http://classicalvalues.com/2013/02/cb2/

Medical Marijuana prohibition is a crime against humanity and a violation of the religious precept – heal the sick.

What I tried to do was provide a limited link of the “culture” issue to a “gut” issue of Public Choice.

Your paras. 1 and 2 provide plenty of scope for detailed examination and discussion. (Of course, I think we all recall where the Devil is said to reside.)

As for the rest … that is surely how it seems to me.

Thanks. :>)

Observations so far indicate that “culture” in any** grouping is formed by the objectives sought and means chosen by the members of that grouping.

Objectives sought are also matters of choice. As McCloskey has demonstrated those choices are not solely determined by “maximum utility,” nor by “maximum valuation” [Buchanan]. The same applies to the choices of means.

Those choices of objectives and means are generally constrained by the availability of resources and the environments in which made. When the environment for particular services (e.g., medical care) is transferred to the political context, the resulting decisions on choices have been demonstrated to follow the processes of “group decisions,” rather than those which occur in open or individual exchanges of services (contractual) and the resulting “culture” is political in nature, and the relationships within it correspond to those of political structures, principally bureaucracies.

A commonly observed feature of those cultures is that a major portion of the objectives of, and selection of means by, those operating inside them requires maintenance of a position in, and satisfaction of, a bureaucratic hierarchy, rather than solely or chiefly the functions of direct exchanges of services.

**probably every “society, “social order,” or civilization.

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Collectivism is irrationality taken to the point of death wish.

That’s Scousers for you.

I assume that by “Fisher” you meant “Francis”? If so, now that you point it out I assume that there has been a sea change and all will now be utterly committed to the saving of lives–even putting those of humans above those of the polar bears who are not drowning for lack of sea ice.

Oddly enough it was indeed your comment that provoked my little lecture above. The more important point of nexus being your reference to Public Choice Theory–which initially struck me as suggesting a degree of disapproval, and against which I have a bias because though I really don’t know anything about it, I have the impression that “Public Choice” types also believe in “Rational Ignorance” on the part of voters actual or potential as actually being the (the) rational stance in general–which I say it is not, and certainly not on the grounds for which it is argued.

On second reading, I see that you really didn’t say any such thing: I may well have read it into your remark. So now I’m curious as to what your assessment of this wondrous Public Choice theory really is, if you’d care to say.

But the second junction point has to do with a culture where ignorance is considered acceptable–not because everyone is, of necessity, ignorant before or unless learning takes place, but because (if the truth were told) it provides excuses one can trot out to oneself and others for not bothering to learn. It’s true (I think) that most of us at times are genuinely ignorant about something we should or must do to avoid disaster–but the general “cultural” attitude that deliberate ignorance is rational/reasonable/acceptable in situations where we’ve contracted to see to the lives and well-being of all our charges is most certainly an unconscionable one for the NHS or any medical personnel to take.

Here I was thinking somebody would pick up on the use of the past tense in the Fisher attribution.

Because, it is said, any given person’s probability of affecting the outcome of the vote is statistically tiny.

First, and most obvious, there is such a thing as the cumulative effect of tiny increments. That, of course, is in fact the way voting works; the very notion of the statistical probability of a given person’s vote’s determining the outcome is really not even applicable. There are any number of illustrative analogies. Suppose a large, but finite, number of chimpanzees–say, a zillion of them–throw identical-sized rocks into the Grand Canyon at the same time. Is it sensible to ask WHICH chimpanzee threw the rock that filled the Canyon? Is it “rational” for any given chimp to decide that probably his particular rock will not be the one that fills the Canyon? And that therefore, though filling the Canyon is the aim of the group effort, he shouldn’t bother doing it?

In short, it’s not because of ANY one, PARTICULAR person’s vote that X won the election. It’s because of the AGGREGATED EFFECT of the votes for and against X. And (assuming all the votes are counted accurately and are honestly reported), EVERY vote cast counts toward that aggregate effect.

Second, it’s true that all of us have only a finite amount of time at our disposal, and (probably) infinitely many ways in which we could spend each second of it. So we must prioritize, and it may well turn out to be, per our own circumstances and value system, better to spend time learning how to take the best possible care of the coming infant than to educate ourselves properly regarding political philosophy, the current situation, and the candidates. But that’s a question of the rational choice of priorities, and persons in different situations might choose differently–for instance, perhaps the pregnant lady has already chosen adoptive parents who will assume parentage of the newborn immediately she delivers.

But–this leads us to the third point, which is that each of us has to live with the consequences of the fact that X won. And this will often enough have an effect not only on our own lives even years hence, but also on the lives of the next generation, and the one after that, and ….

Finally, in general: while ignorance in any field may be necessary for any of a variety of reasons, it is rarely in and of itself rational–even knowing baseball statistics is of value to some. (There are a relatively few cases where willful blindness is helpful as a method of self-control; as for instance in an extreme emergency in which one is liable to panic, and so persuades oneself to believe that the situation will end well. In fact, even in non-panic situations where it’s nevertheless necessary not to become demoralized.)

“There is no such thing as useless knowledge.”

. . .

However, all of this impinges on the issue of whether a society is encouraged to maintain itself in a state of ignorance (that is, whether individuals are discouraged by their society, their culture, and their various leaders in their desire and attempts to learn all they can), and is encouraged to believe the educational theory making the rounds in the early 70′s, which was (and, if you believe in Rational Ignorance as a good excuse not to bother learning, still is) that “you don’t need to know, you just need to know how to Look It Up.”

One of the great gifts of political liberty is that it does not encourage ignorance….

Which brings us to the concept of Enlightened Self-interest, about which we Children of the Fifties were taught in high school. Enlightened Self-interest, as we were taught the concept, meant that one pursues knowledge in matters which seem likely to have a serious effect on the long-term course of one’s life; that one seeks what one, being educated, believes will be beneficial to one in the long term; that one understands that “sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander,” that one ought not to do unto others what one would not have them do unto one, that in forcing others to follow one’s own orders against their wills one has lost one’s own right of self-determination; and that while it might not be in one’s short-term self interest to give the neighbor one’s last cup of milk for her baby, it might very well be in one’s long-term self interest: partly because helping others does often feel good when it’s voluntary, and partly because one is either repaying a prior kindness from the neighbor or because one understands that a spirit of cooperation on some level or other tends to benefit oneself materially, in the long run.

That, by the way, is not precisely the way Wikipedia describes Enlightened Self-interest. But it’s jolly well what I mean by it and I think it’s pretty well what we learned in high school is the moral philosophy (as opposed to political or theological philosophy) which we as Americans inherited from our founders and their philosophical forebears, and which we should keep going as part of our legacy, as a moral policy that works in promoting both individual happiness and social harmony rather than discord (which generally does also make our individual lives more pleasant), and as the moral policy that embraces and encourages whatever inclination to virtue and goodness we may have achieved so far.

I hope you appreciate that the “Liverpool Care Pathway” is a bureaucratic procedure for euthanasia of those the NHS believes it can get away with murdering.

All of this is coming your way when Obamacare really gets its skates on.