Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Sebastian:

Consequentialism and communism: You call Western attention to individual rights ‘lip service’, but the record suggests that it was more than lip service. Western German citizens really did have more individual rights than East Germans. And my mention of ‘citizen’ is not particularly instructive. We can argue about how much nations ought to value non-citizens, but at the very minimum they ought to value their own citizens. Communist nations pretty much didn’t. I don’t see how you can dismiss that as: you’re clearly a prostitute now we’re just haggling over the price. The point of Halliday’s argument is that Communism doesn’t even try to restrain itself by what we see as traditional tensions between government and individual. And that ends up really being awful for individuals...