Thoughts on late night driving, pretty privilege and free marketeers

Yeahhh!

Thanks to the smartphone and the internet generally, I suspect less time than before is being devoted to contemplation, introspection and brooding, because, it’s always easier to watch another short form video than dwelling on the big picture of your life. Or, at least, I’ve found this to be increasingly so in mine.

And this new situation gives special importance to long distance driving because you are forced in virtue of the situation to just stick on a bit of music, preferably instrumental, and think to yourself. And this is done best in the dark, late at night. Motorways are great for this because they really don’t require that much thought, especially if you’re sitting in the slow lane. Non drivers are missing out on this. I’ve had some good ideas driving up and down from East Grinstead to Eynsham,

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Recently I’ve been watching all of Audrey Hepburn’s romantic comedies, including Roman Holiday, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Two for The Road. (I watch war films too!) One of the reasons for this is Audrey Hepburn is beautiful and I wanted to view more of her in moving pictures. Which made me think about pretty privilege, i.e., the better treatment of women simply in virtue of them being beautiful or pretty.

This privilege is justifiable because the appreciation of beauty is an objective good for a person, thus, when you have a line of girls, all the same except some are beautiful and others are not, then, if they want to be helped, chatted up, or, simply listened to, you should help the beautiful ones first. Note though they can’t demand this of you because the moral basis of the pretty privilege is as a byproduct of you pursuing your self-interest, not as some duty you owe them.

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I’ve been to a few Westminster parties over the last couple of months and I often ask how people describe themselves politically and fortunately, due to the places I go no doubt, a lot of people call themselves libertarians. Upon prodding, however, they usually favour quite a bit of redistribution, e.g., one person I spoke to still favoured the NHS.

A lot of people in Britain, unlike America, are not really libertarians but free marketeers. The difference between the two is free marketeerism is an all-purpose public policy disposition towards competitive markets and private enterprise. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a Rawlsian, luck egalitarian, relational egalitarian, sufficientarian, or, conservative, in most cases free markets are going to better serve your goals than a state-controlled economy, so they claim.

Libertarianism, contrastingly, is in large part a theory of distributive justice; which dictates that whatever distribution of wealth emerges from original acquisition and voluntary exchange is just. Unlike free marketeerism, it has political ends baked into it. We can see the difference between free marketeers and libertarians in Britain most clearly in two instances: Regulating natural monopolies and favouring social health insurance.

Libertarians are opposed to both policies because of the breach of private property, while, free marketeers might not oppose them because they have other political goals in mind, e.g., the utility of a competitive gas market or the egalitarian or sufficientarian justice of everyone having access to decent healthcare. To them, consequences matter. One strawberry blonde girl did get what libertarianism was off the bat, or, at least, its deontological gist, when she said libertarianism is ‘when you favour something even if it has very bad consequences’. Quite.