Norton's magisterial if not monumental Personal Destinies), perfectionism (the Dougs Den Uyl & Rasmussen; Thomas Hurka), virtue-ethics (a huge field of authors such as Anscombe, Foot, Rand, Veatch, MacIntyre, John M. Cooper, Nussbaum, Annas, and basically a lot of the moral philosophy faculty at places like Arizona and UNC-Chapel Hill.) That is to say, the intellectual perfectionism applies to the content of one's ends over and above applying the proper form of reasoning.  The very interesting question from this point on, explored in places like Gewirth's Self-Fulfillment, is how mutually reinforcing these reasoning-stances are or might be.  We can have Kantian-ish constraints informing us about the reasonableness of ends to adopt as examined from the flourishing-angle - to both reasonably and rationally incorporate such contraints into one's (wisely-formed) preference-set, as it were.  And it seems to me that whatever else intellectual perfectionists ought to be, they ought to be libertarians who also recognize the problem-solving power of human intellect with all this entails.  (And it's hard to see how Rand doesn't earn high philosophical marks on this count, although I would like also to single out Gewirth - a good man, and thorough.)

Big Govt Refucklicans vs. cannabis common sense

[Details to come; I just wanted to get that post title and images in as soon as I could.  Republicans qua Refucklicans selectively entrust (all of a sudden) and empower an insultingly paternalistic and always-increasingly bloated government bureaucracy to generate supposedly desirable outcomes; all of a sudden they rush toward Wickard-style federal overreach; how's that been working out for them? Should be fun lol ^_^ ]

"The Blue States are legalizing it and they're always wrong about everything. Also it's a gateway drug to opioid overdose, or something." -Scumbag GOP

A pretty smart and common sense guy, probably while saganized

Leftism's reverse-Midas effect: toxicity (e.g., "white privilege")

Following up my recent post on the "educators" indoctrinating their impressionable captive audience about "white privilege":

"White privilege" is an academic-leftist neologism that has not been run by the mainstream of America before the left foisted the notion on the rest of us.  I encourage readers to look at the wikipedia link on "white privilege" to see the notion explained.  From the introductory section:

White privilege (or white skin privilege) is the societal privilege that benefits white people over non-white people, particularly if they are otherwise under the same social, political, or economic circumstances. ...Writers have noted that the "academic-sounding concept of white privilege" sometimes elicits defensiveness and misunderstanding among white people, in part due to how the concept of white privilege was rapidly brought into the mainstream spotlight through social media campaigns such as Black Lives Matter.^[9] As an academic concept that was only recently brought into the mainstream, the concept of white privilege is frequently misinterpreted by non-academics; some academics, having studied white privilege undisturbed for decades, have been surprised by the seemingly-sudden hostility from right-wing critics since approximately 2014.^[10]

Again, I encourage a reading of the full wikipedia link, where what is explained as "white privilege" is advantages that whites (qua whites) experience relative to nonwhites in America.  The "advantages" enjoyed by whites are actually the effect of (real or contrived-by-leftists) unfair and unjust treatment of nonwhites.  In essence - and I'm doing my utmost to characterize this notion accurately - what the wikipedia link describes is a set of circumstances in which whites are not treated unfairly relative to nonwhites.

In essence, then, "white privilege" is whites not being treated unjustly.  No, it's not some special or acquired advantage, as the term "privilege" traditionally denotes (or is it connotes...).  It doesn't mean an advantage conferred, per se.  It means a disadvantage inflicted on others.  (And speaking of things that disadvantage black youth, does the greater prevalence of single-parent families among minorities and black people in particular also contribute to "white privilege"?  Should we double down and insist that this disparity is due to the white-privilege power structure, etc.?)

At this point you might understand how this notion would "elicit defensiveness and misunderstanding" among those upon whom the notion is foisted.  What is taken by the leftist authors of "white privilege" to be defensiveness and misunderstanding is really nothing more than disorientation and confusion as to how the term "privilege" is genuinely applicable to a situation in which what makes the "privileged" privileged is that they're not treated unjustly.  Instead of a term that conveys, commonsense-like, the unjust treatment of nonwhites, the leftists have decided that bastardizing altering the language is a preferable move.  (More examples of leftist language-alterations here.)  And you'd better go along with this alteration pretty darn quickly, lest you be complicit in perpetuating "white privilege."

I wish that there were something that I'm missing here, but I've given up on giving leftists the benefit of the doubt.

If the "white privilege" notion were an isolated thing, not intertwined with a bunch of leftist ideology, with a related cluster of neologisms and dogmas, etc., then one might reasonably treat it as an unfortunate inexactness, or a lapse in an otherwise cogent, good-faith critique of prevailing American institutions.  But that's not what this is.

I think leftism is toxic wherever it is found, but a thesis I'd like to advance in connection with this (the "white privilege" topic as well as all the other intellectual failings documented quite exhaustively in my leftism-related links) is as follows:

The American left is especially toxic and intellectually bankrupt, because of how at-odds leftism is with uniquely American founding and operating ideals, namely: freedom from state power.  The American left is set up starkly over-and-against the American mainstream, standing in a position (as it were) of dialectical alienation.  (This is why leftism seems to be a much "better fit" in European nations such as France, where (e.g.) the French Revolution of the late 18th century illustrates the contrast with America's revolution/break with the English Crown.)

A key example: the ideas of Ayn Rand are within a legitimate Overton Window of range of opinion in America.  There is a (relatively) healthy debate on the American Right over the role that Ayn Rand should play in forming culture and politics.  A great portion of the ideas in Atlas Shrugged resonate with a large segment of the Right (particularly the free-market, libertarian right).  How does the Left respond to Ayn Rand?  I'm speaking here of the American Left; the Left as well as non-Left in Europe don't treat Rand as being within the Overton Window of discourse there.  (Just how punitively high should taxes on the rich be, is the point in contention in these Euro-welfare-states.  Just how much someone should be able to keep what they earn through providing value-added to customers/purchasers in legitimately voluntary transactions, is the point of contention in the American mainstream.  Or: does your life fundamentally belong to you, or to the state/demos/collective?  And: is politics the most just, appropriate, humane, etc. way of addressing social problems?)

Returning to the question: how does the American Left treat or respond to Ayn Rand?  My very extensive experience with this is that these leftists do nothing more than misrepresent, distort, and smear Rand, when they're not ignoring or evading her message.  ("She would let the poor die in the gutter, since her heroes say their lives belong to themselves and not to the poor or govt agents purporting to act on their behalf."  And they choose to ignore the message from Galt about virtue-based aid to the unfortunate.  The leftist assumption here seems to be that if it isn't state-directed aid, it is too precarious and conditional to fit the requirements of justice.  That's an area for good-faith disagreement, not for unquestioned assumption.)

Given the founding and (still by and large - at a roughly 65% rate, anyway) operative principles of America, the legitimate Overton Window would be the range of opinion between Rawls and Nozick/Rand.  [Edit: And a Rawls vs. Nozick/Rand debate might not even take all that much into consideration the reasonably well-argued opinions of many of those describing themselves as conservatives, which pretty much makes it that much more difficult for the Left to defeat non-leftist opinion on the merits.]  But this is not what the American Left sees as the legitimate range of opinion.  The "center" of leftist opinion in America today is the more Euro-style "democratic socialism" of Bernie Sanders and AOC, with Rand/Nozick written off as terribly misguided, inhumane, evil, etc.  What else explains the absolutely pathetic way the American Left debates - i.e., avoids debating head-on, in good faith - rightist ideas (including those of conservatives/Republicans and Trump supporters in general)?

The American Left has replaced a good-faith dialogue with the American Right, with an ever-more-inbred debate about, e.g., how exactly to construct the "white privilege" notion, or just how racist Trump and his supporters are, or just how much more GDP should go to the public sector, or just how evil Rand is, or just how much illegal immigration should be incentivized, or just exactly which past American presidents and national symbols should be besmirched and boycotted, or just how exactly to blame capitalism for high healthcare costs, or just exactly how fundamentally unfair the capitalist system is, or just how exactly and how much to smear Brett Kavanaugh, or just how exactly to distort/smear/deplatform/cancel/evade what conservative opinion that does exist on college campuses, and on and on.

Is it any surprise, then, that the chief source of toxicity in American politics today is leftism, with the Trump phenomenon a backlash against that?

Here's another, related thesis: on the actual merits, many of the best political minds in America are on the Right.  The American Left, by virtue of an atrophied dialectical sensibility, is full of hubris - namely, the assumption that they possess a superior intellectual and moral compass (made more developed by proximity to big coastal cities and college campuses, apparently).  By their own lights this puts them at odds with an American mainstream full of irredeemable deplorables, racists, religious fundamentalists clinging bitterly to their Bibles/religion, rednecks clinging to their guns, etc.  Given their hubris, their outsized commitments to political activism (a substitute religion) as a source of meaning, and the roadblocks to their political vision presented by conservatives, libertarians, Republicans, Trump, talk radio, Fox News, the electoral college, and the Constitution as interpreted in good faith (i.e., with the strong presumption of liberty), it's no surprise that they come off as so miserable and nasty over not having gotten their way.

I would say that the problem has gotten only worse over time (and will continue to get worse) because of the irreconcilable opposition between leftism and America and the American left's doubling down on the correctness of leftism (with the complicitly of the "educators") in the face of this.

I won't belabor this further; either you see how I'm right (here and in all the other blog posts about leftism/leftists I have provided ample leads for above) or you don't.  If anything, this here blog post demonstrates that it's pretty much the end of the line as far as American-leftism's credibility is concerned; it serves more or less as a culmination of all those other blog posts.  This here blog post can and will serve well as a one-stop unit for future reference, whenever I mention how intellectually and morally bankrupt the American Left is.  (The further left you go, the more deranged and toxic it gets.)  Had they ever engaged in good faith with the likes of Rand I might have concluded differently.  If they were nearly as progressive and forward-looking as they pretend to be, they'd be gung-ho on philosophy and philosophical education.

As it is, my one-word summary of the American left is: pathetic.

A middle finger to "woke" statists

For those who propose that the state "do something" at someone's expense.

Independence Day 2019

This day millions of commonsense Americans declare their independence from the would-be tyranny of "politically correct," "woke," sick-puppy leftists who would destroy America, western civilization, capitalism and freedom as we know it - and who thereby helped get our current president elected.  (Can they get any more fucking ridiculous?  They're doubling down on what helped get him elected?  Are they just not very bright?)  And if the following image triggers you - you might have gone mad; seek help! - just remember that the current US flag retains 13 stripes.  (And racist idiots trying to appropriate the U.S. flag need philosophy boot camp as much as the "woke" yet philosophically ignorant leftist idiots do, along with everyone else.)

Democrats & freedom

One thing that doesn't appear to be on the agenda of Democrats these days is freedom.  When was the last time you heard a Democrat politician praise the virtues of freedom?  They promote cannabis legalization and abortion on demand, but do they couch these subjects in terms of freedom?  If cannabis legalization doesn't bring in big tax revenues, do they still favor it?  When Democrats talk abortion, they often (dishonestly) couch it in terms of "women's health" (as though it's women's health that Republicans are focused on here).  (Let's say we termed Second Amendment rights "self-defense rights."  Dems are squishy about or opposed to self-defense rights, then?  And we can make it all one-sided to ignore mass shootings, much like how Dems treat "it's her body" as an abortion debate-stopper?)

I'm keeping an eagle eye on any mentions of freedom that come from the 2020 Democrat candidates.

(Speaking of which, 4 of the top 5 Democrats based on the betting markets decided to smear Brett Kavanaugh on the basis of hazy testimony and in disregard of other sworn statements to the contrary.  I've discuss this nakedly partisan and intellectually- and morally-bankrupt ugliness previously, but I should also bring up this, which no one else seems to have noticed (which would indicate a widespread epistemological bankruptcy): Not only could the accuser(s) not provide specifics as to time and place, but no one else came forward to say what supposed party it might have been that both Ford and Kavanaugh attended.  Shouldn't that fact have jumped right out at the lawyers on the Judiciary Committee?  ffs)

The only mention of the term "freedom" from any of these candidates that I've noticed so far was from a recent speech by Sen. Sanders: Democratic socialism means freedom for working families, etc.

I'm not sure which is better: not talking about freedom at all, or using a bastardized conception of freedom (and/or a contentious conception of freedom not accepted by more than some Americans).  Sanders is quoted as saying, "There is no freedom without economic freedom."  I consider it highly doubtful that Sanders has ever sought out the strongest representatives of pro-capitalism thought that he could find, to put his notion of freedom to the dialectical test.  (Is there any politician today who's done such a not-intellectually-bankrupt thing?)  Is my own life/mind mine to dispose of (refer to the preceding link), or does 'the community' exercise a veto over that?

A number of Democrat-run states today are running amok in the tax-raising department.  (Have any Democrats cut taxes since Kennedy?  Okay, so there were tax breaks in Obama's 2009 stimulus package, but we're talking rather desperate measures there.)  Among their tax-raising schemes is "clawing back" whatever money they can from people who flee their states due to the tax burden.  Rush Limbaugh described on his radio show how the state of New York basically harrassed him for years after he bolted to Florida: "How is this freedom?" he asked.  Great question!

My distinct impression is that the main focus of Democrats is on "fairness," and on employing the mechanisms of politics to secure benefits for people.  (See Haidt for more.)  Thought or talk of freedom ends up falling by the wayside.  Is it because they really don't have any policies to offer in that regard?

Now to pondering some important value that Republicans don't speak much about (and what that reveals about their value-priorities) . . .

[Update 6/22: At today's South Carolina Democratic Convention, Kamala Harris - almost surely the most slimy of the leading 2020 Dem candidates - asked the following questions as though they should taken seriously: "We have in this White House a president who says he wants to make America great again, but what does that mean?" Harris asked the crowd. "Does that mean he wants to take us back to before schools were integrated? Does that mean he wants to take us back to before the Voting Rights Act was enacted? Does that mean he wants to take us back before the Civil Rights Act was enacted?..."  (Further along in the Kamala Harris sliminess dept., she characterized Joe Biden's statements about Dems cooperating with bad people - in this instance, southern racists - as "coddling the reputations of segregationists."  And: she refers to "[t]he senators that [Biden] is speaking of with such adoration...".  Had enough of Harris' shit yet?  It'll keep on coming....)   Meanwhile, Kirsten Gillibrand used the phrase "reproductive freedom" by which one can only assume she means the freedom to kill unborn humans (let's call this "fetus-killing freedom") since Griswold v. Connecticut (obviously the correct - libertarian - legal decision) doesn't seem in jeopardy at any time in the foreseeable future.  In any case, "reproductive freedom" is one freedom Dems seem willing to talk about, which raises the next question: How about freedom elsewhere?  Why is this seemingly the only "freedom" Dems in general - Bernie's rhetoric appealing to freedom noted above duly noted - treat as sacrosanct right now?  As might become clear at this point, when Dems do mention "freedom," they raise other questions about their grasp of the meaning of freedom.  At least Rawls put liberty first in order of lexical priority and by doing so kept that plainly separate from the egalitarian principles of his theory. [Edit: one crucial caveat is that economic liberty isn't explicitly part of Rawls' lexical scheme here.]  If Dems could cite Rawls chapter and verse (much less have a good counter to Nozick/Rand) they might be considerably more formidable against their political opponents - but they have squandered those intellectual potentials for the sake of their political agenda (making them that much less effective in the latter!).  In all their hubris - aided and abetted by a quasi-incestuous left-dominated academic culture - they would have us believe that it's only Republicans who do this....]

[Update #2: To aid in the "eagle eye on any Dem mentions of freedom," I'll set up google search links here for the top 10 or so Dem candidates so that we can see the contexts in which they mention it: Biden; Booker; Buttigieg; Gabbard; Gillibrand; Harris; Klobuchar; O'Rourke; Sanders; Warren; Yang.  It appears that Buttigieg - the candidate who impresses me so far as the least idiotic and corrupt of the bunch - is talking the most about freedom but largely in what I term the bastardized leftist sense....]

An ultimate hypothetical

As an ideas-merchant I try to keep well-attuned to how an audience responds to framing.  Example: I propose the idea of a perfectivist utopia characterized at root by people maximally exercising their intellects.  The response may well be characterized by disbelief, incomprehension, cynicism, defensive cognitive bias or outright evasion, or who the hell knows what.  (Hard to predict, see, just in how many ways people can fail to recognize a good idea for what it is.  The best I can hope to do is to figure out ways to cut them off at the pass, do an end-around, be as dialectically comprehensive as I know how to be, set up as many safeguards 'twixt cup and lip . . . and then maybe there will be some success at getting the idea across.)  One problem in framing the issue in terms of an intellectualist perfectivist utopia is the sheer unfamiliar-ness of the idea to so many.  How can it possibly be concretized in their minds to their satisfaction given their limited context of knowledge?  Concretes do help a lot, after all.

So the concrete I'll use for framing is one Thomas Jefferson.  He's the guy that drafted the United States Declaration of Independence in 1976.  He's more well-known, more visible to the average citizen, than the author of the Nicomachean Ethics.  (In other words: If you polled the American citizenry and asked who authored the D of I, half of them might actually give the right answer.  Ask them who authored the Nicomachean Ethics, you might be lucky to get one in five answering correctly.  So the idea of presenting the latter as a basis for the cognitive revolution we so desperately need has a considerably greater chance of fuck-up on the transmission line.)  Another concrete to pair Mr. Jefferson with might well be that guy whose face shows up on the $100 bill, but probably not that guy who authored The Rights of Man and Common Sense (notwithstanding how well-known and influential as that guy was among the early Americans).  Perhaps the term "polymath" would draw blank stares, serving to throw the audience off the scent.  Perhaps "excellence in all endeavors" would convey the (Aristotelian) idea to more populist effect.  Jefferson and that guy on the $100 bill were polymaths strove for excellence in all endeavors.

How some guy ends up on the $100 bill, might very well intrigue a few in the audience.  Perhaps that could lead in some interesting directions.

It so happens that these two comprehensive-excellence-pursuers were either founder or president of the American Philosophical Society.  But so as not to distract the average citizen, one might want to avoid saying something like "if everyone lived the way the great philosophers did, . . . " because that would lead those who easily miss a point to wonder who would then do all those vitally important things like engineering, running businesses, conducting scientific research and development, raising kids, hitting home runs, cooking restaurant meals, growing the cannabis (oops, distraction) brewing the beer, directing the movies, balancing the books, performing open-heart surgery, etc. etc. etc. etc. - all those things "the philosophers don't do."

So we have to reframe this in terms of something like: constantly striving for improvement, which takes continuous learning, growth, intellectual curiosity and insatiability, development of talents, health-conscious lifestyles, cultivation of social relationships, seeing things from others' point of view rather than merely through one's own cognitive biases or filters, recognition and respect for human dignity and freedom, and other things listed on that hierarchy of needs thingy by that one psychologist guy.

Now, as it happens, carrying out these things successfully requires a love of wisdom, no question.  That doesn't require that one sit atop the rock like that thinker statue whatamacallit with the chin resting upon hand all of the time - just some of the time at very least -  and even that requires a good developmental environment from an early age, which includes decent nutrition, decent parenting, decent educational opportunities, and so forth.  A decent community would do whatever is within reason to ensure that its young members have as much of a good developmental environment as possible.  (Does this create a chicken-and-egg problem?  How do the not-young people figure out how to be so, um - is "virtuous" the appropriate term here? - kind and decent in intention and efficacious in action so as to foster such developmental excellence for the young'uns?  How do they do that, while also holding down a job and coming home tired, etc.?  Well?  Am I supposed to have all the answers?)

So, anyway, with that preamble out of the way, here's the hypothetical:

Say that the American People came to a broad minimal consensus: If we emulate (too distracting a word?) follow the example of behavior set by the greatest of the nation's Founding Fathers, especially TJ and the $100 bill guy - that is, if we sought to secure for ourselves and our family, friends, neighbors, and other community members the most optimal conditions for our flourishing (yeah, I think that is a good term to use - that mad-as-hell guy in Network uses it, too), that is to say, if we as a people sought to cultivate and foster the conditions under which people could flourish the way these gentlemen did in numerous endeavors be they science, philosophy, arts and letters, community and civic participation, statesmanship, business and entrepreneurship, education of one's fellow Americans, ethical and moral excellence, spiritual fulfillment, and so forth, then what kind of society might we come to inhabit?

(There's that pesky, distracting matter of their having owned slaves.  We shouldn't follow their example in that regard, of course.  Surely we can set aside that tree for the sake of the forest?)

Imagine our having a hypothetical conversation with these two men, asking their advice on how to improve the state of affairs in this country.  Assume if you possibly can that in our hypothetical conversation these men have some 200 years of hindsight that they did not actually possess in their time, but which they would have if they were alive today.  What would they think about what has become of the nation since their time - but more importantly, what advice would they offer for improvement?  Might they appeal to various historical figures for inspiration?  For example, Jefferson in some of his letters touted some ancient guys with names like Epictetus and Epicurus as deliverers of moral and practical wisdom.  Also, while Jefferson didn't believe in the traditional God of theism, he did believe in a Creator who set the world in motion (a view popular at the time, known as deism), and also praised as a genius one Jesus of Nazareth; as framing for the average American citizen goes, that's some pretty good stuff, but Jefferson would (of course) urge us to seek wisdom from all kinds of sources (hence his knowledge of those ancient Epi-something guys, among many others).

I do believe Mr. J would lament the polling data pointing to unacceptable levels of ignorance among the citizenry, but he would also be pro-active about solutions.  Beginning with the ignorance of the very political system he and his buddies founded, he might ask such things as: Why are the people this ignorant?  Is it because they're just intellectually lazy, or has their political system gotten to where they are apathetic or too discouraged about participating in the political process?  If we can devise a fix whereby they become genuinely interested in the political goings-on around them, their knowledge of such things will naturally expand.  Were I interested in the fate of the Green Bay Packers, I'd know quite a bit about them.  And while there's no obvious reason why every citizen ought to be interested in the Packers given their limited time and priorities, it's a plausible proposition that every citizen ought to be interested in our political system and ought to be able to pass a basic science literacy test even years after being a fifth grader.  (That unbelievably awful show would have no place in a Jeffersonian culture.)

Now, in presenting such a hypothetical one might well encounter stubborn cynicism:

"People are just the way they are, hardwired and stuff, or Original Sin, you can't expect them to improve." (UP: Speak for yourself!  Also, what about what that Harvard psychology guy has been saying about the decline in levels of violence over human history?  I can dig up the reference if you're curious.  Or how about slavery no longer being a societal norm?  And, to cite this one 20th century author lady, if we have free will as the proponents of the Original Sin idea nevertheless say we do, then why couldn't the idea of Original Virtue make just as much sense?)

"IQ's will always be centered around 100, how do you expect people to get smarter?" (UP: Aren't literacy rates a lot higher these days than in the Dark Ages?  Same basic genetic structure, yet better outcomes.)

"Those are great men, how do you expect ordinary people to live up to such lofty standards?" (UP: Who said anything about everyone becoming a Jefferson or $100 bill guy?  Let's start with a more realistic idea: a considerably greater number of people of their caliber than at present - in effect, a shifting of the cultural bell curve.  Besides, we're talking in essence about excellence of character.)

"You're trying to sneak in the idea of a Utopia under the guise of widely-implemented Jeffersonianism.  But people - even reasonable, intelligent and thoughtful people - will always disagree among one another about various things.  In a Utopia there isn't supposed to be such disagreement, since everyone is supposed to be 'perfect'."  (UP: Call it what you will - Utopia, Jeffersonianism, Nicomachean Ethics-ism - what you're talking about is a strawman.  This societal ideal need only meet certain minimum requirements, like nonviolence, stable social unions, a rule of law.  Now, to get to such an ideal would take some amount of time and, in short, education.  There's a good reason to think that in order to get to those minimum requirements just stated, the necessary process of education would lead to widespread improvement in moral character, which turns this society into not simply a "liberal, freedom-respecting" one, but also a highly virtue-encouraging one as "communitarian" theorists argue for.  A nice integration/synthesis reconciliation of these seemingly competing ideals, isn't it?  And if some people even in such a social order somehow find it to their advantage to be among a criminal element, that's what the rule of law is still there for.  But most likely by then those who comprise the society would have discovered much better ways of preventing and responding to criminal behavior than they do now.  That's what you'd expect in a society in which intellectual curiosity and insatiable learning are a cultural norm rather than an exception.)

At this point, I'd have to leave it up to the hardcore cynic to come up with objections that even I have not yet anticipated.  (I mean, shit, if they're that persistent and that creative at coming up with objections, how does that not just reinforce the perfectivist Jeffersonian point that humans can get pretty good at things if they set their minds to it?  Now, is that an ultimate flanking of the potential opposition, or what?  You can't refute Jeffersonianism. :-)

I.e.:

"Checkmate, unimaginitive naysayers."

Now: What would America end up looking like if it went wholeheartedly back to its Jeffersonian roots, i.e., to what made the country's founding and the country's greatness possible in the first place?  What might America look like?  If the American people can't even so much as entertain this thought experiment, then they might very well be fucked doomed.  But what, in principle, is there to stop them from entertaining it and going on to act accordingly, besides nothing?

ADDENDUM: Oh, by the way, for those of you not out of your element: is that one scene near the end of the pretty good story that the Stranger unfolded, that scene with the nihilists, is that about overcoming nihilism accompanied by a diminution of the Appetitive Soul?  And what about that goldbricker pretending to be a millionaire?  What does he symbolize?  There's a vanity theme there to be sure.  And how about the slut nympho that poor woman, or, for that matter, the known pornographer whom she's been banging?  And what about the strongly vaginal artist, and the video artist with a cleft asshole?  And how about the Stranger?  Is he a daimon of sorts?  A lot of strands to keep in my head, man.  A lot of strands in UP's head.