PLANNER’S PUNCH: I’m really only posting this because otherwise I might forget that I wanted to use the post title. Being a “pater” is metaphysically horrible for the paternalists–whereas those on whom they exercise their expertise will generally work around the paters’ proclamations, with relatively less harm to the subjects’ souls. “Structures of sin” (which are our only contemporary options, I suspect) are always metaphysically worse for the people in power. But bureaucracy is the sweatshop of the urban welfare state–men and women in poverty spend at least as many hours filling out forms, and trying to understand them, with failure to understand them producing its own tragedies….

…The trouble with soft-paternalism is not so much that it’s a bad idea or that it’s anti-freedom (it isn’t), but rather that it leads us to value the wrong things in our leaders.

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