I summarized some of the key points on my blog if you are too lazy to read 9 pages on the NYT site. http://woodstock.typepad.com

Not at all. I do what I do out of personal choice. Government achieves what it achieves through coercion. Therefore, I wish for government to have a very limited role.

Also, any time someone says "at least we try" or words to that effect, it usually means a really bad idea is coming. "At least we try" signifies that the speaker is doing something to make themselves feel better rather than actually fixing a problem. It's not enough to assume that doing something will improve the situation; so many disasters of socialism have gone through because people assumed that doing something was better than doing nothing, only to find out that doing something was actually making things worse.

I suppose the key concept is - how do you pull yourself up by the bootstraps if you have no boots?

You write:

Had I a magic wand, I would waive it and alleviate these conditions (except perhaps unemployment, which is necessary at the margins to enable the creative destruction that makes our economy so robust). Lacking such a device, however, it is not clear to me that government can effect a cure for these things that not worse than the disease.

Proponents of negative freedom alone leave the attempt to find such a cure right there. They fail to even try. Those who accept both positive and negative freedom counter with something akin to: "Well, just because it is "government" doesn't mean I should leave my ethics and/or religious convictions at the door. I must at least strive to have my government live up to my personal standards. I must at least try to find a balancing point between positive and negative freedom."

Democratic socialists in the UK generally agree - and the Blair/Brown economic model explicitly says - that the balance in the UK had tipped too far towards government intervention in all things. That economic model propelled Labor to three electoral victories and, indeed, all of Blair's perceived failures have been when he decided to err on the side of too much governmental control of individuals (surveillance, the Iraq war itself, ID cards etc).

It isn't an easy balancing point for any government to find, but my religious beliefs tell me it would be morally negligent and intellectually lazy not to at least try solely on the basis that it would be hard work.

Regards, C

Here's an old post of mine on the subject but Brit poli-scientist Julian Baggini puts it thusly:

[Negative freedom] means a lack of coercion or intrusion from government in the lives of citizens. At the national level, it means a lack of intervention from outsiders in the life of the country. In both cases, the key idea is that the individual and the nation are both entities which alone have the absolute right to determine their own destinies for themselves.

...Negative freedom is vitally important. But the left has always recognised another from of liberty: positive freedom. This is the practical ability to actually make choices and live your life in the way you want. The problem is that negative freedom alone doesn't guarantee this. If you have no opportunities in life, the fact that the government isn't interfering with your business is small consolation...Freedom only becomes real if people are empowered to make choices for themselves, and they may need the help of others to do so.

Cameron's speech is in a strong British conservative tradition that includes Adam Smith (who believed aiding the poorest of society was one of the necessary functions of government), Benjamin Disraeli and the younger Winston Churchill which predates both Marx and Thatcherite/American Republican economics and acknowledges that "positive freedom" has an important role in ethical governing. I also suspect, very strongly, that those who founded and shaped America would have agreed with Smith, Disraeli et al - since all the records show they were heavily influenced by the seminal Scottish Enlightenment thinkers who always had a place for positive freedom in their work.

Regards, Cernig

As Cameron rightly points out, allowing the poorest of our society to go without food, power and shelter in our affluent society is immoral and downright uncivilised. That's a real expression of compassionate conservatism and I heartily applaud Camer....

Regards, Cernig

Its secondary purpose, turning the kids into Americans, has been somewhat less successful.

Our experiment in universal education is only about 50 years old. For half that it's changed from being a respectable profession for middle class and upper middle class women to being a path to the middle class for minorities. Whether that is compatible with its presumed objectives is a good question.

“There's the Republican Party which is roughly the equivalent of our Conservative Party and the Democratic Party which is roughly the equivalent of our Conservative Party.”