Quote:
Originally Posted by Wayfarer
nothing could be better for society than freedom, IMO.
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Well, the way I've been arguing here means that absolute freedom is something you can only approach the most when you are totally by yourself and no other person can control you. Living with others means giving up some freedom because you have to relate to other people, either by your own will or because they are able to influence or force you.
Don't laugh at me :p but I made this handy little graph to illustrate what I believe the general situation is like.
This shows Control -> Freedom on the X axis and a rough measure of the quality of life for every member of society on the Y axis with the optimal being in the middle. This is of course grossly simplistic and aside from exclusion of potentially important factors, I'm prepared to accept that the relationship between control vs. freedom and life quality may not be quite so linear. Possibly, the lines should bend a bit and meet somewhere to the right of the sweet spot, but for illustrative purposes, it does an okay job.
I'll get to a problem with being on the freedom side of this graph soon.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Fruitonica
Not so much, generally anti-government sentiment is fuelled by legitimate issues. The problem with government is that as society grows larger, they are forced to regulate to their citizens benefit with less and less precision. When you are representing many different groups with conflicting interests, someone is bound to be disappointed.
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You have a good point here which I want to discuss, but I just wanna point out a potential problem with "freedom" and right-wing thinking first. In a good state, the government will be made up by the people and will represent it's wishes. This works best in the political middle ground. Here's a reason why : I think in a society, important things that should benefit all should be controlled by the government. Health care and education are good examples. If you introduce market interests into that, you're gonna change the priorities "giving the best health-care" or "giving the best education" into secondary priorities with "making money" as number one. This turns it into a society of winners and losers where some recieve better health care and better education than others. In that society, the winners will rise to the top and the losers will drop to the bottom.
Now, in that society, there's a bias where the winners will form the government and that drives a wedge between the government and the people because the winners who are a minority are no longer representing the interests of the people. The people start to mistrust the government (it becomes "them" and not "us") and that creates a wish for less government, less control. This wish again expressed as rightist thinking promotes the winners and losers society - something that in turn drives the wedge between government and people only deeper so it's a positive feedback loop. Problems potentially caused by rightist thinking leads to more rightist thinking.
So you see, Fruitonica, while you are correct - a more rightist way of thinking may only make the problem worse and keep a society away from the overall life quality optimum.
There are other things that can separate a government from it's people. Obviously, if you have a state made up of 60% cowboys and 40% indians, the cowboys would rule the indians and the indians would not be happy about that. Thus, it's important that the culture of the people in a society is a little more homogenous. In this respect, having a large number of people may not be a problem if those people all live the same way of life. However, nowadays we have a lot of immigration in and out of societies. Everyone knows integration of immigrants into a country's culture is important, but things can be done in the country as well.
Since you live in USA, think about how christianity may act as a barrier between people. Separation of the church and state could help a little into easing these barriers between groups within the society.