Will Wilkinson hits the nail. Searching question for the weekend: but is it in our nature to care, and, regardless, why should or shouldn't we? How fungible, and on what grounds, is efficiency itself? This line of questioning splits in two: sovereignty for states is one part of it.
Sovereignty for you and I is the other. As Constant knew, we cannot recover and do not even want ancient liberty, in which the only liberty to be had was political and that absolutely. But the fiction of representative political liberty can only tolerate so many Daliesque crutches under the pressure of surrendered political responsibility before it cracks and collapses; and the bargain of absolute civil liberty in exchange for a progressive loss of political liberty needs to be examined not just in my terms but in those of efficiency too, to see just how fall the economically minded are willing to ride their own train.
The kicker: broad civil liberty is certainly broadly an inefficient dissipation of energy into license and luxury. Only if the market system is rejiggered to continually re-jigger itself to capitalize the feelings and emotions surrounding license and luxury can cultural liberaltarianism avoid destroying productivity. Yet further feeding the surrender of political liberty.
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