Some quick random thoughts, not necessarily well organized or thought of

It’s reading week and I’ve barely started reading. Monday was “pass up the final paper” day, Tuesday was one of those horribly bad days, Wednesday was a lost day, Thursday was the beginning to catch up day, and finally today, after 20 kilometers on my bike at 6am in the morning I got down to work.

Which isn’t great because every page I read a paper for social policy, I reflect on everything else. For example, I wanted to write a large commentary about a link Rajan put up about liberal-utilitarianism and how I disagreed with some of the premises there but I don’t want to spend time on it at the moment. Like how the dude went like it’s okay to reduce one segment of society’s utility if it meant huge gains for others, which I don’t think is justifiable by other moral standards. Yeah, I’m paraphrasing here and I don’t want to argue… yet.

Also Hafiz commented on why pay taxes if the government is going to misspend it, and the short answer is that the government is going to put you in jail for tax evasion. The longer answer would be, under a more authoritarian government, people would have even less say where your tax money is going. Under a representative democracy, it should be taken that leaders will have a life of their own and people only have an indirect power over the content of government. He argues that the government needs to convince people that they have a stake in government. To add to his point, I would argue that people necessarily have a stake in being governed, even by a mediocre government (although not a completely dysfunctional one where there is effectively no state at all). A mediocre government always trumps the absence of government, and because demand for security is inelastic, government can always charge high taxes, although a weak government would make tax evasion possible because , which in turn cause a free-rider problem in a collective action dilemma (ooo big words). It’s essentially Hobbes’ Leviathan. They are thugs, they always will be thugs, it’s just a matter of how nice they are. I should throw in some Gramscian hegemony after this but I’m not in the mood for it.

Kent Ridge Common writing is down, there’s the exams and there’s been a brief spike of publishing. I have some material written down for the next article on Red Thread, but after reconsidering it I may have to scrap half of the current draft (which is about 300 words of a written 600 of an intended 1200) because it’s just not punchy enough. Also, I’ve sent out invitations to write a labour day special for KRC. Yaaaay.

In other thought, it struck me that the three things that are considered impolite conversation subjects (politics, religion and sex) are also the three things I consider the most important to talk about.

I’ve been listening to a podcast between William Lane Craig and Shelley Kagan on the necessity of God to have objective moral values. I don’t buy into Craig’s arguments, especially moral accountability. What interests me is that Shelley Kagan uses the veil of ignorance and the natural position to objectively base moral values, which essential says that Rawls was right in positing the natural position but perhaps was too quick to conclude the Maximin principle.

Oh, the author cited by Rajan also discussed the Maximin principle. Uh, yeah, not going to talk about that. Ok, mental diarrhea over!