> Take California’s high speed rail. Every individual has the right to object. No one wants an eyesore in their backyard. Everyone gets a hearing. Everyone gets a lawsuit. Everyone gets a veto in practice, if not in theory.
That has absolutely nothing to do with civil liberties and everything to do with the adversarial legalism of the Common Law code and with property rights, which are quite a different matter. There are any number of Western countries in which individual or household property rights are not taken to constitute an arbitrary veto on otherwise legal state action: if a train is scheduled to get built, it gets built, and compensation is paid but vetoes cannot be exercised.
Every additional "right" you have is a "freedom" you can choose to execute or not execute on. A right is an additional freedom. If you have no rights, you have no freedom, if you have unlimited rights, you have unlimited freedom.
I agree there's things like eminent domain. I'm just saying China leans more in the direction of less rights overall which in turn leads to a more productive society.
> Every additional "right" you have is a "freedom" you can choose to execute or not execute on. A right is an additional freedom. If you have no rights, you have no freedom, if you have unlimited rights, you have unlimited freedom.
Suppose there is one city where everyone has the right to build new housing on any piece of land they own and another city where everyone has the right to prevent anyone else from building new housing. These things are the opposite of one another, so they can't both be increasing the "freedom" of the public at large.
I guess the keyword is "individual freedom." Technically, freedom can be expanded in the way you're implying but usually in common parlance they are referring to individual freedoms. That is what people mean when they say the US is "more free" than China. Under your expanded definition it's not clear which one is more free.
Extreme individual freedom is often called anarchy.
There is nearly universal agreement among humans that nobody should have the "freedom" to commit non-consensual violence against another person. This is often cast as interfering with their freedom to be left alone and then the argument is that you don't have the freedom to deprive someone else of their freedom. But as soon as you have a government that so much as prohibits murder you're not doing something that can be described as anarchy.
The question is, in a "free country", does the government limit itself to punishing compelling violations with near-universal consensus like murder, or does it seize control over the micromanagement of dubious and petty violations like hypothetically marginally increasing traffic by carrying out a construction project?
It seems like the thing you're objecting to is the latter.
And I'm just saying that "less rights overall ... in turn leads to a more productive society" is rubbish idealism that imagines a big thermostat slider by which to trade off one abstraction vs another, ignoring the material histories and institutions that actually generate the outcomes.
Yeah, this kind of thing was part of the subject of my PhD, first postdoc, and ongoing scientific work. The question is how to produce generative models and inverse-inference algorithms that are powerful enough to work in tens to hundreds of milliseconds in high dimensionality :-/
The global workforce benefits from higher salaries and higher demand for labor, not from zero- or negative-sum moves of jobs from one place to another.
1) There's a very reasonable chance the company discriminates. Sorry, but once bitten, twice shy. One company gets caught at it and the whole industry develops a reputation.
2) If you've got a problem finding candidates, there's 16,000 more on the market now. Congratulations!
3) If you think there must be something wrong with those 16,000, well, that would explain where your pipeline is going wrong.
> There's a very reasonable chance the company discriminates
I don't see how this is even possible. There would be a memo from the CEO to 1000s of recruiters asking them to favor foreigners? that would leak immediately.
I don't quite know what you mean by that phrase. The conversation was about what constitutes a massacre, and I was trying to get a calibrating sense. Surely we both agree that 70-100k dead civilians disproportionately targeting children and medical workers/facilities would be at least one massacre, maybe several dozen.
And quite relevantly to the analogy, in Iran, the regime controls most of the economic links to the outside world, including the ability to convert the rial to dollars or euros.
That has absolutely nothing to do with civil liberties and everything to do with the adversarial legalism of the Common Law code and with property rights, which are quite a different matter. There are any number of Western countries in which individual or household property rights are not taken to constitute an arbitrary veto on otherwise legal state action: if a train is scheduled to get built, it gets built, and compensation is paid but vetoes cannot be exercised.
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