Indeed, Fr, excellent article indeed.
]]>Just bumped into this – it should be required reading for anyone discussing these issues.
http://www.heritage.org/BudgetChartBook/contents
It is time for people to inform themselves (with some data) about what is really going on here. This is no longer a left vs right issue – it is becoming an issue of “people who can count” vs “those who can’t.”
An uninformed, apathetic and ignorant electorate is the surest path to tyranny.
Best Regards,
Dean
Pardon me, Macedonia74, but I’m having trouble making sense of what you’ve said, and it doesn’t appear that you’ve understood what I’ve said. I said “support the local Church and enforce public morality”; you’ve turned that into “enforce the local Church” and “set up a theocracy,” as if (a) any cooperation between church and state constitutes a theocracy, and (b) such theocracy is presumptively bad. How very American. How very progressive.
Try this:
In On Liberty, John Stuart Mill writes that a person’s “own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant” for the state’s use of force against him, and that personal welfare and private morals should be governed solely by social suasion and censure, rather than by political coercion. This is consistent with Adam Smith’s three principles endorsed Fr. Peter and many other “classical liberals” and libertarians. By that rule, the state cannot ban pornography, prostitution, gambling, or a host of other vices. The state cannot even ban gladitorial games as long as the gladiators are free participants.
Now, why should such things be off limits to the state? Why should we draw the line where Mill draws it? That’s the question James Fitzjames Stephen asks in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Stephen was himself a “classical liberal.” He even stood for Parliament as a candidate of the Liberal Party. But his book was written against Mill’s On Liberty and in defense of state support for religion and morality, which Mill would not allow.
Thus my question for Fr. John and Fr. Peter was, which kind of “classical liberal” are you, Mill’s kind or Stephen’s kind? Progressive or conservative? The former is more common; the latter is more Orthodox.
]]>Suppose the true source of income was a gigantic pile of money meant to be shared equally amongst Americans. The reason some people have more money than others is because they got to the pile first and greedily took an unfair share. That being the case, justice requires that the rich give something back, and if they won’t do so voluntarily, Congress should confiscate their ill-gotten gains and return them to their rightful owners.
(…)
The sane among us recognize that in a free society, income is neither taken nor distributed; for the most part, it is earned.
(…)
Say I mow your lawn. For doing so, you pay me $20. I go to my grocer and demand, “Give me 2 pounds of steak and a six-pack of beer that my fellow man produced.” In effect, the grocer asks, “Williams, you’re asking your fellow man to serve you. Did you serve him?” I reply, “Yes.” The grocer says, “Prove it.”
That’s when I pull out the $20 I earned from serving my fellow man. We can think of that $20 as “certificates of performance.” They stand as proof that I served my fellow man. It would be no different if I were an orthopedic doctor, with a large clientele, earning $500,000 per year by serving my fellow man.
By the way, having mowed my fellow man’s lawn or set his fractured fibula, what else do I owe him or anyone else? What’s the case for being forced to give anything back? If one wishes to be charitable, that’s an entirely different matter.
Contrast the morality of having to serve one’s fellow man in order to have a claim on what he produces with congressional handouts. In effect, Congress says, “You don’t have to serve your fellow man in order to have a claim on what he produces. We’ll take what he produces and give it to you. Just vote for me.”
Who should give back? Sam Walton founded Wal-Mart, Bill Gates founded Microsoft, Steve Jobs founded Apple Computer. Which one of these billionaires acquired their wealth by coercing us to purchase their product? Which has taken the property of anyone?
Each of these examples, and thousands more, is a person who served his fellow men by producing products and services that made life easier. What else do they owe? They’ve already given.
If anyone is obliged to give something back, they are the thieves and recipients of legalized theft, namely people who’ve used Congress, including America’s corporate welfare queens, to live at the expense of others. When a nation vilifies the productive and makes mascots of the unproductive, it doesn’t bode well for its future.
http://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2011/05/18/understanding_liberals/page/full/
]]>Now, why would the state have to enforce the local Church? I never got this argument, because it’s really not an argument. If anything, the Church silently, enforces the State. And at a local level, if a particual State wanted to set up a theocracy, then the STATE had no say in the matter. In fact, many of the smaller colonies/states early on where. And Jefferson, who was anything but a Christian disagreed with them but did absolutely nothing to stop them from doing so.
Dn. Brian, don’t let a few “anarchists” in the midst of Classical Liberalism let you think that they actually have a voice in defining what that ideology really is.
]]>The question is, would classical liberals of the Austrian school support the state’s use of force to support the local Church and enforce public morality? This was a major no-no for many if not most 19th-century liberals; it’s still verboten among many self-styled “classical liberals” and most avowed libertarians, including those I know of the Austrian school; and it isn’t included within the limits set by Adam Smith and endorsed by Fr. Peter above. Yet it is the Orthodox tradition.
]]>Classical Liberal of the Austrian school, which presuposes a strong local Church and understands that none of this (liberty) works without a moral fabric (the family) that doesn’t originate from the State.
]]>Actually, both are modern phenomena, but the distinction of left and right preceded the use of the term “liberal” by two decades. Left and right originated in the early days of the French Revolution, whereas the label “liberal” was first applied in Spain in 1810 to a party of the left opposed to absolute monarchy.
The term “classical liberalism” is a 20th-century invention meant to distinguish earlier forms of liberalism from the “new liberalism” of the late 19th century, but this “new liberalism” arose out of liberalism’s earlier forms. John Stuart Mill laid the groundwork for it, and was opposed by more conservative “liberals” like Fitzjames Stephens.
What people call “classical liberalism” was quite diverse and in many ways contradictory. About the only thing uniting early “classical liberals” was opposition to the innovation of absolute monarchy, but some supposed liberals like Edmund Burke (grandfather of Britain’s Conservative Party) opposed it on conservative grounds (constitutional tradition, Christian subsidiarity) while others opposed it on progressive grounds (natural rights, equality, consent of the governed). I discuss the differences among the opponents of absolute monarchy (and plutocratic nationalism) in my book Eight Ways to Run the Country.
Sorry to complicate things, but reality is often more complicated than we would like.
]]>Classical Liberalism is just that Classical Liberalism it does not come from the left or from the right. That is a modern political distinction.
]]>But are you a classical liberal of the left or a classical liberal of the right?
That’s the problem with “classical liberalism”: It doesn’t really get at the main differences between people, and so it lumps together people who are in fact poles apart. Look at the wikipedia article: Most of those named as “classical liberals” were not particularly Christian; many were in fact very anti-Christian.
Only rather recently (last 50 years) have anti-government conservatives in America taken the name, but it really doesn’t fit them. Politics is not all about the individual, and if our own tradition means anything, governments do have other responsibilities that those named by Adam Smith.
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