The Shape of Things to Come

This blog will be undergoing a change in philosophical direction soon. Insight into politics is often hard won and very much the product of long experience. Healthy accommodation for the amendment of views is therefore necessary. At any rate, since little has actually been published, a change in direction is not difficult to undertake. It will retain its titular orientation. Thus far I have addressed the sometime blur between social and economic issues, the implications of ethnocultural diversity for US politics, fallacies in the social analysis conducted in American academia, problems with interest group politics for a virtuous polity. I have also touched on Georgist tax policy and usufruct.

All of what I've written has contained some valuable insights, but I have not addressed in great detail many basic economic concerns and neither have I spent much effort on the collossal task of providing an adequate philosophical foundation for political thought. Your author's philosophical position, for the sake of disclosure, is highly rooted in Natural Law theory and bolstered by psychological nativism. Unlike many strictly political libertarians, I do not find myself constrained to refrain from larger philosophical and metaphysical theorizing.

With regard to economic policy, I sense there may be a more rigorous game-theoretic approach that I've yet to pursue that may be agnostic (at least as an a priori matter) about policy outcomes. "Libertarianism" as a descriptor may simply denote a certain disposition to political questions much more than a fixed program. "Democrat," as I have said, is more a loose description of an orientation towards a set of politics than a strong indicator of party affiliation. The label "libertarian" has been employed by the left and the right and can connote varying positions. Libertarianism and the liberal tradition out of which it comes both have a distinct set of sensibilities that differentiate them from political ideologies such as fascism and Marxism, for instance. Liberalism even has too much baggage associated with it, even if we discount the smears that right-wing populists have made against it. Libertarianism is therefore the label of choice for me.

Libertarianism, if it is to be strengthened as a political tendency, must be able to cope with the question of government intervention as a pragmatic one, not one of principle. One cannot simply identify the existence of intervention as a threat to freedom per se. It must be shown why it is, if at all. Game theory is promising to the extent that it attempts to analyze the activities of rational actors and their varying incentives to act as a matter of objective rationality and on methodologically individualistic terms. This has the potential to free a libertarian theory from potential dogmatism. More to come...