Good idea for a thread!
Most people around here know where I stand on a lot of issues, but I agree that it's worthwhile to talk about the principles that underlie them.
1. I believe that moral truth comes from the individual, not from institutions. This means that the role of government in moral issues is to preserve and protect our ability to choose our own ethical paths. What I in essence mean is that government itself is and should be morally neutral. The same holds true for corporations and other kinds of institutions. Institutions (like churches) that seek to replace the moral judgement of the individual with their own are in my view deleterious social forces because they interfere with the individual's ability to make moral conclusions of their own.
2. The role of government is to build and foster a strong and prosperous society in which opportunity is equal, though results are not. I don't mind paying taxes, as long as government recalls its mission which is to pool the resources of people in order to provide the infrastructure of modern life, plus education and health care for all. To me the ideal government would actually be relatively small, because it would attempt relatively few things: sustaining the infrastructure of the community, providing a small number of efficient, universal entitlement programs and providing for the protection of our society at home and abroad.
3. A wealthy society cannot make every member a wealthy person--but by the same token, there is no excuse for a modern society to abandon its members to homelessness and sickness.
4. Laws should be few, enforceable and should have a clear rationale: that is to say that laws should exist in order to protect us or to foster a greater collective, not to impose morality on the individual (see number 1). For me, ethics always trumps law: if asked to choose between two courses of action, one of which is clearly unethical but also legal, and the other of which is ethical but illegal--I'll choose the ethical course every time.
5. I'll add civil disobedience too--which is something that I wish I lived by more. Many of the ideas above are very influenced by Thoreaud, and I think he was right in suggesting that it is the duty of every citizen to work each day in order to create a government more in keeping with his principles. This is the true problem with partisan politics in my view--because it subverts the democratic process into a horse race in which the drama of power is reduced to the status of a sports match, with boosters rather than true partisans. A true partisan bases his or her beliefs on principles, not parties--which means they won't and shouldn't hesitate to abandon the party when it deviates from those principles. In other words--rule 1 above applies equally to political parties, and blind loyalty to a single one is foolish for the average voter. Unfortunately, party systems also frequently force voters to make a devil's bargain between two choices that they don't like very much--and though it's a necessary evil it's one that comes at a cost: that many people treat politics as a game instead of as what it is--the social conversation about the future of the collective.
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