Beneficence

Red, Blue, and Green

Enjoy this Valentine's Day inspired reflection by Dan Klein.   Dan  puts an interesting twist on red/blue politics relevant to the exchange in the comments to my previous post.  The only thing I wonder is why  those who tend to call themselves Democrats or progressives tend  so often to the color green and allow their rhetoric to sound more like a  politics of envy (i.e., make the rich pay) than a politics of compassion.   In compassion we may come closer to finding some unity of spirit and truth, whether we experience the hot red passion of romance or the cooler blue passion of prudence.  Envy, however, is by nature divisive.   

Left2Right

I'm not yet ready to jump back into blogging full speed, but spent much of this evening catching up on reading other people's blogs that I like to follow.  Was intrigued to see this new blog on the scene:  Left2Right .  When I do get caught up on my offline projects, I will look forward to engaging with this group some.  Especially interests me to see Stephen Darwall there.  I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the English moral philosopher Ralph Cudworth.   Darwall's actually one of the probably less than 50 living people who've read much of Cudworth, and I cite his work in my dissertation (which, sigh, sits idly on my shelf).

I did wonder at this early post by Eliz. Anderson:  What Hume Can Teach Us  About Our Partisan Divisions, who writes:

Hume observed that differences in interest are the most "reasonable." They are most open to compromise and negotiation.  Moreover, arguments about what policies are in people's interest are most open to revision in light of evidence.   If interests were all that divided us, the Democratic Party (what there is of the Left that has institutional power) would enjoy an overwhelming majority, since it represents the interests of the bulk of the population, while Republican policies favor mainly the rich.  Most people understand this, and the Left can offer sound arguments and evidence to persuade those who disagree.

This confused me at first--for it doesn't seem patently obvious to me that most people DO think the Democratic Party represents their interests.  Then I wondered whether there was actually something rather favorable in this in that perhaps Anderson is suggesting that the majority of the voters who voted Republican in the recent election must be rich, or at least must consider themselves to be so.  This would mean that, contrary to the typical assertions from the Left, the number of the "rich" in America is growing significantly, a trend that would seem on its very face to begin to undermine the assertion that "most people" understand the Dem Party to represent their interests. 

 

More on Wal-Mart

Had an email fairly early in the day today from Bill Schambra, in reference to the Wal-Mart brouhaha brewing. He wrote (then gave me permission to post):

as for GiftHub's taunt today that we decentralist conservatives never speak out about the Walmart situtation, let the record show that several years ago National Journal did a piece entitled "Rethinking Capitalism," and the author posed a similar challenge to me. I noted that if I were a citizen of a small town and had the opportunity to vote for or against the building of a Walmart, I would vote against it, in the name of preserving Main Street values and institutions. That earned me and the other conservatives who expressed such sentiments -- Don Eberly and Bill Bennett among them -- a ringing denunciation by Virginia Postrel and other libertarians in the Wall Street Journal, Reason magazine, and elsewhere. Sorry, Phil. I won't be hoisted on the Walmart petard.

While we couldn't find the original NJ piece online, Bill did provide the link to Doug Bandow's criticism of the position he took.

I probably come down on the issue a bit closer to Bandow than Schambra on this one, but I know Bill's commitment to decentrist conservative principles, and the arguments are nuanced with good claims on both sides. I particularly tend to agree with Bandow's observation that Turning morality over to government risks having the same effect as turning charity over to government-reducing the role of private people and institutions.

Note that Bill's opposition is premised on his opportunity to vote! As long as we're voting, I suppose my final answer would depend on what proposed Wal-Mart in what town. These hypotheticals really let us get away with too many generalizations all around. Gerry and Phil are going to tell me now that Bill's vote wouldn't matter anyway because corporate cash would be buying out the process, or simply preventing any community input into the question. Could be. I don't recall the last time I was called to the polls to cast a ballot on Wal-Mart development. Could it be that the corporate cash bought the bureaucrats and that there is a vast corporate-regulatory conspiracy afoot?! Now we're talkin!

Smallville

DARN! I thought that in the comments to Civil Society and Corporate Contributions, etc, I was beginning to make some headway in understanding the progressive critique of Big Business and see some common ground between myself and Gerry and Phil around issues of corporate welfare and rent-seeking.

I thought I was beginning to see that progressives and classical liberals/libertarians might share dismay with the political power of corporations but differ essentially on the question of how best to restrain corporate accretion of political power, with progressives seeing Regulation as the answer and libertarians believing instead that Market Forces set in an elegant set of procedural institutions (private property, rule of law, etc) are ultimately the best discipline of corporate energies.

Now I read at GiftHub that what we really need is a world in which no successful "big guy" ever puts a "little guy" out of business. Meaning that all the other little guys who want a cheap tube of toothpaste so they can put another dollar into their kids' education fund pay for the business inefficiencies of the little guy's "way of life."

To pursue this substantive vision of the Good Society contra the free market, in my mind, constrains us to some sort of static utopianism that promises that no one ever suffers, no one has to adjust their plans to those of others, and we can all dwell pleasantly in a monochromatic, but of course diverse, Smallville (or some idyllic New England town of the 19th-c).

I'm torn, because those good ole family shows (the Beaver and Andy Griffith) from my childhood do carry some appeal. I'm no apologist of Wal-Mart--though I do shop there on occasion--and do not want to privilege Wal-Mart through some sort of corporate welfare. But to suggest that no "big box" store could ever be a legitimate marketplace player seems to me a Jeffersonian-style retreat to simple subsistence-level, pre-industrial agrarianism. The world was more complex than that in 1787, and it's not gotten any less complex.

That said, if we're merely arguing that each community qua community should be able to weigh whether or not they offer the various incentives and concessions (carrots of corporate welfare) that I presume many corporations seek on the backs of the jobs the bring, then I agree. But it has to be as legitimate for a community to decide to admit Wal-Mart as it is for a community to reject a Wal-Mart. And I'm troubled about the scenario where a private landowner is willing to make the deal against the sentiment of the community. do we give the communities an expanding right of eminent domain, and open up even more opportunity for rent-seeking and speculation in regulatory takings?

I want to take these matters seriously, but rather than fight what in some instances sound like old battles of the industrial era, I'm truly more intrigued by moving forward to understanding together what a genuine knowledge-era society might look like!

Has the institution of property itself fundamentally changed in the knowledge -era? Doesn't the knowledge-era turn old assumptions about scarcity on their head? What does self-determination of a community look like, and how do we hold that in viable balance with the freedom of the individual and retain the relative freedom of the marketplace and the positive contributions to quality of life corporations make everyday?

These seem important and fruitful questions for us to explore further together.

Bainbridge on Libertarians

Thanks to Stephen Bainbridge who explores The Problem With Libertarians . He writes:

Granted, [Russell] Kirk was no friend of neoconservatism, but his critique of the libertarians goes far deeper; for it is the latter who deny that the "permanent things" even exist. It is the latter who rush to deny custom and morality any place in the laws of the land. It is the latter who construct fantasies like the social contract and dream of Objectivist utopias. It is the latter who deny that life has any purpose beyond self-gratification. It is the latter whose platform's provisions against war and in favor of abortion on demand looks like something a Berkeley resident might have written.

Ah, now one can see why I studiously avoid calling myself libertarian and must resort to the more opaque notion of being classical liberal!

Truth is, a Christian who believes in the permanent things and their relevance to our world but who also believes in limited government (and finds the politics of faith-based initiatives and marriage amendments and Ten Commandments a distraction from the work of building strong, independent, Gospel-teaching churches) doesn't find a clear-cut path in politics today.

A friend recently reported that an acquaintance was kicked out of a Baptist church in Texas for his Democratic political activities, being told by his pastor that he couldn't be a Baptist and a Democrat! I've long thought that church discipline today could use beefing up, but this incident seems wholly lacking in Christian charity much less an understanding of the radical, non-political message of the Cross. This is not to say that Christians should ignore politics nor abstain from it, but that we should prioritize the Church before the State and not get confused about the ultimate source of authority over our consciences. Seems the Baptist preacher in question here could benefit from a look back at the great fears his historical predecessors had of the state's involvement in the churches. Hard to stomach that the church would so readily sell out to one party. though I don't agree with them on every issue, Cal Thomas and Ed Dobson are worth reading in Blinded by Might.

Libertarians for Kerry

For my buddy Gerry I've added a category for politics-related posts and will confess that I can't wholly bracket these issues! Perhaps this will demonstrate why I'm not too dedicated to exploring our political differences here, though, since it would seem in American electoral politics that one needs a party home, and I'm a wandering stranger these days.

Jacob Levy at the Volokh Conspiracy points out the electoral dilemma for libertarians this year, with links. While I tend to call myself a classical liberal rather than a libertarian, I'm caught on the horns of this one, too.

Hope

I've been engaged as one of many interlocutors on the Giving Space listserv in a fascinating conversation about hope, humility, and gratitude. Our conversation reminded me of a wonderful book by Glenn Tinder, The Fabric of Hope. This is from the preface to the Eerdmans edition:

True hope, as I understand it, encompasses all human beings. Only thus does it conform with the charity that underlies it. This is why Christians must take care not to let their faith, and their sense of that faith as a singular gift, separate them altogether from those innumerable persons all over the world who do not share it.
My universalist concept of hope may help to explain the strong political cast of the following pages. To harbor hope is to situate oneself in the midst of the human race. This in turn--universal humanity being an empty abstraction for anyone who spurns the particularities involved in the life of a people or a nation--is to take on the obligations of membership in a particular society. Hope in this way implies politics. Conversely, since the patience needed for resolving conflicts through persuasion rather than force is not likely to inhabit the hearts of desperate peoples, politics presupposes hope. All of this is to say that hope is not a private dream. It unites us with the concrete human beings inhabiting our own historical time and place, and with their concrete tribulations and perplexities. It connects us with the multitudinous crucifixions and resurrections that make up the destiny of the human race. To live with hope is, if my reflections are valid, to live in one's full humanity.