Guiding Questions:
What is the obligation of government.
Should it be an actor in society, or just provide structure?
Is government intervention in non-legal issues a good thing or no?
should the government be in the business of legislating morality?
Please discuss below
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Edited by Partisan: 4/20/2019 10:21:15 PMI guess the short answer is "yes" and the long answer is "yes, and I care much more about the framing in the topic title and much less about the framing in the topic body" People spend a lot of time developing strong rhetoric on What The Government Is For and What The Founding Fathers Would Have Wanted and then use that to guide their thinking on Is This Good Policy. This should make sense, but it often leads to different (worse) decision-making than if you were just to look at Is This Good Policy as a problem-solving exercise. I think about the Conservative austerity economics of the Great Recession in this way, where the philosophical argument was that it was not the government's role to intervene to prevent suffering, and the moral argument was that people who were suffering had sinned, and their suffering would teach them to become better people; if I never hear the phrase "belt-tightening" again, it will still be too soon. The problem was that this was extremely stupid economics, and extremely poor problem-solving, and directly made life worse for millions of people-- even if it was Peak Political Moralistic Philosophy. All this to say, when it comes time for the government to do or not do something, it doesn't seem like such a bad idea to be biased towards a narrow view of what the merits of that policy are. And when I take a broad look at what the government is doing now, and whether it could do more to solve problems, I usually walk away thinking that it could.