RE: consumption

["Lisa & Ian Murray" <seamus@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

 I guess I'm more and less libertarian than Jim.  On the one hand,
 I think any
 decent society would have an enforceable meta-rule (like a constitutional
 guarantee) carving out a private space for personal choice in
 consumption, use
 of one's body etc. beyond the purview of even the most democratic of
 majorities.  On the other, the world faces an impending crisis of
 over-consumption: the pattern of consumption now dominant in the
 "developed"
 world cannot be generalized to all 6 billion of us.  What do we
 do if all the
 nice post-revolutionary stuff still leaves too many people
 gobbling too many
 resources?  Price 'em out of it with draconian green taxes?

 Peter
******

Sell 'em a drug called anti-consumerism.




 Jim Devine wrote:

 > Ian wrote:
 > >Is it forbidden to forbid?
 >
 > it's okay to forbid (smoking, drinking, whatever) as long as
 the process is
 > consistent with democratic sovereignty. Obviously, in practice such
 > sovereignty has been totally distorted and suppressed by the rule of
 > capital, patriarchy, and racism. Come socialism, it's hard to
 tell what the
 > vote would be about cigarettes. Hopefully, people would decide
 that there
 > are many activities (like Doug's eating of lard) which are okay for
 > individuals to engage in, since people will value their own freedom from
 > collective control.
 >
 > Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx &  http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine

******************

Negative and positive liberty arguments are pretty damned intractable in a
pluralistic global village with omnidirectional spillovers. Suppose over the
next 50 years 800 million more people want lard; who'll pay for the
externalities [clogged arteries etc.]? How about 800 million more smokers?
350 million more cars? No one wants tyranny, but we need to deal with the
paradoxes of liberty real quick or we're up the proverbial creek. Casting
the teenage smoking problem in the idiom of methodological individualism
doesn't help us.

Ian