Buckley’s Mix

Fair Governance IV

In previous posts I argued that the state is justified in restricting a person’s liberty to prevent him from harming other people. I also said that one could harm others through one’s example, with bad behavior rubbing off on others. I called restrictions on liberty prompted by this concern social perfectionism. I also rejected Mill’s [...]

Fair Governance III

Let me now strengthen the argument for perfectionism, where the government restricts individual choices to promote a moral vision, with an example that nearly everyone would find compelling from the 1964 Civil Rights Act. One of the Act’s then-controversial sections prohibited discrimination on the basis of race when people rented out rooms in their homes. Critics [...]

Fair Governance II

The case for government interference with individual preferences is usually made as a matter of paternalism, not perfectionism. That is, the claim is made that we’re really trying to make people better off or happier, not more moral. Any project to reform morals runs against the relativism of our time. Of course, the paternalist can’t be a relativist. He has to [...]

Fair Governance

I am asked to present my book, Fair Governance, on Reason TV. That will be a bit of a challenge, becuse the book can be technical and I’ll have to simplify. The book describes two principal rationales goverments might offer for interfering with personal preferences. First, the state might do so with the goal of making individuals [...]

Libertarian Paternalism

My book, Fair Governance, came out from Oxford U.P. last week, and I am asked by someone in the British government for a precis of my thoughts on “libertarian paternalism.” That’s a bit of jargon popularized by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, in their book Nudge. Cass is a very smart guy and it’s a [...]