Comment by eli_gottlieb
13 hours ago
> Take California’s high speed rail. Every individual has the right to object. No one wants an eyesore in their backyard. Everyone gets a hearing. Everyone gets a lawsuit. Everyone gets a veto in practice, if not in theory.
That has absolutely nothing to do with civil liberties and everything to do with the adversarial legalism of the Common Law code and with property rights, which are quite a different matter. There are any number of Western countries in which individual or household property rights are not taken to constitute an arbitrary veto on otherwise legal state action: if a train is scheduled to get built, it gets built, and compensation is paid but vetoes cannot be exercised.
Every additional "right" you have is a "freedom" you can choose to execute or not execute on. A right is an additional freedom. If you have no rights, you have no freedom, if you have unlimited rights, you have unlimited freedom.
I agree there's things like eminent domain. I'm just saying China leans more in the direction of less rights overall which in turn leads to a more productive society.
> Every additional "right" you have is a "freedom" you can choose to execute or not execute on. A right is an additional freedom. If you have no rights, you have no freedom, if you have unlimited rights, you have unlimited freedom.
Suppose there is one city where everyone has the right to build new housing on any piece of land they own and another city where everyone has the right to prevent anyone else from building new housing. These things are the opposite of one another, so they can't both be increasing the "freedom" of the public at large.
Now which city actually has more freedom?
I guess the keyword is "individual freedom." Technically, freedom can be expanded in the way you're implying but usually in common parlance they are referring to individual freedoms. That is what people mean when they say the US is "more free" than China. Under your expanded definition it's not clear which one is more free.
Extreme individual freedom is often called anarchy.
1 reply →
And I'm just saying that "less rights overall ... in turn leads to a more productive society" is rubbish idealism that imagines a big thermostat slider by which to trade off one abstraction vs another, ignoring the material histories and institutions that actually generate the outcomes.