Fortunately this changes in the iterated prisoners' dilemma, in which the game is played between the same players many times. That's a closer analogy to human society.

"For example, it is of not unfair if a person making 1M a year is taxed at 80% in order to enable people making 20K to be taxed 10%. The former is still filthy rich and the later can have a comfortable life without struggling for subsistence."

Looking at this sentence from the point of view I've tried to outline here, what leaps out at me is this: the immediate fairness of the equation is not the only issue. Just as I don't want you to pollute my lake, I don't want you (the government, in this case) to promote economic policies that will result in collective poverty. I would argue that an 80% marginal tax rate, especially in today's globally competitive economy, is a prescription for fiscal disaster. There is plenty of evidence that overly collectivist policies reduce economic growth, resulting in stagnant, moribund economic malaise. That is not an ideological belief; it's an opinion based on objective, real-world observation. I would rather be on the poor end of the scale in the USA than way up the food chain in North Korea or Cuba. The issue is not just "is it fair?" but, in the larger perspective, "does it work?" There is ample evidence, IMSHO, that both unbridled Capitalism and ideologically uncompromising Communism result in disaster. Contrast the fate of the former USSR with that of China, and ask yourself: what was the difference between these two societies? On the other side, we only need to look at the events of the last few weeks to see that a market that is 'free' of all responsible oversight, where individuals (or corporations, ie small, powerful collections of individuals) are allowed to make decisions completely unfettered by any regulation or second-guessing, but at the same time are depended on to provide an economic basis for social stability (ie, they're in charge of home loans), is a prescription for meltdown and disaster.

The truth is, extreme points of view are just not subtle or broad enough to encompass the problems we face today. There are no easy solutions; we have to work together to find common ground, and come up with reasonable, workable, ideologically impure compromises that just happen to work well enough to maximize personal and collective well-being.

-artiphys

My way of describing the central issue at hand is as follows. There are individual rights that I think we can all agree on, such as the fundamental right not to be physically harmed without cause (ie besides in defence of your initial aggression). There are collective rights we should be able to agree on as well, such as the right to access clean, breathable air, which by its nature is shared and not amenable to ownership. Anyone who quibbles with either of these rights is a crank in my book, and not worth the energy to argue with.

So once we establish that both individual and collective rights exist in principle, the rest is a mere bookeeping matter of putting every possible life scenario into one or the other of these categories. But wait, there's a catch: a whole bunch of things end up somewhere in the middle. In particular, there are some clear cases where individual and collective rights are simply antagonistic to each other by nature. The classic exposition of this problem is Garrett Hardin's "Tragedy of the Commons". A somewhat more nerdy explanation would involve the so-called Prisoner's Dilemma. In any case, the issue is simple: what's good for an individual is bad for the community. To pick one simplistic example: if you go on a picnic, it's easier to leave your garbage around than to throw it away. If you don't plan to come back to that spot tomorrow, chances are someone else will pick up after you. However, if everyone who frequents the picnic spot makes the same decision, everyone suffers; the place looks and smells like a garbage dump.

Almost any issue regarding rights, privileges, Capitalism, Communism, Socialism, and many other -isms can be boiled down to this core dichotomy.

I propose that there is no axiomatic truth involved here. Just as we can develop geometry with or without the parallel postulate, we can develop perfectly consistent and logically sound philosophies that emphasize personal rights (Capitalist –> right-leaning Libertarian/Objectivist), or community (Socialism –> Communism). So how do we decide which way to go?

I've given this problem much thought, and I'm sorry to say I don't have any special answers. I think it's sort of obvious to most reasonable people, if they avoid the trap of getting caught in the grip of seductive ideology, that the practical solution to this dilemma involves some sort of reasonable compromise between individual and collective freedom. The tricky part is that how you weigh things then becomes heavily dependent on various soft aspects of your worldview. Culture, religion, upbringing, tradition, and gut instinct all play a part in how we square this circle. That's why these sorts of issues are so divisive, and cause such a strong emotional response. The key to compromise is to first accept that the other side's opinion is neither crazy, evil, or hopelessly stupid. Unfortunately, my casual perusal of left-leaning blogs and right-leaning talk radio makes it clear to me that many folks still believe the solution to this question is blindingly obvious, and that everyone on the other side (often including moderates, who are labelled 'soft on terror' or 'soft on fascism') are simply blithering idiots who need to be shouted down or worse.

(more…)

I am not exactly sure where I stand, in terms of political philosophies, because I have yet to find an individual or party that completely agrees with me and have nothing but blog posts and a little time on Wikipedia to go on. Some of this seems relevant to me, though, so I will attempt to describe my the relevant parts of my personal philosophy, as I currently understand it, on the premise that someone might care, and that even if no one does, articulating it as well as possible might help me figure it out more fully.

I think that more or less complete negative freedom (as defined by Wikipedia) is basically a good thing. I reached this conclusion based on the fact that I would at least want to be able to choose how much freedom to exchange for things like security (in my case, fairly little) and I can't see why everyone else shouldn't also be able to make their own choice about that. I have no problem with whatever choices people make for themselves on this or other topics, as long as they don't substantially violate another's rights without their consent. Positive liberty sounds good as well, up to a point. After all, who wouldn't want to be able to reach their full potential? However, I see something wrong with attempts to make people reach what others decide is their full potential, or attempts to make people reach an average full potential.

On the issue of capitalism, I tend to be personally in favor limited capitalism. This is because unregulated private enterprise can limit people's rights as easily as a government can, but no private enterprise would violate rights as well. In practice, I think voluntary cooperation will tend to work better than capitalism for idea and information based "products". The free software/open source movement is a good example of this. I think that both private enterprise and voluntary cooperation have their place when it comes to physical goods and services, though. I support the idea of private property, but think intellectual property rights are not a good idea, with the exception of the sort of requirements the GPL and many CC licenses specify,

All of this is just an approximation of what I currently believe. I may have horribly misused terms, stated things imperfectly or even inaccurately, made any number of logical errors, and so on. I have had zero training and little experience in this sort of thing, and I haven't thought about it all that often in any detail. Also, I will do my absolute best to allow myself to be convinced, if someone else can provide sufficient evidence that they are right or the facts contradict my views.

On the other hand, to achieve freedom is also a matter of bravery, cleverness, etc. – But this will be off topic again. Yet a fool's heaven might be a wise man's hell.

But when it comes to "knowing" you will have to admit that what we "know" is evolving as well (heck, look at the past 100 years – it's amazing!) and there is a high chance that we know next-to-nothing right now and maybe never will know something of significance. Then again – what is significance, anyway? And there we are back to it-is-what-you-make-of-it. And only then we know at least something.

I am not going to convince you – but I know you are able to consider different points of view and so I will never stop to invite you to think about it once in a while. But do not forget that you will be developing structure always dependent from science, so more slowly than you could. Look at the social skills you have – social science is not half way through it's own forest of theories, not sure about why and how some of the things work, because individual experience is not counted in that much. I am not sure if I could express what I meant, but please ask if something is unclear. o_O

if looked under the plain no-influence-everything-detached-view as he is in the beginning, he/it is free.

But nobody is really free that way because from the moment we draw our first breath we are influenced by others. The only way to be free like that is to be isolated I guess.