Kriston links to a funny sheet of textbook advisory stickers and discusses some matters of public reason.

Which puts me in the mind to say this: You know, I wish that some folks on the left (and I don’t mean Kriston or Matt, unless the shoe fits) would be more frank about the fact that they really do seek to use the manifold powers of the state to impose their secular liberal comprehensive conception on the unwilling. (The right seems to be pretty frank about its intentions.)

But, I suppose, if you’re really up front about this, then you simply CANNOT pretend to be shocked, shocked when you end up in a cultural-political battle with the right. And you can’t be properly surprised and appalled when the right wins, and ends up imposing some of their comprehensive conception on you, because this is exactly what you wanted to do to them, but you lost.

So, if you would just cop to your designs of imposition through the power of the state, then it wouldn’t be so grating to me if you went ahead and railed full bore against warning stickers on textbooks and those creationist oafs and whatnot. But please don’t ALSO bitch about the fact that public schools are a politicized battleground for competing conceptions of truth and goodness. I mean, I guess it’s a cagey bit of rhetoric to pretend that sex ed classes and environmental consciousness-raising units and good old Darwin aren’t all part of a scheme to impose your view of the world upon other people’s children, so that you can then turn around and scream bloody murder when some zealots wants to put a sticker on a textbook because the textbook doesn’t teach what they (as opposed to you) want their children to believe. But, please, be serious.

I think that if you’re a political liberal, and sincerely don’t want to impose your comprehensive view on people, then you’re obliged to support something like vouchers for religious schools, so that you don’t end up imposing a secular comprehensive conception by means of crowding out the institutions through which people are able to raise and educate their children as they see fit. If you’re not willing to go quite this far, then it seems to me extremely unreasonable to complain about a sticker on a textbook. In fact, I don’t think you can complain about the sticker, be against vouchers for religious schools, and claim to be a political liberal all at the same time. If you do, then you’re really just an “impositionist” liberal of the first sort who has at least tacitly assented to the principle that those with the political power get to impose their views.

Having endorsed this principle, you should be pretty worried to find yourself on the wrong end of the power, but you shouldn’t pretend to be shocked that the right is trying to use its power to at least insulate elements of their comprehensive conceptions from the influence of we atheist, Darwinian liberals. Right?

Yglesias suggests that Gillespie’s maligned piece about his history of home ownership and the excruciating boredom of Kansas may get his libertarian card yanked. I should say that, to my knowledge, there is no authority who issues libertarian cards, and thus there is no agency authorized to revoke them. Matt’s statism apparently goes so deep that he conceives even libertarianism in terms of licensure.

Oh, but I wanted to say something about Matt’s post! He writes:

if what matters freedomwise isn’t simply the absence of coercive state action, but the practical ability to do things (i.e., the sense in which you’re freer in New York City simply because there are more things you could do, even though you’d be less regulated in Kansas) then you start slipping toward all manner of statist leftwingery — the fair value of liberties, positive rights, etc. Marx, I think, referred to the equal freedom of rich and poor alike to spend the night sleeping under a bridge as a way of highlighting the putative bankruptcy of European classical liberalism.

If Matt is right I fear my card, too, may be in danger. I am happy to endorse a notion of positive freedom. I do think it is important not to confuse liberty with ability. I do not have the ability simply to flap my arms and fly, although I am perfectly at liberty to do so, in the sense that I am not threatened with violence or censure should I attempt to do so. But I agree that it is cold comfort to be assured that you are at liberty to buy a yacht, or a sandwich, when you lack the ability. We cannot eat, or sunbathe upon the decks of, our liberties. Ability really is what matters. And people no doubt often find that it’s worth it to sacrifice some liberty to gain the unique abilities a city like New York affords.

However, I think that among the best argument for robust negative or liberty rights, i.e., for institutionalized constraints on coercion, is that a reliable system of negative rights over time creates more abilities, opens more paths of feasible possibility for individual lives, than most alternative systems of rights. Like Friedman and Hayek, I’m in favor of a modest and well-designed social safety net. However, political systems built around positive rights tend toward sclerosis, thereby reducing rates of economic growth, and a high rate of economic growth, along with (negative) liberty and stability, is part of the trinity of primary political goods (says me). Furthermore, a system of positive rights, conceived as a system of guarantees, is often self-defeating, because it cannot overcome systemic moral hazard problems that, independently of growth problems, turn out foreclose many of the possibilities for life that the system of guarantees was meant to open.

A system of robust negative liberty, together with a modest well-designed safety net, is in my opinion the one in which people are least likely to avail themseleves of their freedom to sleep under bridges.