Prelude to Politics (9) -- Politics - The Economising Institution -- A First Chain of Points - An Emerging Thread of Arguments

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Continued from here.

Politics (7) - Politics (18):

(8):

Certain conceptions of politics, especially liberal ones, are tinged, to say the least, by the idea of some kind of natural or self-creating order - like self-correcting markets or natural rights inhering in the individual as such whose observance make active involvement in the politico-legal shaping of society superfluous, indeed, representing dubious and even dangerous undertakings. 

• as freedom, according to certain philosophical preconceptions, is rooted in divine, natural or spontaneous order, politics is bound to be a destructive additive

• observation of the principles reflecting natural order is to be preferred to efforts at active figuration (design) of human relations 

• true interventions may be ill-conceived and result in failure, but

• David Hume paved the way toward a differentiated incentive-structure-analysis of government, by discovering that “rights are not deriv’d from nature but from artifice.” 

• once you challenge the dogma that “rights … are deriv’d from nature” you unblock the path that leads to an analysis of what “deriv’d by artifice” means. That’s the moment when you start to look at the world as it is, and you discover politics and the state, however much you may dislike them, are decisive parts of the process that churns out rights, good and bad. [...]

• people must venture interference, both of the kind that percolates from individual and local arbitration or contracting to society at large as well as in the form of deliberate grander schemes of collective coordination,

• not all interference is dangerous and results in failure; experimenting is an indispensable part of human design addressing the framework of inhuman interaction,

• human design is balanced by human counter-design

• politics as the gateway of change is counter-balanced by politics as the organisation of opposition 

• politics helps us keep on course via mean-reversion

• politics may be used to overly stretch and misallocate resources, but

• politics is an economising institution

• politics, being pluralistic, competitive, and mean reversing, keeps us within the corridor of success, helping us avoid the inordinate costs of radical and hard to reverse aberrations

• politics is an economising institution in that it enables us to balance our interests, admit progress while avoiding the costs of utopias that transpire to be dystopias

• the rules by which we live are not givens, but involve human volition and design 

• once this is realised politics assumes a more respectful position in the gamut of human affairs

• shedding our prejudices against politics, we are free to recognise its necessity and benefits, which include 

1. improved information (needed at a minimum to work out reasonable compromises), 
2. the management of political scarcity (irreducible value differences), 
3. violence reduction, 
4. trust building, and 
5. resource pooling. 

• politics is a device helping us to economise on violence, mistrust, destructive divisiveness, ignorance of our mutual concerns and potential for cooperation.

Continued here.