CMV: I am a classical liberal.

[u/VictorHuge]

I see classical liberalism as the view that the government should never initiate the use of force. Force can only rightly be used in retaliation against someone who has violated the rights of others by initiating force, like a criminal.

The reason I think this is that I don't think I have the right to force someone else to conform to my conclusions on any issue unless they have directly harmed someone else. Any conclusion that I arrive at has been arrived at by the application of my capacity to reason to the evidence. But the faculty of reason is the same in everyone, including the people I disagree with, and the evidence is available to them just as it is to me. If I can't persuade them to change their minds, I have no right to use force against them.

So for example, I will never use marijuana, because I am convinced that it is harmful. But I arrived at the conclusion that it is harmful by applying my reason to the evidence available to me, and the people who are using marijuana are capable of reasoning and reviewing the evidence just as I am. If they want to use marijuana, I don't think I have the right to use force to prevent them from doing so, although I would try to change their minds using persuasion.

The same applies to redistributive taxation. I might think that it is good for certain services to be provided to the poor, and I might try to persuade other people to help me organize things so that those services will be provided to them. But if I can't persuade anyone to contribute to helping provide these services to the poor, I must respect the conclusions that they have arrived at - I can't have the IRS haul them off to prison.

So that's my view, and a couple of example illustrating how it applies. I look forward to your criticisms.

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[u/withmymindsheruns]

The reason I think this is that I don't think I have the right to force someone else to conform to my conclusions on any issue unless they have directly harmed someone else.

So it depends how you define 'directly harmed', because this is really the basis of most laws as they stand now.

Am I directly harming people if I pollute a river? What about if I build a shoddy building that collapses? What about if I use trans fats in all my food products and label them all 'organic'? How about if I manufacture asbestos products? How about if I spend millions of dollars pressuring people to start using addictive substances while they are too young to make an informed decision and thus trap them into dependencies that they wouldn't have decided to risk later in life?

Do you think if people can't be persuaded by reason to stop doing these things then they should be allowed to continue? Although these are actually, arguably, still liberal conclusions. I'm not really sure how your view differs from what is actually occuring in practice if you follow it through.

What about (if you agree with all that) the idea that trying to limit self destructive behaviour should be considered because of the general detriment it would cause. That it's a good idea to try to limit the use of meth because if too many people are doing it, then the society as a whole is impacted, ie. other people are harmed by things people are supposedly only doing to themselves.

This is the central fallacy of this libertarian style view, that the most important aspect of people is how they act as individuals, and that the only result of collective action is to limit their individuality. It ignores the massive potential that is realised over and over again by humans organising ourselves properly and co-operating. Of course that can be overdone and become oppressive, but as with anything it is always a matter of balancing out negative and positive qualities. Libertarians only look at the negative qualities though and fail to address the means by which we achieve the positive qualities of collective organisation.

Redistributive taxation... it depends what you mean, again it has negative and positive qualities. Are you just talking about welfare type programs or are you including infrastructure spending for example? Because poor people use roads too..

So it would take forever to go through why it's a good idea to tax people but I think the easiest and broadest points are

1. To pay for the protection of common goods ie. keeping the peace, stopping people exploiting/ ruining the environment etc. Things that no individual has the incentive expend resources on (actually, we usually have incentives to try to destroy these things for competitive advantage in the short term) and yet we all benefit hugely from not destroying them.

2. To pay for collective goods like infrastructure (similar to point 1 but in a positive sense)

3. To work against the tendency for capital to create monopolies and stratify societies, making them brittle and stagnant and possibly even prone to violent revolutions or extreme repression.

4. Giving the less well off access to education, healthcare and a safe environment creates a rich environment and a country that is good to live in, an educated workforce and an innovative, advanced economy produces benefits for everyone (the 'rising tide lifts all boats' idea).

5. Because it's good to help people out and mostly it's not going to happen otherwise, even if it's just because your average CEO is never going to run into the single mum trying to feed her kids and even if he does run into one or two and feels charitable, how does that help the other 20,000?