Hi, you don’t need to thank me, this is the point of places like steemit in my view, and will probably lead to the acceleration of the evolution of our species – and that’s just our conversation, haha! Well, reading Rawls, or anything else, won’t really help you understand my position, I’m afraid you have to ask me. Truth is, I’ve always been leery of authority in a major way, and I’ve never been a ‘follower’ of any school, or had a core textbook belief system. I’ve slowly come to consider myself a Liberal, but not classical (property rights are of no great interest to me, though they are certainly relevant in the evolution of rights theory). I’m certainly not the libtard sham. My original political study, and what I probably know best, was Marx – I learned enough to find out where he went horribly wrong – but he was quite, quite brilliant, and had some wonderful insights regarding the human condition. It is not wise to throw out the baby with the bathwater. I firmly believe in minimal government, drastic devolution – and lots and lots of community experimentation encouraged by the genius of unshackled human freedom. I recommended Rawls because I came across him briefly nearly 25 years ago now, and my impression was that he was the best modern exponent of the Liberal model. I don’t recall how much he delves into the classics, which as I recall are focused a lot on the issue of ownership. You are quite right about definitions, but if you think I’m strawmanning you’ll need to cite, or I can’t deal with it. Might be, but not intentional.

I’m not an expert on Classical Liberalism, or classical anything. My views are a unique hodgepodge, largely made up in the moment of asking. In discussing this with you I have likely conflated a number of disparate, half-remembered political theories into my inadequate notion of CL, and presented to you as though it were a concrete, pristine theoretical edifice. It will not be. I think the point is the interaction, and the growth that is possible through it. I remain convinced that rights/duties theories, divorced from any concept of ‘the good’, are by far the best method to preserve individual liberty, voluntary association, sovereignty, etc, etc., and I hope it has been valuable for you to see it through that lens. It is clear enough to me that Voluntarism/Libertarianism are an offshoot of CL, and so they must, inherently, be built on the same rights/duties assumptions. You are perfectly entitled to consider yourself a voluntarist consistent with these principles, but I am very wary of rooting that position in terms of how society ‘should/ought’ to be, and I think your arguments are at their weakest when you make claims like ‘don’t want military leaders with monopoly of force…’ etc. I know what you’re driving at, but I don’t think decisions like that have any place in the foundations of political theory, for reasons I outlined last time. I think we are still where we started though – your voluntarist version of Liberalism, particularly anarchism, is a vision of a future that I believe will likely arrive, but when we get there, we won’t even be talking about it, it will just be self-evident. In the meantime, I think for pragmatic reasons it is better to focus on what is easiest to spread in the societies we are embedded in now – basically, rights based Liberalism, encouraging ever contracting government, and ever multiplying and complexifying communities of freely associating sovereign individuals. From most outsiders’ points of view, on most political topics, I doubt there is much daylight between us at all. Db