(Part 3) Top products from r/AskALiberal

> An approach that places high value on personal responsibility is a more hands off approach that leaves people to take responsibility for solving their problems themselves without pushing them towards any particular choice.

Agreed... what's toxic is a policy which interferes with incentives to encourage negative behaviors... a highly likely moral hazard of any welfare program and one Democrats have not been careful to avoid.

> The sugar tax is an example that's been shown to work.

I'm not an advocate of a sugar tax for a lot of the reasons you mentioned above. I was just pointing out that at least it attempts to align incentives with the policy goal. A lot of welfare programs do the opposite.

> I think government changing incentives takes away from the individual responsibility of the person whose incentives are changed.

I basically agree with that. And for that reason I am NOT in favor of a sin tax on sugar. After all this back and forth I think I've figured out our disconnect:

You think government should paternalistically create positive incentives to encourage positive behaviors. The kind of policies advocated by Cass Sunstein n Nudge

I disagree, I think that's a paternalistic view of government's role, even a soft form of authoritarianism which is ultimately harmful to a spirit of self-reliance which I think is both right and just for it's own sake, and which is necessary for social health over the longer haul. Outside of actual criminality people should be free to make their own decisions AND potentially to suffer the consequences of the decisions they make.

Where I'm talking about government policy ignoring incentives it's where government programs, usually those intended to alleviate suffering, create negative incentives which promote negative behaviors.

> A focus on individual responsibility sounds to me like letting people have full agency over their lives and not interfering at all.

For the most part... yes.

> If the incentives are such that they make bad choices then so be it.

I'm ALL for removing externalities which create bad incentives. I'm all for education of the young which seeks to promote and reinforce, and even enforce moral behavior within the schools.

I'm NOT for holding the hand of a grown-ass man and telling him he shouldn't drink so much soda. If you want to create positive incentives to produce positive social outcomes I'd submit that the best social outcomes can ONLY come from people who are self-reliant and do not NEED or WANT a nanny holding their hand to nudge them into making good decisions for them. This kind of paternalistic nannying can only produce a culture of reliance and dependency which in the long run cannot produce positive results.

As I said before... this does NOT preclude any and all policies that provide a helping hand for people in need. What id does say is that such a helping hand is always at risk of creating moral hazards promoting the underlying social pathologies which created the need in the first place by removing the painful consequences of them. There's a balance there and one we've gotten badly wrong in the past with dire consequences we see in the underclass both black and white today.

If you're interested in an eastern philosophy perspective but have a western cultural background there's no one better than Alan Watts to start with. He's an expert at translating difficult concepts into a frame of reference that's far more digestible.

I'd start here with The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. Alternatively you can listen to many of his talks on YouTube for free. I highly recommend this as his character is half the joy of his work. Here's a relevant talk that covers some of the same material as The Book, just in less depth obviously.

If you enjoy his work, then you can move on to more difficult material. I'm a huge fan of Nagarjuna and his Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, or "The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way". It's an incredible work but you can't just start there or you won't have the necessary conceptual vocabulary.

I don't really know. My guess would be something described by Charles Murray in his new book (https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Apart-State-America-1960-2010/dp/030745343X): essentially, there is a segment of the country who is practicing stable, traditional paths of structuring their life like long term stable marriages, raising children in two parent households, etc, and there is a segment of the country which is not, and the former group is building a virtuous cycle, while the latter group is stuck in a vicious cycle.

This phenomenon likely has many many causes, but I suspect some of which are the decline of religion and the lack of alternative value systems to replace it in certain smaller communities, the prevalence and ease of escapes from socially-bonding activities like video games and drugs, the dramatic restructuring of economic activity away from traditional jobs to more dynamic creative type jobs.

The US is a much bigger place than the European countries, with a smaller social safety tradition, so these differences are probably more exaggerated in the US.

The FED website is probably the best place to learn about US policy. Otherwise, this is a pretty academic area, so I'm not sure if there's a single source I could recommend.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy.htm

​

Bank of England: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/

European Central Bank: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/home/html/index.en.html

Financial Times: https://www.ft.com/

The IMF has a page on monetary policy: https://www.imf.org/en/About/Factsheets/Sheets/2016/08/01/16/20/Monetary-Policy-and-Central-Banking

If you want to really study it, then this is a pretty well known textbook, this one is a good intro, and of course Big Debt Crises by Ray Dalio is interesting & very light reading.

Random question of the week: What book are you currently reading or what was the last book you read?

I'm currently reading a book on Catherine the Great. Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman. It's a great book so far.

In all honesty, check out every other definition of populism. I'm the one who brought the word up, so if I'm using a commonly accepted definition of it (I am), it's better to discuss the actual topic than fight about semantics. I've also defended elsewhere which definition I mean. And I believe it IS a common behavior that Trump and Bernie share.

For reference of the traditional definition of the word populism I'm using, see:

> https://www.amazon.com/Populism-Very-Short-Introduction-Introductions/dp/0190234873

or

> https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/02/what-is-populist-trump/516525/

or (kinda light description/summary)

> https://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15615.html

It seems silly to argue the validity of an accepted definition... so check out the definition I'm defending, and let me know if you think Trump is not a populist by that definition (the experts I've quoted DO categorize him as one). Or let me know if you think Bernie is not a populist by that definition (the experts hadn't discussed that). Or let me know if you think that definition of populism is a "good thing" (as a Marxist, you might. Populism is a viable baseline "thin philosophy" for communism, though I believe you can have Marxism without populism)

Otherwise, there's not much else to discuss.

I LOVE points 20 & 21 regarding statehood for colonies. There should only states in the United States. No inhabited land, excluding international embassies, should be part of the country, unless it is a recognized state. Therefore, all current US colonies and territories should either be declared independent or be made a state. These include: Guam, American Samoa, Puerto Rico, The US Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, and Washington DC. Check out this fantastic book to learn more about our messed up imperialist history is.

Like...did you know that we almost annexed all of Mexico once we took Texas et.al? There were competing forces in the government, imperialism and white supremacy. The white supremacists didn’t want the rest of Mexico because it was full of non-whites, so they only took the northern half because those people were mostly white. It’s true!

Did somebody say "A People's History of the United States"?

And, since there was no freedom, there was no possibility of citizens uniting to petition the government for change, since (a) they'd slung into gulags and (b) the government was so secretive most people never even knew about the disasters. This is a good book about that subject.

Why Nations Fail

In no particular order:

• The Moral Animal. Robert Wright.
  
• The Open Society and Its Enemies. Karl Popper.
  
• Albion’s Seed. D. H. Fischer.
  
• *Zero to One.* P. Thiel.
  
• The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
  
• Critique of Pure Reason. I. Kant.
  
• A Treatise on Human Nature. Hume.
  
• The Death of the Liberal Class. C. Hedges.
  
• A Theory of Justice. Rawls.
  
• The Origin of the Work of Art. M. Heidegger.
  
• The Denial of Death. E. Becker.
  
• American Colonies. A. Taylor.
  
• The Selfish Gene. R. Dawkins.
  
• Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud.
  
• The Hero with a Thousand Faces. J. Campbell.
  
• The Birth of the Artist. Otto Rank.
  
• Modern Man in Search of a Soul. Jung.
  
• The Feminine Mystique. Betty Friedan.
  
• Sexual Personae. Camille Paglia.
  
• How to Win Friends and Influence People. D. Carnegie.
  
  Sorry I got tired of making links. I’m on my phone.

https://www.amazon.com/White-Gold-Extraordinary-Thomas-Million/dp/0374289352


I've read other sources too. What I mean is when the kidnapped Europeans arrived in the Barbary States and were sold, they would be beaten if not working hard enough, given little food aside from meager amounts of bread and water, family and friends were seperated and sometimes slaves were even tortured to turn to Islam.


>Sorry Muslims, predictive text got me. And it really doesn't if you listen to the vast majority of Muslims that condemn groups like ISIS and fight them all the time.



I'm referring to what the Quran itself says, not what many moderate Muslims say.

This list isn't comprehensive, it's just a few books I've read that I think would be helpful:

• The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics And Religion
  
  This is not a liberal book, but it does show a bit behind the curtain of the differences in moral foundations, sort of moral axioms, that each side has, and how those logically lead to different prescriptions for society. I always recommend this book to anybody looking to learn about politics.
  
  
• The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too
  
  Despite the title being pretty clickbait-y, it is actually a serious essay by a liberal economist that highlights a lot of issues liberals have with the modern political system, and with conservative rhetoric vs what policy they actually propose.
  
  
• The Working Poor: Invisible in America
  
  This is also not a liberal book, but it does do a lot to highlight the various ways in which everybody is not equal, and how the poor are often held back by impersonal economic structures and bad financial choices being essentially forced onto them, just by being poor, and then that propagating to their children, ensuring intergenerational poverty.
  
  
• American Progressivism: A Reader
  
  This is a collection of essays, speeches, and letters written by leaders of the Progressive movement during the Progressive Era in the early 1900s. Back then, Progressives were in both parties; one of the most famous ones, Teddy Roosevelt, was actually a Republican. This book details the theory underpinning the foundations of modern government, the reforms the Progressives hoped to achieve in order to modernize government and remove corruption. Most of their ideas eventually got implemented, and form the basic structure of our government today. They also inform the modern liberal understanding of what government can do for people.
  
  

Enforcing the law is a start. I'm not being flippant, that genuinely seems like a reasonable and broadly agreeable place to start. The CFPB alone has already returned $11 billion to consumers from fraudulent and illegal action by existing bad actors breaking existing laws.


Conversations with people we don't generally identify with (for whatever reason) is a good technique to reduce polarization.


https://www.vox.com/identities/2016/11/15/13595508/racism-trump-research-study


Cognitive and critical thinking skills should probably be taught in schools, in my opinion. For example, we're all aware of what stereotypes are, but we aren't every really told how they work, why they exist, and in what ways internalizing them frequently fails us in daily life. They backfire when we misunderstand or misapply the statistics that even a valid stereotype represents.

This is an excellent book by a winner of the nobel prize for economics. It isn't at all about stereotypes or racism, but I see how a lot of the cognitive heuristics and biases he discovered and explored are key to how racism works (or, doesn't work).

https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374533555

>1 - 9 years old

They're from the relevant time period, when these accusations of a "Possible Military Dimension" (previously called "Alleged Studies") were being addressed by the IAEA.

2- Whatever nice distinctions you want to make, there was never any evidence that Iran had an active nuclear weapons program or a nuclear program with a military purposes or whatever other way you want to put it. Zero. None. And FYI Iran's enrichment program started before the 1979 Islamic Revolution with the encouragement and support of the US and not to mention that many countries have or will be devleoping the same technology of enrichment which is why most of the countries of hte world backed Iran in the dispute wit hthe US over the right to enrichment (not because they want to make nukes but because like Iran they too want to have an independent source of reactor fuel not dependendent on outsiders)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3983-2005Mar26.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/12/opinion/12iht-edferguson.2781236.html

http://www.nti.org/analysis/articles/bush-proposals/

https://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/non-aligned-summit-belies-isolation-iran

https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2006_11/NAFuel


3 again you're making nonsense distinctions. If Iran had a nuclear weapons program or anything about nuclear weapons, then it was the job of the IAEA to say so instead it had consistently stated otherwise. The worst it has said is that Iran had a program to develop technology that was "relevant to" nuclear weapons. Which is what the NPT is supposed to do -- requires sharing nuclear technology, Article V of the NonProliferation Treaty even requires the sharing of data from nuclear test explosions with countries such as Iran.


4
if You claim my statement has been "directly contradicted" then please cite the language instead of two entire reports. Also, please make sure you also have the legal qualification to understand and interpret what you're reading and versus the actual requirements of the NPT. May I suggest:
https://www.amazon.com/Irans-Nuclear-Program-International-Confrontation/dp/0190635711

5 Removing the possibility

Ten years ago, 40 nations were estimated to have the capability to make nukes quickly if they wanted to -- that's 1 out of 4 nations on Earth.
http://old.seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/2002041473_nukes21.html

They don't because nukes are actually useless and cause more problems
http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/ten-reasons-iran-doesnt-want-the-bomb-7802

https://thinkprogress.org/colin-powell-nuclear-weapons-are-useless-4ab6657759c7/

The assumption built into your argument is that nukes are a universally-desired thing that any country would get to deter any other country that has nukes. Well if that's just not true and is very simplistic.

This is aside from the fact that Iran already has proven that it opposed to WMD when it refused to resort to chemical warfare legally and in selfdefense against Iraq's US-backed CW attacks on Iran. Iran instead accepted the casualties of 100,000 people. So when Iran says it opposes WMDs on principle, it has already proven it with blood.
https://web.archive.org/web/20030102224708/http://cns.miis.edu/pubs/programs/dc/briefs/030701.htm

At the time, the US was trying to shift the blame for gassing the Kurds from Saddam onto the Iranians ! https://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/17/opinion/halabja-america-didnt-seem-to-mind-poison-gas.html

The NPT requires the sharing of nuclear technology, all of which "could be" used for nukes. There is no way to "remove the possibility" from any country without violating that country's rights. Note that every country has the right to make nukes if they want. In fact the NPT Art X even allows signatories to legally withdraw. So who gave the US the right to "allow" who to do what? The US itself is in violation of its own NPT obligations, FYI.

>storage of high-grade uranium

Iran never produced any "high grade" uranium and FYI in the past the US gave Iran weapons-grade uranium along with plutonium. So no that's not the issue and never was.

The deal had nothing to do with any actual nuclear threat. There was none.

Iran conssitently made BETTER nuclear offers that were ignored by the US to maintain the regime-chage pretext

So, correct me if I'm wrong, but the summation of your argument is that the current structure of human society produces more harm than it prevents. If you really want a detailed and largely data-driven answer to this, read the book "Better Angels of Our Nature" by Steven Pinker. It will give you a better answer to this question than anything else you'll find.

But to surmise the arguments in the book, the answer is a resounding NO. History has shown, time and again, that as society has become less structured by norms, rules, and laws, it becomes significantly more brutal. A big part of this is that, as you have more and more people competing with each other for limited resources, you get this never ending cycle of what are called Hobbesian traps ("I must strike at my enemy first and annihilate him or else he'll do the same to me") that creates these perpetual cycles of violence between groups. This violence then hinders or even reverts technological developments that could then lead to increasing these resources via increased production or more efficient use (who has time to produce pesticide when you've gotta constantly be keeping an eye on the village 2 miles away?).

Railing against globalism is kind of a fad nowadays, but few people realize just how much it has helped reduce overall violence in the world. As much as I hate what trade agreements have done to the American middle class, I can't deny that it's made major power war much less likely by creating huge economic incentives against, while at the same time significantly improving the living standards in many countries (China especially).