Negative Liberty.
Paper details Use the following thesis against this passage: While the definition the author uses for negative liberty is valid, and taxation is interference, that interference acceptable. Spend the first full-body paragraph discussing the thinker’s definitions of negative liberty. You can defend your agreement or disagreement either by assessing the internal consistency of the following passage (is it coherent or contradictory? Why?) and/or by assessing the accuracy of its claims (are its various claims true or false? Why?). The essay should draw from the thinkers Isaiah Berlin, Cohen, Taylor, and Hobbes. (I have attached summarizations of their points of view to try and help – I have nothing on Cohen and almost nothing on Hobbes.) “If you truly value negative liberty—if you really think that others should not interfere with your own choices about what to do with your words, your body, and your belongings—then you have to agree that whenever government raises your taxes in order to provide social assistance to other citizens it encroaches upon your liberty. Yes, it is important that people have access to things like healthcare, education, and income. But let’s not pretend that government can distribute these resources without compromising liberty, to which we have a basic right. It is safe to say that all of the principles of justice that require the government to interfere with people’s economic choices in order to maintain some “pattern” of equality always conflict with liberty.”