Pluralism
This, as with all other things on this wiki, is a work in progress.
There is probably not much overlap between the people you want to live with and the people who want to choose your particular form of government.
-- Arnold Kling, in Virtual Secession
Assuming you're on board with the broad goals of liberalism, the sort of dynamic society & economy that comes about under liberalism tends toward pluralism of goals, pluralism of values, etc. This is profoundly difficult for people to get through their thick skulls, probably for deeply seated psychological reasons (see the work of Jonathan Haidt)
Only a savage or a philosopher may be content with, or rise to, the conception of a pluralistic universe.
-- James Truslow Adams, on p. 65 of his The Founding of New England (on Google Books)
Any institutional arrangement which claims to be liberal, which also intends to endure over time, must be resilient within a pluralistic society, even when many elements thereof are hostile to the goals of liberalism. Will Wilkinson said:
[I]n democracies, the diversity of opinion is a predictable side-effect of freedom of conscience and expression. As such, it is a constraint on policymaking, not something to rail against.
Which is to say that we shouldn't advocate institutions that fail the November Rain Test.
Consider Prop 8. One one hand, you have a coalition of various diverse people who all find homosexuality, or at least gay marriage, to be evil / undesirable / whatever. On the other hand, you have a similarly diverse coalition in opposition.
But the meta-issue is that Prop 8, as such, was ever even on the table as an option, as something that can even be voted upon & enacted into the CA constitution. The CA ammendment process completely bombs the November Rain Test. Utterly and completely.
This is a case in which democracy fails the NRT, so I find things like Lessig's reaction to the passage of Prop 8 ("This is a democracy. We win when we persuade people of our ideals. I believe strongly that Proposition 8 is against our ideals. I have so argued. But we have failed to convince the other members of this democracy.") completely miss the point of the issue.
All this is just another way of stating the common-sense knowledge that that utopia isn't possible, that any institutional arrangement will be populated by ordinary people.
See also The Ism Book's entry on pluralism.
Pluralism and charity
In Rejecting Charity, Ryan Shaw...
I believe it is far better to take the money that would otherwise be spent on charity and give it to the government as taxes, and then to demand transparency and accountability from our elected officials to ensure that those taxes are being used in a way that realizes the kind of society we collectively envision.
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2009/07/four_reactions.html
Copyright © 2008, 2009 Edward O’Connor. CC BY-SA 3.0.