Does society exist?

No, I'm not going all solipsistic on you, but there was a recent post by a href="http://www.delawareliberal.net/2009/06/18/the-bankrupt-rhetoric-of-rationing/"cassandra at Delawareliberal/a quoting David Leonhardt of the NYT that got me thinking....br /br /Which is always dangerous.br /br /[The post, by the way, concerned the issue of rationing health care, and while I disagree with both cassandra's and Leonhardt's take, that can wait for another day. This is about a line in his column that I'm sure he didn't even think twice before using.]br /br /Here's the clip:br /br /blockquotespan style="font-style:italic;"Today, I want to try to explain why the case against rationing isn’t really a substantive argument. It’s a clever set of buzzwords that tries to hide span style="font-weight:bold;"the fact that societies must make choices./span/span/blockquotebr /br /Notice the bolded section.br /br /The problem is that, quite literally, isocieties don't make choices/i. This is a piece of rhetorical shorthand we use in hindsight to characterize the aggregate choices made by large numbers [or a leadership cadre] of members of a society. Picking this bone is not just nit-picking grammar, because there is an important philosophical point here.br /br /During the 1990s through about 2008 the sales of gas-guzzling SUVs all the way up to Hummers seriously outpaced those of high-mileage sub-compacts.br /br /Did that represent a societal choice to ignore the long-term consequences of short-term cheap oil, or global warming, or living beyond our means? No: those sales represented the individual, aggregate choices of millions of Americans for millions of different reasons, although polling and other research can--in hindsight--pick up some apparent trends.br /br /Another example: since 1948 a disproportionate amount of our Federal budget has been parsed out to a small number of defense contractors, regardless of who the President was, or what party he represented, or even who controlled Congress. Did our society somehow ichoose/i to spend imore on guns and less on butter/i? Or were key voting leaders heavily subsidized by the defense industry, the production of weapon systems distributed to key congressional districts, a steady stream of propaganda developed to insure continued funding, and pretty much any information to the contrary declared off-limits for public consumption? What exactly did isociety/i choose?br /br /You should always watch out for that buzzword isociety/i or one of its synonyms ["the voters" or "the American people"], which are 99.9% of the time used to intimate that a small leadership clique [elected or not] has made binding decisions on behalf of isociety/i, which will be used to control the lives of all of us--the ones who dissent, and even the ones who were not aware that such choices were going to be made.br /br /When somebody tells you that isocieties make choices/i instead of admitting that ileaders make choices and enforce them on the rest of the body politic/i, they are at best unconsciously attempting to intimate that anybody who disagrees with those choices or that intellectual model of society is selfish and not concerned with ithe greater good/i.br /br /At worst, they are consciously attempting to de-legitimize their opposition.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7893272060787897238-819258547646511079?l=delawarelibertarian.blogspot.com'//div

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