The "Swamp Fox" posts this, which ends with the following:
Freedom does not occur in a vacuum. Freedom occurs in community, and its preservation is a daily struggle.
Hope you have a happy and healthy Fourth of July.
To which I had to respond:
Amen. And that is why I oppose those who wrongly invoke "freedom" and "choice" to defend their rejection of community, and their embrace of radical individualism, a la Ayn Rand and her "Virtue of Selfishness."
Thus endeth today’s sermon. Changing the subject slightly, does it strike anyone besides me as odd that the libertarians formed a political party, but communitarians never have? Think about it — the radical individualists organized themselves in collective action (of a sort), while the big boosters of community have never done anything but post essays and such.
Which is a shame, really. I had thought the communitarian movement had some real possibilities. I guess all we have now is the Unparty. Sigh.
Speaking of the Fourth reminds me of Ben Franklin, which reminds me of this quote. Smart guy, that Ben.
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Ben Franklin: “We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”
Great quote which I totally agree with. But where does it say that the community has to agree with you or else they are jerks, according to you, or dolts, according to another poster. Where does it say that? Yes, we should hang together but that also requires an acceptance by you when the majority of the community (at least the part that cared enough to vote) votes for the lottery, against Ken Clark, or for Karen Floyd. If you don’t accept those decisions, we will indeed hang separately. When you reject and bewail the community’s decisions, as you still do 6 years later in the case of the lottery, you are rejecting the community will as well. By doing so, you’re appointing yourself as one of the anointed who knows better what the people should want than the people know themselves. A busybody elitist, in other words.
As for the Swamp Fox column/post itself, I am totally bewildered how you arrived, or at least appeared to arrive, at the conclusions you did. Maybe I misread your post but how do you square this Milton Friedman quote with your big-government leanings: Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. The existence of a free market does not of course eliminate the need for government. On the contrary, government is essential both as a forum for determining the “rules of the game” and as an umpire to interpret and enforce the rules decided on. What the market does is to reduce greatly the range of issues that must be decided through political means, and thereby to minimize the extent to which government need participate directly in the game.
Note that nowhere does it say that government should take from Peter to give to Paul and spend vast sums of money in the process. Instead government’s function is to set “the “rules of the game”” and to act as an “umpire to interpret and enforce the rules decided on”. Other than that it should stay out of the way. It certainly isn’t the government’s job to run schools and in fact Friedman was the original proponent of school choice half a century ago.
All in all, I have the impression that your idea of community is for a country, state or city governed by people who think just like you. Remember, anything else is just a bunch of “jerks”, according to you. Myself, just like William F Buckley, I’d rather be governed by a bunch of randomly selected people (e.g. the first 2,000 names in the Columbia phone book) than by a self-appointed gaggle of elitists.
Brad
To maximize the benefits to the community, each participant must play its proper role. Even Milton Friedman agrees that the government has a role “as a forum for determining the “rules of the game” and as an umpire to interpret and enforce the rules decided on.”
Where government screws up is when it becomes a participant in the game, mandating choices best left to the market, because it interferes with giving “people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want.”
This is precisely the situation we have in public education, and no one seems to be able to figure out how to extract government from its inappropriate role as a player in the game, to what should be government’s role, which is as a referee deciding how the game will be played and then ensuring that the rules are followed.
You are right, and hard core libertarians are wrong, that government does have an appropriate role in public education to ensure that the game is played fairly and that no one is left behind, as it does in other aspects of our society.
But right now, the creative potential of entrepreneurial educators is locked away, because they have only weak and rather ineffective ways of bringing higher quality, more cost effective educational alternatives to students not well served today. As a result, the community is worse off, and will remain worse off, until we figure out how to free the most creative individuals in education to play the game as only they can play it.
Brad, The basic problem with communitarianism can be illustrated with this one simple example. This is a theoretical community of primitive Americans. A community of ten families may have 3 families that work very hard at gathering food to the point where they have excess food, 4 families collect only what they can consume, and 3 families that avoid the work and instead play but then have no food. Therein lies the conflict, should the over achievers be forced to give up their food to the three families with no food? And who can make that decision, since each family ONLY owns its own food. A simple example but this is the balance of power that is playing out in our society today.
Two thoughts on this.
Why must communities be held together with governmental action? Why can’t communities act for the benefit of people without needing to resort to governmental force to get things done?
I am an unabashed individualist, who resides in community and completely sees the need for community; I diverge where government gets involved. Our Founding Fathers did not build this nation as a communitarian endeavor, but as individualists. “All men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” they wrote.
Those are individual rights, not community rights. The Founders rightly focused on individual liberties rather than the power of a communitarian state.
As to your contention that there has never been a communitarian political party… Communitarianism is simply another form of statism in development. As such, the Greens, the Democrats, the Socialists, and the Communists have all been communitarian parties — parties which subject the rights of individuals to the whims of oligarchical bureaucracies. This is why I am a Republican American — we honor the power and rights of the individual over those of the state. This is why we hold to the free market – the belief that things work best when each works in his own best interest. This leaves plenty of room for individual charity (and Americans are the most active charitable givers in the world – witness the tsunami relief program) but charity that is determined at a non-governmental level (either by individuals, or churches, or other social organizations.)
I hope this gives you some insight into why we disagree so often…
The Libertarian Party was founded by Goldwater Republicans who left the GOP over the liberalism if Richard Nixon and the Rockefeller wing. They warned people that Nixon was true 1930s liberal – militaristic, for using government to subsidize poverty, and bring about social change through shallow, brute force reform initiatives.
Nixon proved them right. He ran on a platform of ending the Democrat’s war in Vietnam, but vacillated between negotiating peace and trying to win territory. He created the EPA, Earned Income Tax Credit, expansion of Medicare and Medicaid, Department of Education, trade with Red China, etc.
The only reason that devotees of individual liberty and responsibility have to organize is against the statists who seek to strip them of their rights and humanity. The NRA would still be just a manager of target shooting events had it not been for the socialist efforts to disarm American citizens. There would be no school voucher groups, had it not been for the federal and state governments seizing control of public schools as their brain laundries.
Joshua
Re: Why must communities be held together with governmental action? Why can’t communities act for the benefit of people without needing to resort to governmental force to get things done?
Because without a referee we’d have anarchy. A very interesting example is the ongoing experiment in democracy, Wikipedia. While some Wikipedians have claimed that “the community-run online encyclopedia explodes the myth “that someone has to be in charge” as well as the assumption “that experts count,” (Wikipedia and open source) some users inevitably abused their freedom therefore an authority was required to be an honest arbitrator.
We may not like it, but because of our human nature that’s life.
Interesting Brad, but we have had similar arguments in theology in the church. Acts 4 foresees, as does the Old Testament, a parity of income among those who call themselves Christians. It has worked at different times in the history of the church. Seems like I read in the paper this morning that it even worked very briefly in the Jamestown experiment.
It has worked in the past in the mission that I am most actively involved with. But it also had to eventually be abandoned for an individualistic system. It is as though community and caring is the ideal, but selfishness inevitably tends to cause it to disintegrate. Eventually, people stop taking care of common property. They lose the sense of coherence with the whole. But they still look for the power and prestige that community will give them for their generosity, and become hypocrites (Acts 5:1-10).
But for those of us who have been a part of caring community for a time, however brief, we know that there is more out there than just individualism. We hunger for it; we long for community. That’s why we can never quite get it out of our minds. Personally, I think it is part of that “God-shaped vacuum” that Pascal talked about.
The bottom line? I suppose we have to encourage individualism, especially in this country. But we have to temper it, which is what we did with child-labor laws, anti-monopoly laws, and all the rest. This is where the libertarians are wrong. They trust human nature. We cannot do that. Human nature must be governed by human government, and government has to be kept in check by vigilant individuals. We need both.
In other words, this is a plea for moderation on both sides.
Case in point: for all his faults, FDR started programs that gave many Americans a chance to start again. My Dad was one of those, and he never forgot it. No wonder FDR was a hero for him. Of course, the economic boom of WWII had a lot to do with that. But had Goldwater been president in 1932 (now there is a bit of “what-if” history for Turtedove to work on), I imagine things would have ended up a lot worse.
People will accuse me of being a biblicist, but I really don’t care. I’m a pastor, so I live in the Scriptures. I’ve often thought that Revelation 3:14-20 really epitomizes American life today. We think that we are really wonderful, because we are rich and increased with goods. In reality, we do not know how poor we are. We are missing, among other things, a sense of community.
I could ramble on, but time to enjoy the day with the family. Thankfully, we still have a lot of community there. Many people don’t.
John, I didn’t see your post until I had posted myself. But well said. Thanks!
John Warner, you are right on the money. In a totally live as you choose society, the strong would be able to confiscate from the weak and nothing could stop that. On the other end of the scale, the irresponsible and lazy would want what the achievers have, without putting in any labor to get it. Even God formed an organization, commanding Moses to be the leader and put some structure to society. So structure is necessary. The tenuous balance is having a society where those with initiative and work ethic can prosper and succeed, while not erring on the side of cruelty to the poor like Mother Nature does. Has anyone else witnessed what some animals can and will do to a runt newborn. Sometimes they shun or abandon it and some will kill it. Nurturing life is one endeavor that separates humans from the animal kingdom. But overall, this nation was founded on individualism, and the Constitution is focused on LIMITING government power, not expanding it. This is where conservatives and libertarians are on the right track, and the liberals are wrong. And we have the European’s model to show how we will fail if we go the socialist, liberal path.
Nobody denies that we need gtovernment to act as a referee and rulemaker. However, when this government spends $2.7 trillion a year and has its nose (and hand) in virtually everything we do we have gone waaaayyyyyy beyond that limited role deemed appropriate by all.
You know, I don’t think we’re all that far apart here. I see a lot of reaching toward common-sense middle ground. We should build on that.
And LexWolf, I’m sorry about the “jerk” thing. I was on vacation, yet spending hours trying to post something I had promised to post, something that would give readers a more complete picture than my column had done, and you more or less accused me of making it up. I shouldn’t have let that get to me. When I’m at work, I maintain a discipline so that such things like that DON’T get to me. I guess I let it relax a little because I was on vacation.
I apologize.
Now let’s get together and work as comrades before the cheese-eating surrender monkeys take over.
Seriously, though, if we could all stop goading and using hot-button phrases that set each other off — phrases that, as near as I can tell, have no other purpose but to define people as being on THIS side and against THAT side (“big-government,” or “right-wingers”) — we could work as one community to solve all sorts of problems.
A point of history for herb, and others who like FDR, is that FDR implemented the progams proposed by Herbert Hoover, which FDR had ridiculed in the presidential campaign.
Even worse, the growth of bureaucracies under FDR created homes for hundreds of outright communists and fascists, who used their power to attempt an even broader seizure of power. Congress and the courts often had to reign in the FDR Socialism in its attempts to confiscate property and nationalize industrial and financial businesses.
We still have not dismantled much of the relics of the 1930s, especially the bad notion that government is a benevolent savior.
George Will had a pretty good editorial today about how the Pilgrams on Plymouth Plantation began with communal farming, but quickly found that it didn’t work well. Once they moved to private enterprise, their harvests increased and the community as a whole was enriched.
“This,” Bradford reported, “had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means.” Indeed, “the women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression.”
Hmmm, I bet this would also be the case with many government handouts if they where abolished.
I support any community-centric organization that rewards hard work and initiative, not one that attempts to redistribute wealth.
You can denigrate Ayn Rand’s philosophy all you want, but the reality is that America’s strength is a direct result of the efforts of individuals, not collectives. Can you imagine what this country would be like if the top 5% in every field just walked away from society at the same time as they do in Atlas Shrugged?
If you had $1000 to invest, would you give it to Warren Buffett or the S.C. state legislature?
Brad is right, and I apologize for the “right-wingers” thing. I have no illusions about agreeing hunky-dory (would be boring), but I do like mutual respect. It’s one of the things that puts me off of anything the caustic radio pundits say; even if I agree with them at times, they make me want to adopt the opposite viewpoint. Toxic comments help nobody.
Lee has a point about FDR, of course, but we do need to keep in mind that some of the time a person doesn’t have to have all his theory right in order to lead people in the right direction. FDR inspired in a way that someone else would not have done. My Dad wanted to work hard and get ahead, just because of what FDR represented to him.
Just like in my field (ministry); people can be “right” theologically, and do nothing but damage. Or the opposite can happen. But if people don’t think you care, it doesn’t matter how good your theory is.
Brad, no problem with the 2nd jerk comment. I know I was a little provocative with the preceding comment. I also have fairly thick skin and have been called far worse in the past but your intemperate comment came in handy in subsequent discussions. For that one I say water under the bridge.
The jerk comment you should do some serious soulsearching over is when you used it to refer not to me personally, but generally to people who don’t agree with you on school choice and don’t believe in throwing ever more of their tax money at the educracy. Those people probably care at least as much about education as you do, if not more. Their only “sin” is that they want to improve education by other methods than the ones you prefer. That hardly makes them jerks.
I think anyone who spends much of his time demanding that the government take money away from me and distribute it to him ought not to call himself a “libertarian.”
But that’s just my personal opinion.
Herb, one of the main reasons I have been successful in family and business has been because my Dad taught me to never, ever, ever give up. Those words are not in my vocabulary so to speak. Voice your beliefs and opinions and don’t give up if you believe it.
Dave, to quote a South African friend of mine, you’re a chum. We don’t always agree, but you’re a chum.
Did I insinuate I was giving up?
Herb, I think on another thread you indicated you were giving up, maybe just on that thread, so kindly ignore. I wonder how fishbait got to be called chum? haaaaaaaaaaahaaaaaaaaa
Oh, you’re talking about down on “Now I’m Smoking . . .”
Speaking of fishbait, ol’ Lexie baits me on.
My trouble is that verses like “A soft answer turns away wrath, but harsh words stir up anger” keep coming back to me, and avoiding the biting sarcasm that other people may use. Sometimes I wish I could bite back, but then I think that I don’t ever want to be like my opponents.
Besides, God is going to bring us into judgment for every idle word we speak, which I assume includes writing, right?
Anyway, sometimes I do fall back into my pre-conversion style language, and spit green stuff all over the monitor. So far I’ve pretty much been able to keep it out of print or cyberspace, though. I get tired of confessing it, though. Sure glad I’m not Catholic, I’d be trapseing to church five times a week.
If I’m completely honest, I’d have to say that I am tempted to quit at times. After all, in a pastoral capacity, I admonish people to always cut the other person some slack. “This is what I hear you saying . . . .” Marriages and families get slaughtered all the time because people tear each other to shreds. Makes me shudder. So I come on this blog, and it makes me shudder again.
But you are a bright spot here. A humorous one, but a bright spot indeed.
Mark W., I forgot to re-read your post, and now I can’t find which thread it was on. Can you direct me? You know, the one where I was too bamboozled by the flu to read and comprehend.
A friend sent a reference to this website. Doesn’t look like we are necessarily winning the war on terrorism, Dave.
Hi Herb- I’m glad that you are feeling better. Here is the link.
Herb, with that far Left website, we could have overthrown the crazies in Iran, Syria and North Korea, killed all the terrorists anywhere and strung up Osama in Times Square and they still wouldn’t admit that we’re winning the WOT. You really need to be more selective in the websites you read.
A little critical thinking wouldn’t hurt you either. Our foreign policy apparatus is a disgrace, being against the WOT from the start and dragging its feet every step of the way. Surveying them will predictably give you anti-WOT results. When you have a panel featuring two of the most prominent WOT opponents, the result is also very predictable. Could you drag out something a little more mainstream?
More angst for the Schizophrenic Left. Team Bush just prevented another major attack on New York City, by reading online chat room posts from the Mideast. By Sunday morning, the chatting class will have spin instructions in the NY Times on how to denounce the methods used to stop another mass murder.
If the target had only been some place that pseudo-liberals despise, like Columbia, South Carolina, it would be easier for them.
Suddenly, Chuck Schumer is a fan of communication intercepts:
Mr. Schumer said the arrest in Lebanon was the result of intercepted Internet conversations. “They were caught by people talking” he said. “In this case, intelligence did its job.”
Amazing how having a politician’s political base made safe by such work tends to make that politician less hysterical about privacy implications.
SOURCE
It shut Hillary up.
Herb, how can you say after plots are foiled in Miami, Chicago, Toronto, and NY, among others that we are losing the WOT. Preston on another thread stated that foiling the Sears Tower and Holland Tunnel plots were a joke. I know you are a reasonable guy Herb so dont go radical left on us….. Now you see even Chuckie Schumer is praising the intelligence gathering of the Patriot Act, who next, maybe even Pat Leaky Leahy. As long as we dont let Chuck and Pat know we listened to their cell phone calls, they are happy. We can kill them but beyond all else dont listen to their phone calls. Amazing.
You didn’t hear the Democrats condemning their illegal wiretaps of Newt Gingrich’s phone calls. When the low-level henchmen in that caper lost in court last month, the New York Times forgot to put it on the front page.
There are quite a few other things the NYT forgot to put on the front page. Curiously all those forgotten stories would have been in favor of the GOP and/or the US.
I’m not sure that the political bickering in the comments that follow your original are Communitarianistic (i’m not ever sure that’s a word) in nature but the original post at swampfox and its subsequent responses are a good form of journalistic collectivism and is much closer to Poor Richard’s aphorisms… and to be fair to the readers of your blog and to champion the spirit of collectivism.. you should link your big words to wikipedia articles so that everyone can follow without a sharp witted memory of history class.