We wanna be free, to do what we wanna do
Excellent post by D^2 on new pointy-head blog, Crooked Timber on the ridiculousness of the various measures of how 'free' countries are.I won't repeat the whole post, but essentially D^2 points out that two of their measures are what commonly are described as 'positive liberty', ie the type libertarians don't like, which he says;
"Including the two positive liberties in their index of economic freedom is equivalent to the admission that economic freedom is not really worth anything unless you have the ability to make use of it'.
Well indeed. I've never really understood how libertarians seem happy to say, the second you propose any postive-liberty role for the government, 'I'm a libertarian and you're not', and yet almost all libertarians believe the government has a major role in enforcing contracts. This is a pretty big intervention, and -- as D^2 says -- a positive liberty one at that.
Yet once you start allowing for measures to increase positive liberty, it's hard to stop, as D^2 points out;
"This is, if I remember, what Isaiah Berlin ended up concluding; that once you let in any sort of positive liberty, it is powerfully difficult to avoid ending up with a concept of liberty that includes all and any of the compenents of what people need to live a good life".
The only other thing to note about these indices, and similar ones, is people always go 'look how high the United States is'. And it is usually top or at the least top 5. But that's because the indices are constructed with the US as the ideal example of liberty, so almost by definition it will be at the top.
posted by Matthew @ 7/11/2003 06:23:00 PM
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