Liberty and the common good

A Libertarian Case for the Common Good | America: The jesuit review - Stephanie Slade:

August 6, 2018 - "One of the widespread misconceptions about libertarianism is that it denies the importance of community — assuming, in the words of the Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen, that “the individual lives, or could live, in splendid isolation” from others. Another is that it preaches a selfish unconcern for the plight of one’s fellow humans, especially the least among us.... But ... in fact, neither of those positions is integral to the libertarian worldview.

"One way to think about libertarianism is that it is a political philosophy that prefers voluntary, nonviolent human interactions over coercion. Because government dictates are by nature coercive — we do not get to choose whether to pay taxes or comply with zoning restrictions — libertarians advocate relying on private solutions to problems whenever possible. Civil society institutions — family units and neighborhood groups, labor unions and trade associations, churches and charities — must do the heavy lifting. State interference in people’s lives should be a last resort and then undertaken only for grave reasons.

"As David Boaz of the Cato Institute has put it, libertarians generally believe 'the only actions that should be forbidden by law are those that involve the initiation of force against those who have not themselves used force — actions like murder, rape, robbery, kidnapping, and fraud.' Everything else people should be free to work out organically, through trial and error, give and take, pressure and persuasion.

"Ask a libertarian why we believe what we do and the answer may be rooted in abstract moral principles: We think people deserve to be treated as ends, not means — which is to say we think their autonomy should be respected as long as they are not infringing the rights of others. But very often, the explanation you get will be pragmatic. An honest assessment of reality tells us that maximizing the scope of freedom from government coercion creates the conditions for material progress and human flourishing.

"That is not limited to progress and flourishing for a select few. Good-faith skeptics might be surprised to learn how active libertarians have been in the fight to end mass incarceration and advance criminal justice reform in the United States, for example, or how many libertarian groups filed amicus briefs siding with the Little Sisters of the Poor during their showdown over the Obamacare contraception mandate....

"I came to identify as a libertarian after studying economics in college. I was moved by the realization that market capitalism is the most efficient engine of economic growth the world has ever known. Both theory and empirical observation told me that government regulation is more likely to interfere with this process than it is to correct flaws in the system....

"Material well-being is part but not all of the story.... Libertarians extol capitalism because it provides a framework for people to interact peacefully and achieve mutually beneficial outcomes. (Have you ever noticed that after a commercial exchange, each party instinctively thanks the other?).... we want people who are struggling to escape desperate, backbreaking poverty to get the same material opportunities we are lucky enough to have. There is a thoroughly moral dimension to our worldview that is hard to miss when observed with an open mind.

"In the final analysis, libertarians see the human person as worthy of respect. For the most part, they do not recognize the deeper truth: that this is so because we are made by God in his image and are incomparably valuable to him. But in a real sense, without meaning to, libertarianism takes that idea more seriously than most other political philosophies."

Read more: https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2018/08/06/libertarian-case-common-good
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The racist roots of the progressive movement

Progressive and Racist. Woodrow Wilson Wasn't Alone. - Bloomberg View - Virginia Postrel:

December 8, 2015 - "Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics and American Economics in the Progressive Era, by Thomas C. Leonard, reveals the largely forgotten intellectual origins of many current controversies, including disputes over tightening voter identification laws, raising the minimum wage and restricting immigration....

"Early 20th-century progressives transformed American institutions, and the movement’s premises continue to inform thinking and policy across the political spectrum. 'It was the progressives who fashioned the new sciences of society, founded the modern American university, invented the think tank, and created the American administrative state, institutions still defined by the progressive values that formed and instructed them,' writes Leonard, a research scholar at Princeton’s Council of the Humanities.

"The progressives believed, first and foremost, in the importance of science and scientific experts in guiding the economy, government, and society. Against the selfishness, disorder, corruption, ignorance, conflict and wastefulness of free markets or mass democracy, they advanced the ideal of disinterested, public-spirited social control by well-educated elites. The progressives were technocrats who, Leonard observes, 'agreed that expert public administrators do not merely serve the common good, they also identify the common good.' Schools of public administration, including the one that since 1948 has borne Woodrow Wilson’s name, still enshrine that conviction....

"In the early 20th century, the progressive definition of the common good was thoroughly infused with scientific racism.... Leonard argues [that] eugenics and scientific racism fit particularly well with progressive thought: 'Eugenics was anti-individualistic; it promised efficiency; it required expertise, and it was founded on the authority of science.' Equally important, 'biological ideas,' Leonard writes, gave progressive reformers 'a conceptual scheme capable of accommodating the great contradiction at the heart of Progressive Era reform -- its view of the poor as victims deserving state uplift and as threats requiring state restraint.' They could feel sorry for impoverished Americans while trying to restrict their influence and limit their numbers.

"Take political participation. Nowadays, people argue about whether stricter voter identification laws are good-government protections against fraud or discriminatory attempts to deter minority and low-income voters. A century ago, leading progressives happily embraced both goals. 'Fewer voters among the lower classes was not a cost, it was a benefit of reform,' Leonard writes. After progressive reforms, including Jim Crow restrictions sold in part as anti-corruption measures, voter participation plummeted. In New York State, turnout dropped from 88 percent in 1900 to 55 percent in 1920, while national turnout fell from 80 percent in 1896 to 50 percent in 1924.

"Advocates similarly didn’t deny that imposing a minimum wage might throw some people out of work. That wasn’t a bug; it was a feature -- a way to deter undesirable workers and keep them out of the marketplace and ideally out of the country. Progressives feared that, faced with competition from blacks, Jews, Chinese, or other immigrants, native-stock workingmen would try to keep up living standards by having fewer kids and sending their wives to work. Voilà: 'race suicide.' Better to let a minimum wage identify inferior workers, who might be shunted into institutions and sterilized, thereby improving the breed in future generations....

"Although they generally assumed black inferiority, progressives outside the South didn’t worry much about the 'Negro question.' They were instead obsessed with the racial, economic, and social threats posed by immigrants.... So restricting immigration was as central to the progressive agenda as regulating railroads. Indeed, in his five-volume History of the American People, Wilson lumped together in one long paragraph the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the 1887 Interstate Commerce Act as 'the first fruits of radical economic changes and the rapid developments of trade, industry, and transportation' -- equal harbingers of the modern administrative state. With a literacy test and ban on most other Asian immigrants enacted in 1917 and national quotas established in 1924, the progressives bequeathed to America the concept of illegal immigration."

Read more: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-12-08/woodrow-wilson-wasn-t-the-only-progressive-racist
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What's behind the new crusade against capitalism

Catholics Against Capitalism | National Review Online - Kevin Williamson:

June 10, 2014 - "The errors of the Catholic hierarchy regarding the economy are the product of errors in its thinking regarding the state. Catholic thinking about the role of the state has evolved precious little since 'render unto Caesar,' even though there is, especially in the Christian world, a blessed shortage of Caesars just now, and has been for some time. The Catholic clergy still operate under the Romans 13 assumption that 'the powers that be are ordained of God'.... From the old royalist Right to the redistributionist Left, there is an implicit and sometimes explicit belief that the state is a channel for moral expression, whether that expression takes the form of entrenching traditional ideals about family life or of collaborating with the state in the seizure and redistribution of wealth....

"This is true even among the so-called conservatives. Consider John Paul II writing on the 100th anniversary of Rerum Novarum:

If Pope Leo XIII calls upon the State to remedy the condition of the poor in accordance with justice, he does so because of his timely awareness that the State has the duty of watching over the common good and of ensuring that every sector of social life, not excluding the economic one, contributes to achieving that good, while respecting the rightful autonomy of each sector....

"But the state in fact has no way of knowing to any practical effect what the common good even is or how its policies might affect priorities relating to it.... Meanwhile, he also expects the state to determine just wages and union work rules, to administer unemployment insurance, to calculate the economic consequences of immigration, and a hundred other things that the state has no capacity for doing. Like Cardinal Rodríguez Maradiaga and others, he assumes that the state will act in the cause of justice for the poor rather than being the most ruthless and pitiless exploiter of the poor, as history, including the history of this country, very strongly suggests that it will be....

"'The case against libertarianism'? As usual, the most important part of the question goes unstated and unanswered: 'Compared with what?'"

Read more: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/379954/catholics-against-capitalism-kevin-d-williamson/page/0/1
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