I've never really had any strong political convictions... I have lots of big ideas but they seem disparate or contradictory and I almost feel like resorting to BLARG. Basically I end up voting pragmatically.

Recently though I have been listening to various liberty-orientated social philosophies and they seem very appealing to me. I was wondering if DV would discuss this and attack me for being a right-wing lunatic as an exercise in the dialectic method. The focus here is a consistent philosophical basis for a society rather than any particulars.

Right now I'm thinking a property-owning republic with a strong and applicable constitution is the best bet. My state would be based on the principle that you cannot encroach upon the free will of another, and also that there are some inalienable human rights (e.g. the right to life) that you have an obligation to provide and take precedence.

If somebody does encroach upon the will of another (e.g. stealing) then they should make some kind of repayment. If they are a dangerous individual (e.g. serial killer) then due to the above obligation to protect others, it is acceptable to encroach upon this individual's free will and incarcerate them. Capital punishment is of course forbidden by the right to life.

The above necessitates a police force and judicial system, and this in turn necessitates taxation. Taxation is permissible again by the obligation to provide certain human rights.

There must also be a free health service to provide the right to life to any treatable people with ailments, who are not able to pay.

Education is where I start to become a bit uncertain. I suppose education available to all up to a certain age could be treated as a human right.

However for university at least, I find it sensible that people should pay, although a good state loan system should be in place.

There are two arguments for higher education.

The first is to increase your income in adulthood. In this case it is a personal, selfish matter (I don't mean that negatively); it is an investment and it makes sense to pay for it anyway.

The second is that knowledge is inherently valuable. I could make the slightly cynical response of, 'well, pay for it then'. Instead I'll highlight one of the main reasons for the model I'm delineating: it may be so that knowledge is inherently valuable to some degree, but it does not take precedence over the fundamental principles of my state. You cannot encroach upon somebody's free will and force them to pay for your ideals, under threat of forced incarceration. I find that immoral. You will simply have to rely on uncoerced altruism.

I think that's as much detail as I'll go into for now. I'll just add that I think such a state also encourages human advancement. I am an altruist but also a pragmatist, and I think that the maximum benefit for all humans is, sad as it may be, in large part attained by harnessing human selfishness. I think that a state like Soviet Russia puts a huge damper on human progress; if such a state were enforced a few thousand years ago, sure it may have seemed like the idealistic option at the time to give everybody equal wealth, but the fallacy is that you're ignorant of the consequences in the future; come back to the present day and we'd still all be equal, but we wouldn't have medicine or... light bulbs. I'd much rather things were unequal, yet everybody's standard of living is above a much higher minimum level that it would have been otherwise; and it's still rising all the time.

Also, one of the few solid convictions I have which I alluded to at the start is the belief that technology is probably the greatest instrument for human good. My state would be totally transparent via the internet. New technologies make social problems redundant: the internet could make decent education virtually free, and so the thorny issues above completely dissolve, because the cost is hardly anything anyway. Or to take another example; a weapon capable of effectively nullifying an assailant without any serious health issues would completely dissolve the issue of others encroaching upon your free will in a violent sense, and all of the related issues of gun legality.