Notes on Life, Notes on Greece

Good post.

But it’s false. You cannot make that assessment without understanding WHY we have the civilization, country, institutions and norms that we have today, and why others do NOT have them. Why they have had them and lost them? Why they choose not to have them. And why they are prohibited from having them by their institutions and norms.

Norms and institutions have a momentum. They are not a force of gravity: cet. par., we do not maintain position, we live in ignorance and poverty. No synthetic historian disagrees. Like Camus, they only provide different excuses so that we can tolerate the death of our way of life, in the same manner which we invent magian causality in order to tolerate our own deaths.

You take too much for granted. It is in taking all those issues for granted, that you a) export risk onto those of us with longer time preferences. b) transfer from us and our preferences to you and your preferences using the coercive state rather than voluntary exchange. This is an expropriation and nothing more.

If you were to pursue your value judgments through voluntary means (even if the state were to enforce a voluntary equilibrium) then there could be a trade off between long and short time preferences. However, by advocating short time preferences by force of government, you force a conflict by which each side can only escalate in both rhetoric and policy.

This was the insight of the British model, and of the Classical model. Instead of adding a house for the proletariat once they were able to consume as if they were the middle class, we handed the entire edifice over to them via democracy, and created a set of institutions that mandated a battle between statists and corporatists that cannot possible come to resolution except by suicide: Camus addresses philosophy from the religio-personal perspective. He asks the right question. But that question only exists outside of the political domain. The first question of politics is “why don’t I just kill you and take your stuff?” The second question of politics that follows from that answer is “How then do we compromise on transfers?” The third question of politics is then “how do we not commit systemic suicide quite by accident”. You did not take Camus far enough. Thats forgivable. We have spent more time on epistemically simplistic personal reflection than on empirically complex political institutions.

(Accidentally have a Becker-Posner thing going on here…not my intention. But that said, I have hope for you. And a lot of affection. You’re the rare intellectually honest man. The first principle of debate is the assumption of honesty of inquiry if not agreement upon means and ends. Without that assumption all debate may be informative to observers, but it is purely eristic in achievement. -Curt )

5) Being responsible is not an attempt to display high status. Let me explain. Sometimes we reach a point in our lives where we feel as though almost everyone we have ever known has either abandoned us, or we can no longer be with them. Nonetheless, even though we have little remaining affection for them, we still have feelings for humanity. That is responsibility. What is the difference, you might ask? Because I still had feelings for humanity, that pushed responsibility back into my being. If I had contempt for everyone else and humanity as well, I would have just gone out and started robbing people, when I was homeless. And believe me at one point I gave it some serious thought.

Could we say that, barring apocalyptic thinking, being responsible would be to try to avoid Greek austerity situation – which we all know can happen ?
In such respect, kicking the can up-the-road should be avoided (ie. what former Greek politicians did before crisis) especially as there is little collective cost to that. Being responsible could then be defined as balancing current framework (collective decision making process & resources sharing) preservation and short term happiness improving changes.
My point is that 1) austerity proponents are not really talking about how to manage crisis in crisis time but on how to avoid crisis before it happens. So you’re not talking about the same thing and may be the thing they try to talk about (Time machine) doesn’t exists in the US or in Greece. Moral hazard concept aims to derive incentives to avoid system breach allowing some decentralized decision making.

And 2) if the ‘why not’ question avoids suicide, it’s not enough to avoid dynamic thinking, and uncertain decisions about future states of the world (at collective and individual level). Even if you know ‘things won’t work out’, you are essentially unable to totally discard the future because consciousness is precisely projecting oneself into the uncertain future (not the certain future when we all die, the one happening just before ).
This is the core of absurdity, when you decided to have insight and accepted absurdity, you accepted you cannot think without time and projecting yourself (time and causality are hence tightly linked).
We are going concerns. Therefore, responsibility can mean something quite important: trying to put a limit to the consequence of our (collective) speculative projective thinking.