classical liberalism

Compassion and force.

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The left markets wealth redistribution as “compassion” when it is simply the state’s exercise of arbitrary power.

As citizens, we are expected to buy into this, and to outsource our moral decision-making to the state; so that we can be manipulated into feeling we are doing “good deeds” by giving the state more power.

To truly practice compassion and altruism, you need to have local knowledge, accountability, and trust. Local knowledge of the other person’s specific, unique needs (which includes the need for autonomy and independence, because humans are complicated); accountability, because there needs to be a price paid for being wrong; and trust, because trustworthy help is more valuable than fickle help, and trust facilitates planning for the future.

When people are close to one another (within a community or a family), there is a feedback loop that allows meaningful help to be given and exchanged. When you outsource the practice of kindness to the government, there is no local knowledge, no accountability, and no trust – as we have seen in the Federal Government’s response to the hurricanes. Neighbors helping neighbors did what government could not or would not do.

Charitable organizations are accountable in a way that the Government is not, because charity, like commerce, is a competitive market. If I learn that my donations to ABC Foundation are being misused, I have the choice to give to XYZ Foundation instead, or to simply save my money. The Government, by contrast, holds a forcible monopoly on its “charitable” projects. [251]

On movements.

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As a younger adult I did a lot of volunteer work in gay rights organizations. As a kid I’d gotten picked on a lot for being a “faggot” even though I wasn’t gay, so I had a lot of empathy. I’m proud of the time I put in for Basic Rights Oregon and other gay organizations. But I supported the LGBT movement to fight against the bullies – not to become one of the bullies. When we get to the point that a couple in Oregon is ordered by the court to bake a gay wedding cake, that’s where I gotta get off.

When you see injustice against a group of people, you organize to fight that injustice, and that’s a good thing. But once you start that process, certain other things are going to happen, whether you want them to or not:

(1) People will get so caught up in the excitement of “fighting for the cause” that they won’t want to quit. If you ever actually achieve your goals, they’ll be disappointed because they’ll miss going to the rallies. And there are professional organizers and activists who depend on “fighting injustice” for a paycheck. So there’s a danger that you could end up creating the problem just so you can keep fighting it.

(2) Equality means equal rights, but it also means equal responsibilities – and nobody wants to hear about that part. If you keep telling people about all the stuff they’re entitled to because they’ve had it so hard, they’ll never stop listening to you. But real equality and real justice means no discrimination and no favoritism either. You have the right to be treated fairly and judged fairly, but you still have to earn your own way.

(3) And then with any kind of social reform movement, where you’ve got people who sincerely want to build a better society, there’s another element that creeps in unnoticed. Those are the people who don’t care anything about the cause, they don’t care anything about justice, they don’t care anything about building a better world. They’ve got their own program and they are in it for power. They don’t want to build up, they want to tear everything down and burn everything down. And then they want to build their own tower on the rubble, with them at the top.

Those are some of the reasons why social reform movements that start off with the best intentions can go off the path; #3 is especially dangerous. And there are many more, because it’s a lot easier to get things wrong than to get them right.

People sometimes ask “What causes poverty?” or “What causes failure?” But those are the wrong questions. Poverty and failure are easy to explain. Poverty is the default state of mankind, and it’s always easier to fail than to succeed. Any economist will tell you that the important question is “What causes prosperity?” Any psychologist will tell you what matters is “What causes success?” Moving up requires strength, will, and wisdom.

Chana Cox: John Locke and toleration.

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Chana Berniker Cox: Liberty – God’s gift to humanity.

The coercive power of government should be limited in scope. Thus, Locke stresses again and again in the “Letters on Toleration” that the sphere or scope of government enforcement of law must be severely limited. This conception of the limited role of government was fundamental to an understanding of Locke’s liberalism and to the liberal tradition that developed in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America. (p. 76)

Yoram Hazony: Dark side of the Enlightenment.

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Yoram Hazony in Wall Street Journal.

A lot of people are selling Enlightenment these days. After the Brexit vote and the election of President Trump, David Brooks published a paean to the “Enlightenment project,” declaring it under attack and calling on readers to “rise up” and save it. Commentary magazine sent me a letter asking for a donation to provide readers “with the enlightenment we all so desperately crave.” And now there’s Steven Pinker’s impressive new book, “Enlightenment Now,” which may be the definitive statement of the neo-Enlightenment movement that is fighting the tide of nationalist thinking in America, Britain and beyond.

Do we all crave enlightenment? I don’t. I like and respect Mr. Pinker, Mr. Brooks and others in their camp. But Enlightenment philosophy didn’t achieve a fraction of the good they claim, and it has done much harm.

Boosters of the Enlightenment make an attractive case. Science, medicine, free political institutions, the market economy—these things have dramatically improved our lives. They are all, Mr. Pinker writes, the result of “a process set in motion by the Enlightenment in the late 18th century,” when philosophers “replaced dogma, tradition and authority with reason, debate and institutions of truth-seeking.” Mr. Brooks concurs, assuring his readers that “the Enlightenment project gave us the modern world.” So give thanks for “thinkers like John Locke and Immanuel Kant who argued that people should stop deferring blindly to authority” and instead “think things through from the ground up.”

As Mr. Pinker sums it up: “Progress is a gift of the ideals of the Enlightenment, and will continue to the extent that we rededicate ourselves to those ideals.”

Very little of this is true. Consider the claim that the U.S. Constitution was a product of Enlightenment thought, derived by throwing out the political traditions of the past and applying unfettered human reason. Disproving this idea requires only reading earlier writers on the English constitution. The widely circulated 15th-century treatise “In Praise of the Laws of England,” written by the jurist John Fortescue, clearly explains due process and the theory now called “checks and balances.” The English constitution, Fortescue wrote, establishes personal liberty and economic prosperity by shielding the individual and his property from the government. The protections that appear in the U.S. Bill of Rights were mostly set down in the 1600s by those drafting England’s constitutional documents—men such as John Selden, Edward Hyde and Matthew Hale. …

Read the whole thing. (Non-paywall article here.)

Free Republic post here.

American Creation responds to Hazony.

While I can’t speak to the Royal Society or Boyle, I think it’s wrong to categorize Newton as a “politically and religiously conservative figure[].” He was actually some kind of heterodox unitarian Christian of the Arian variety and like his friend John Locke had to be careful with the way in which he publicly articulated his views. Indeed, Newton, even more so than Locke leaves us with a record of private heterodox sentiments that could have gotten him in serious trouble with the then “politically and religiously conservative” figures in Great Britain who could enforce their orthodoxy with teeth provided by the state.

But John Locke gets categorized by Hazony as one of the “dark” Enlighteners. For instance:

One such myth was Locke’s claim that the state was founded on a contract among free and equal individuals—a theory the Enlightenment’s critics understood to be both historically false and dangerous. While the theory did relatively little harm in tradition-bound Britain, it led to catastrophe in Europe. Imported into France by Rousseau, it quickly pulled down the monarchy and the state, producing a series of failed constitutions, the Reign of Terror and finally the Napoleonic Wars—all in the name of infallible and universal reason. Millions died as Napoleon’s armies sought to destroy and rebuild every government in Europe in accordance with the one correct political theory allowed by Enlightenment philosophy. …

The vast majority of scholars who have studied the religious and political positions of both Locke and Newton would agree it makes no sense to categorize them so differently. Either both were “Enlightenment” during the same time and place in Great Britain or neither were. Both were self proclaimed “Christians”; both privately and secretly held heterodox positions; both cautiously articulated novel ideas in politics, science and theology attempting to give a veneer of respectability to the ideas they publicly posited; both were suspected of secret heterodoxy by the orthodox forces of “religious correctness” then in power.

America was very influenced by more moderate strains of Enlightenment, those Scottish “common sense” figures that Hazony doesn’t want to categorize as Enlightenment. But America was also influenced by what Hazony categorizes as bad or “dark” Enlightenment. …