The recent annual cost-of-living increase in social security payments seemed skimpy to some. But it all matters what you buy. With the price of consumer electronics going down while the cost of medical care goes up, senior citizens can obviously stretch their dollars further by buying more iPods and less medical care.
(Thanks to Tim Iacono for that one, on Seeking Alpha or at http://themessthatgreenspanmade.blogspot.com/)
The social contract, which you may remember from school, isn’t much discussed any more, but it provides the framework for how political decsisions are made in the U.S. My own thoughts on the subject:
1- Given: people have an innate moral sense of fairness and sympathy, which appears to have proven by psychologists and neurologists, and which my own study of history leads me to agree with
2- Given: a strongly held belief system, or a strong emotion, can override this moral sense
3- Given: the US is a pluralistic society like it or not. John Rawls: within this society there are “communities” that are not pluralistic, but the overall nation is, because it’s made up of many such communitites
4- Conclusion: if each community tries to enforce its belief system on the other communities, constant strife will result. Or an oppressive police state.
5- Conclusion: a social contract or cooperative agreement, such as the US Consitutution, that requires people to compromise, is the only way these communities can get along
6- Conclusion: decisions made under a social contract should be made by gathering the facts (inductive thinking) and seeing the situation from the other guy’s perspective (fairness) — because it seems to be the best method. It’s better than utilitarianism, because of the difficulty of measuring happiness. And it’s better than decisions made according to a particular belief system, including libertarianism, because that’ll destroy the social contract.
I Brake for Trees Archive 