Hi Elephant and Danila:
> ELEPHANT TO PLATT:
>
> The point I was making in the throw-away line was that the boundary between
> depreciated statism and esteemed state-intervention is a hard one. At the
> lowest level, the administration of justice is state-intervention. A
> policeman is a form of state-intervention. A murder inquiry is
> state-intervention. Public enquiries are, in a way, a branch of the same
> administration of justice, but in practice the administration and the
> justice that is involved here gives the state a slightly higher degree of
> authority over the details and circumstances of citizen's lives, right
> through to, in the case of enviromental catastrophe, whether they live or
> die, and in the case of enviromental quality, whether they can go for a walk
> in the woods.
>
> Indeed the political movements that have argued for greater
> state-intervention have generally had, as their rallying call, the
> implementation and administration of justice: economic justice, social
> justice, enviromental justice, health justice, even in some alarming cases
> divine justice.
>
> So, what I suggest is that whether you think of a proposal as constituting
> statism or the proper state function of administrating justice depends,
> almost completely, on what you think of as just. You, Platt, think of land
> ownership as entirely proper and just. Danila does not, largely because of
> the social, economic and enviromental injustices that he attributes as
> consequences of outright land title. There is the possibility of a serious
> argument between your two veiws of justice. But that argument will not
> occur if all that either of you exchange is labels like 'statism'. MOQers
> should be able to debate social programs without being accused of unamerican
> activities.
"Statism" is a perfectly legitimate and accurate description of
Danila's proposal for the government to own all property. Here's
the definition from the Random House dictionary.
statism (n) 1. the principle or policy of concentrating extensive
economic, political, and related controls in the state at the cost of
individual liberty.
I'm not accusing Danila of anything other than perhaps ignoring
history and the role of Dynamic Quality whose "only perceived
good is freedom."
A discussion of what constitutes "justice" in the MOQ would
indeed be interesting. But, at the moment I want to concentrate on
Elephant's post on Plato's 'essences'/forms as it contains such a
feast for thought.
Platt
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