Social and Political Philosophy – Page 22

Dems: “Government is the Only Thing We All Belong To”

Some say that there is no real difference between the two major parties in the USA, the Republicans and the Democrats. The claim is breathtakingly false for so many reasons. The latest example of difference is provided by this DNC video. John Hayward's response is spot on:

Even this benign-sounding apologia for “government is the only thing we all belong to” is incredibly wrong-headed. We most certainly do not belong to the government. We are all members of the electorate, which is a very different thing. Each of us lives beneath several distinct governments – federal, state, city – empowered to protect our rights, not act as the almighty executor of some “collective will” that exists only in the totalitarian fantasies of liberals. There are very few areas of government action that command anything like overwhelming majority support from Americans, let alone nearly unanimous approval.

To which I add:

There are two extremes to avoid, the libertarian and the liberal. Libertarians often say that the government can do nothing right, and that the solution is to privatize everything including the National Parks. Both halves of that assertion are patent nonsense. It is equal but opposite nonsense to think that Big Government will solve all our problems. Ronald Reagan had it right: "A government big enough to give you everything you want is powerful enough to take everything you have."

The government is not us as liberals like to say. It is an entity over against most of us run by a relatively small number of us. Among the latter are some decent people but also plenty of power-hungry scoundrels, for whom a government position is a hustle like any hustle. Government, like any entity, likes power and likes to expand its power, and can be counted on to come up with plenty of rationalizations for the maintenance and extension of its power. It must be kept in check by us, just as big corporations need to be kept in check by government regulators.

If you value liberty you must cultivate a healthy skepticism about government. To do so is not anti-government. Too many leftists love to slander us by saying that we are anti-government. It is a lie and they know it. They are not so stupid as not to know that to be for limited government is to be for government.

From a logical point of view, the ‘Government is us’ nonsense appears to be a pars pro toto fallacy: one identifies a proper part (the governing) with the whole of which it is a proper part (the governed).

Academic Philosophy (with an addendum on Human Corruption)

Academic philosophy too often degenerates into a sterile intellectual game whose sole function is to inflate and deflate the egos of the participants. But this is no surprise: everything human is either degenerate or will become degenerate.

……………………..

Addendum: 2:45 PM

Long-time blogger-buddy and supplier of high-quality links and comments, Bill Keezer, comments:

Academic anything eventually degenerates either into ego battles or battles for status as grant securers. In addition to tuition inflation the big money-maker for universities is the administration overhead awarded within grants and the supplement to salaries in some cases that allow them to forego raises or to reduce their portion of the payroll.

Government corrupts all that it touches.

I agree with Bill's first point, but not with his second. The source of moral corruption is not government, but the human being, his ignorance, his inordinate and disordered desires, and his free but wayward will. Everything human beings are involved in is either corrupt or corruptible, and government is no exception, not because government is the unique source of corruption, but because government is a human, all-too-human, enterprise.

On my view, government is practically necessary. Anarchism is for adolescents. Some of what government does is good, some bad. Governments in the free world defeated the Nazis; communist governments murdered 100 million in the 20th century. (Source: Black Book of Communism.) Some of what is bad are unintended consequences of programs that were set up with good intentions. Federally-insured student loans made it possible (or at least easier) for many of us to finance our educations. (It is of course a debatable point whether it is a legitimate function of government to insure student loans.) But lack of oversight on the part of the Feds, and the greediness of university administrators coupled with the laziness and prodigality of too many students has led to the education bubble.

What has happened is truly disgusting. The price of higher education has skyrocketed, increasing out of all proportion to general inflation, while the quality of the product delivered has plummeted in some fields and merely declined in others. There are young people graduating from law schools today with $150 K in debt and little prospect of a job sufficiently remunerative to discharge the debt in a reasonable time.

Can we blame the federal government for the education bubble? Of course, if there had been no federally-insured loan program the bubble would not have come about. But there was no necessity that the program issue in a bubble. So we are brought back to the real root of the problem, human beings, their ignorance, greed, prodigality, and general lack of moral and intellectual virtue.

Compare the housing bubble. Government must bear some of the blame through its bad legislation. But no bubble would have occurred if consumers weren't stupid and lazy and greedy. What sort of fool signs up for a negative amortization loan? Am I blaming the victim? Of course. Blaming the victim is, within limits and in some cases, a perfectly reasonable and indeed morally necessary thing to do. If you are complicit in your own being ripped-off through your own self-induced intellectual and moral defectiveness, then you must hold yourself and be held by others partially responsible. And then there are the morally corrupt lenders themselves who exploited the stupidity, laziness, greediness and general lack of moral and intellectual virtue of the consumers. A fourth factor is the corruption of the rating agencies.

So, contra my friend Keezer, we cannot assign all the blame to government. We need government, limited government.

Obama’s Assault on the Institutions of Civil Society

Obama showed his true colors quite unmistakably in his 'You didn't build that" speech. Yuval Steinitz has his number:

The president simply equates doing things together with doing things through government. He sees the citizen and the state, and nothing in between — and thus sees every political question as a choice between radical individualism and a federal program.

As I said before, it is a classic false alternative fallacy: either you pull yourself up by your own bootstraps or government helps you. This goes together with a straw man fallacy: Obama imputes to his opponents an absurd 'rugged individualism' that they do not espouse.

But most of life is lived somewhere between those two extremes, and American life in particular has given rise to unprecedented human flourishing because we have allowed the institutions that occupy the middle ground — the family, civil society, and the private economy — to thrive in relative freedom. Obama’s remarks in Virginia shed a bright light on his attitude toward that middle ground, and in that light a great deal of what his administration has done in this three and a half years suddenly grows clearer and more coherent, and even more disconcerting.

Disconcerting is right. It's an all-out, totalitarian assault on the institutions of civil society. The Left is totalitarian by its very nature and it can brook no competitors: not religion, not the family, not private charities and associations.

This intolerance of nonconformity is even more powerfully evident in the administration’s attitude toward the institutions of civil society, especially religious institutions involved in the crucial work of helping the needy and vulnerable. In a number of instances, but most notably in the controversy surrounding the Department of Health and Human Services rule requiring religious employers to provide free abortive and contraceptive drugs to their employees under Obamacare, the administration has shown an appalling contempt for the basic right of religious institutions to pursue their ends in accordance with their convictions.

It is important to recall just what the administration did in that instance. The HHS rule did not assert that people should have the freedom to use contraceptive or abortive drugs — which of course they do have in our country. It did not even say that the government facilitate people’s access to these drugs — which it does today and has done for decades. Rather, the rule required that the Catholic Church and other religious entities should facilitate people’s access to contraceptive and abortive drugs. It aimed to turn the institutions of civil society into active agents of the government’s ends, even in violation of their fundamental religious convictions.

The idea is to hollow out the space between the individual and the State, to clear it of the institutions of civil society that mediate between individual and state:

Indeed, the president and his administration don’t seem to have much use for that space at all. Even the family, which naturally stands between the individual and the community, is not essential. In May, the Obama campaign produced a Web slideshow called “The Life of Julia,” which follows a woman through the different stages of life and shows the many ways in which she benefits from public policies that the president advocates. It was an extraordinarily revealing work of propaganda, and what it revealed was just what the president showed us in Roanoke: a vision of society consisting entirely of the individual and the state. Julia’s life is the product of her individual choices enabled by public policies. She has an exceptional amount of direct contact with the federal government, yet we never meet her family. At the age of 31, we are told, “Julia decides to have a child” and “benefits from maternal checkups, prenatal care, and free screenings under health care reform.” She later benefits from all manner of educational, economic, and social programs, and seems to require and depend upon no one but the president.

[. . .]

The Left’s disdain for civil society is thus driven above all not by a desire to empower the state without limit, but by a deeply held concern that the mediating institutions in society — emphatically including the family, the church, and private enterprise — are instruments of prejudice, selfishness, backwardness, and resistance to change, and that in order to establish our national life on more rational grounds, the government needs to weaken and counteract them.

The Right’s high regard for civil society, meanwhile, is driven above all not by a disdain for government but by a deeply held belief in the importance of our diverse and evolved societal forms, without which we could not hope to secure our liberty. Conservatives seek mechanisms and institutions to bring implicit social knowledge to bear on our troubles, while progressives seek the authority and power to bring explicit technical knowledge to bear on them.

[. . .]

To ignore what stands between the state and the citizen is to disregard the essence of American life. To clear away what stands between the state and the citizen is to extinguish the sources of American freedom. The president is right to insist that America works best when Americans work together, but government is just one of the many things we do together, and it is only rarely the most important of them.

One of the problems with Romney is that he has no clue as to what the battle is really about. He thinks solely in economic terms. Paul Ryan or somebody should force the affable milque-toast to study Steinitz's piece and then give him a test on it.

ButI'll give Mitt this: his pick of Ryan as running mate was courageous and intelligent.

Gun Laws and the Supposed ‘Politicization’ of the Aurora Massacre

Last year, when Republicans were being accused of 'politicizing' the national debt crisis I made the point that one cannot politicize that which is inherently political:

The Republicans were accused of 'politicizing' the debt crisis. But how can you politicize what is inherently political? The debt in question is the debt of the federal government. Since a government is a political entity, questions concerning federal debts are political questions. As inherently political, such questions cannot be politicized.

If to hypostatize is to illicitly treat as a substance that which is not a substance, to politicize is to illictly treat as political what is not political. Since governmental debt questions are 'already' political, they cannot be politicized.

Then I was criticizing Democrats and liberals. But now I find that some Republicans and conservatives are making the same mistake. They are accusing liberals of politicizing the Aurora massacre. Example here.

But as I said, you cannot politicize what is already political. Now guns are not political entities, but gun laws are, whether federal, state, or local. Whether there should be gun laws at all, and what their content should be are political questions.

Now we all agree that we have to have laws regulating the manufacture, sale, transporting, and use of firearms. So we all agree that we have to have 'gun control.' Gun control is not what I display or fail to display at the shooting range, but is a phrase that refers to gun control laws. Since we all want gun control, we all want (enforceable and enforced) gun control laws, even the dreaded NRA.

It is a liberal lie to say that conservatives are against gun control. It is similar to the liberal lie that conservatives are anti-government. If I am for limited government, then I am for government, whence it follows that I am not against government. (Anarchists are anti-government, but no conservative, and few libertarians, are against government.) Likewise, if I am for laws that prevent the sale of guns to felons, and for other such laws, then I am not against gun control.

By the way, the preternaturally obtuse Bill Moyers got a nice and well-deserved slap-down from Bill O'Reilly the other night for his idiotic remarks about the NRA. Bill Moyers is a one-man argument for the federal defunding of PBS and its affiliates such as NPR. (See National Public Radio Needs Your Support!) Listen to the whole of O'Reilly's speech. He is a moderate on gun control, too moderate perhaps. He is moderate on many issues. Is that why the Left can't stand him?

But I digress. We all agree that we need enforceable and enforced gun control laws. But we don't all agree about the content of these laws. Now that is a political question the answering of which presupposes a political theory, a theory of man in his relation to the state. The gun debate is political from the ground up. It is silly so speak of 'politicizing' it.

Here is what I say. I have a right to life, a right to defend my life, and a right to appropriate means of self-defense. No government has the right to interfere with these rights. This is nonnegotiable. If you disagree, I have to put you down as morally and intellecually obtuse, as beyond the pale of rational debate. I will do my best to make sure that you and your ilk are defeated politically.

What's an appropriate means of self-defense? The tactical shotgun is the most effective tool of home defense. Holmes, the Aurora shooter, had one of those. It looked like a Remington 1070. He misused it for evil ends. That is chargeable to his moral and legal account, not to the gun's. Guns lack such 'accounts.' No gun is a free agent. No gun ever lilled anybody. Killing is an action (action-type); actions are actions of agents. Pay attention, liberals.

There will always be massacres and murders regardless of the stringency of gun laws. Norway.

Can anything be done? Yes. Enforce existing gun laws. Execute miscreants such as Holmes, after a fair trial, in a speedy manner. There could a be a judicial fast-track to expedite the execution of such people within a year, at most. Put limits on the quantities and types of vile and soul-destroying rubbish that HollyWeird liberals dish out. Stop attacking religion, that most excellent vehicle for the delivery of moral teachings. If Holmes had internalized the Ten Commandments as a boy, could he have done what he did? Do you think he would have been less likely to do what he did?

But liberals are morally and intellectually obtuse. So they will fight against all reasonable proposals. A liberal would far rather violate the rights of decent citizens than mete out justice to vicious criminals.

Equality of Opportunity Thin and Thick

Will Knowland writes:

Browsing your Money Matters section, I noticed this:

Equality of outcome or result is not to be confused with
equality of opportunity or formal equality in general, including equality under
the law. It is an egregious fallacy of liberals and leftists to infer a denial
of equality of opportunity — via 'racism' or 'sexism' or whatever — from the
premise that a certain group has failed to achieve equality of outcome. There
will never be equality of outcome due to the deep differences between
individuals and groups. Equality of outcome is not even a value. We must do
what we can to ensure equality of opportunity and then let the chips fall where
they may.

I agree that there will never be equality of outcome, but neither will there ever be equality of opportunity, because opportunities at any given moment won't be equal unless outcomes are. And must we do what we can to ensure equality of opportunity? Can does not imply may. Family circumstances, for example, are the biggest determinant of a child's educational success. The State could, as Plato wanted, remove children from their families at birth. That would produce a more level playing field.

As Don Colacho wisely warned, though, "levelling is the barbarian's substitute for order."

BV responds: You say, "neither will there ever be equality of opportunity, because opportunities at any given moment won't be equal unless outcomes are." Your argument appears to be this:

a. There will never be equality of outcome
b. There is equality of opportunity if and only if there is equality of outcome
Therefore
c. There will never be equality of opportunity.

We agree that (a) is true, but I would deny (b). In fact (b) strikes me as plainly false. I enter local road races, but I never win. I don't come close to winning: I am a back-of-the-pack plodder who if he is lucky wins in his age division. So there is no equality of outcome. But there is equality of opportunity: I have exactly the same opportunity to win as the world-class 25 year old who actually wins. In what sense? Well, no one barred me from entering the race; I wasn't forced to pay a higher entry fee; no one verbally abused me before or during the race; no one threw rocks at me; I was not forced to wear weights that would slow me down; obstacles were not thrown in my path; etc. The timing chip even compensated me time-wise for the fact that I could not stand right at the starting line with the top runners.

So I had an equal opportunity qua runner to win, an opportunity equal to that of every other participant. I was not discriminated against on the basis of race, sex, creed, length of hair, or the fact that I insist on wearing the skimpy, slit-up-the-side nylon shorts we wore in the '70s as opposed to those utterly ridiculous, baggy, gangsta-rappa semi-auto concealing, knee-length monstrosities popular now among sartorial know-nothings [grin].

Obviously much depends on the concept of equality of opportunity being employed, and I favor a very 'thin' conception. Clearly, one one can plump for 'thicker' conceptions. But the thicker the conception, the less the contrast with equality of outcome/result. I grant that there is no real chance of me winning any (well-attended) road race. But that is irrelevant. Relevant alone is whether I am being excluded on the basis of irrelevant criteria, such as my sex or the color or skimpiness of my running shorts.

As for ensuring equality of opportunity, I would say that we must do what we can to ensure equality of opportunity in my thin sense. But on your exceedingly thick conception, according to which equality of opportunity is equivalent to equality of outcome, then we, collectively, deploying the awesome coercive power of the State, should not do anything. That's what I meant above when I said: let the chips fall where they may.

As for the liberal-left phrase 'level playing field,' we conservatives should avoid it. If you are a conservative, don't talk like a liberal. It's a metaphor whose application is severely limited.

If we are playing soccer or basketball (and there is no handicapping going on), then there must be a level playing field if there is to be a fair competition. But suppose Tom was born with two good eyes and Sally with none. Should we intervene to right that cosmic unfairness, to 'level the playing field' as between Tom and Sally, by transplanting (if we could) one of his eyes into her head? No.

Tom does not deserve his two good eyes, his intelligence, his height, his being born in the USA, in a good, two-parent, loving family, not in a war zone, not with crack cocaine in his system, etc. But he has a right to his advantages despite not deserving them, and no one and no State has the right to violate his rights.

We are just scratching the surface of a whole cluster of thorny and bitterly controverted questions.

Addendum: Knowland sends use this quotation from John Kekes, The Illusions of Egalitarianism, (Cornell, 2006), p.84: ". . . equal opportunity tends to produce unequal outcome, and equal outcome
requires making opportunities unequal by increasing the protection of some at the expense of others."

Is Political Science Science?

The answer depends on what counts as science. The so-called 'hard' sciences set the standard. This useful article lists the following five characteristics of science in the strict and eminent sense:

1. Clearly defined terminology.
2. Quantifiability.
3. Highly controlled conditions. "A scientifically rigorous study maintains direct control over as many of the factors that influence the outcome as possible. The experiment is then performed with such precision that any other person in the world, using identical materials and methods, should achieve the exact same result."
4. Reproducibility. "A rigorous science is able to reproduce the same result over and over again. Multiple researchers on different continents, cities, or even planets should find the exact same results if they precisely duplicated the experimental conditions."
5. Predictability and Testability. "A rigorous science is able to make testable predictions."

These characteristics set the bar for strict science very high. For example, is climate science science according to these criteria? I'll leave you to ponder that question. There are branches of physics that cannot satisfy all five criteria. But most of physics and chemistry meets the standard.

Is political science science according to these criteria? Obviously not. Political Scientists are Lousy Forecasters.

Am I suggesting that the only real knowledge is rigorously scientific knowledge? Of course not. Consider the knowledge we find in the first article to which I linked. There is no doubt in my mind that each of the five criteria the author mentions is a criterion of science in the strictest sense. (I leave open the question whether there are other criteria). Now how do we know that? By performing repeatable experiments in highly controlled conditions? No. By making testable predictions? No.

We know that (1)-(5) are criteria of genuine science by reflecting on scientific practice and isolating its characteristics. When we do that we engage in the philosophy of science. Since some of the philosophy of science gives us genuine knowledge about natural science, knowledge that it not itself scientific knowledge, it cannot be the case that all genuine knowledge is scientific knowledge.

That all genuine knowledge is scientific knowledge is the thesis of (strong) scientism. Therefore, (strong) scientism is false.

Mayor Bloomberg on the Purpose of Government

(CBS News) New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg shrugged off criticism of his controversial public health initiatives, saying that "if government's purpose isn't to improve the health and longevity of its citizens, I don't know what its purpose is." [emphasis added.]

Bloomberg most recently put forth a plan to ban the sale of sugary drinks larger than 16 ounces from the city's eateries, street carts and stadiums. The proposal has been sharply criticized, in some cases by beverage and fast food companies as a case of government overreach.

He's also been criticized for previous efforts to, among other things, ban smoking in public places and the use of trans-fats in restaurant foods. Some have gone so far as to mock has as being like a "nanny."

But on "CBS This Morning," Bloomberg fired back, saying, "We're not here to tell anybody what to do. But we certainly have an obligation to tell them what's the best science and best medicine says is in their interest.

In this startlingly incoherent outburst, Bloomberg betrays the liberal nanny-state mentality in as direct a way as one could wish. And it is incoherent. He wants to ban large drinks, pop corn, milk shakes and what all else while assuring us that "we're not here to tell anybody what to do." He blatantly contradicts himself. Does the man think before he speaks?

But the deeper problem is that he has no notion of the legitimate functions of government. Apparently he has never heard of limited government. Border control is a legitimate constitutionally grounded function of government. One reason the borders must be controlled is to impede the spread of contagious diseases. So government does have some role to play in the health and longevity of citizens. Defense of the country against foreign aggressors is also a legitimate function of government and it too bears upon health and longevity: it is hard to live a long and healthy life when bombs are raining down.

Beyond this, it is up to the individual to live in ways that insure health and longevity if those are values for him. But they might not be. Some value intensity of life over longevity of life. Rod Serling, for example, lived an extremely intense and productive life. Born in 1925, he died in 1975 at age 50. His Type A behavior and four-pack a day cigarette habit did him in, but was also quite possibly a necessary condition of his productivity. That was his free choice. No government has the right to dictate that one value longevity over intensity.

A government big enough and powerful enough to provide one with ‘free’ health care will be in an excellent position to demand ‘appropriate’ behavior from its citizens – and to enforce its demand. Suppose you enjoy risky sports such as motorcycling, hang gliding, mountain climbing and the like. Or perhaps you just like to drink or smoke or eat red meat. A government that pays for the treatment
of your injuries and ailments can easily decide, on economic grounds alone, to forbid such activites under the bogus justification, ‘for your own good.’

But even if the government does not outlaw motorcycling, say, they can put a severe dent in your liberty to enjoy such a sport, say, by demanding that a 30% sales tax be slapped on all motorcycle purchases, or by outlawing bikes whose engines exceed a certain displacement, say 250 cc. In the same way that governments levy arbitrary punitive taxes on tobacco products, they can do the same for anything they deem risky or unhealthy.

The situation is analogous to living with one’s parents. It is entirely appropriate for parents to say to a child: ‘As long as you live under our roof, eat at our table, and we pay the bills, then you must abide by our rules. When you are on your own, you may do as you please.’ The difference, of course, is that it is
relatively easy to move out on one’s own, but difficult to forsake one’s homeland.

The nub of the issue is liberty. Do you value it or not?

Does Bloomberg even see the issue?

Social Justice or Subsidiarity?

Just over the transom from James Anderson:

I appreciated your recent posts on "social justice." I agree that the phrase is a mendacious rhetorical device and that conservatives should refuse to use it. But what should we use instead? In one post you asked what's wrong with "plain old 'justice.'" One problem is that the phrase "social justice" has now become so depressingly commonplace that many folk, unaware of this conceptual revisionism, understand "justice" as shorthand for "social justice". So conservatives need their own distinctive qualifier. Fight fire with fire. What would be your suggestion?

One possibility is "natural justice". Not only does it tip its hat toward the venerable natural law tradition, it also communicates the idea that justice is inextricably tied to the intrinsic nature of things (specifically, the nature of human beings) as opposed to being a mere social construction (as, perhaps, "social justice" suggests). And like "social justice" it has the virtue of being unobjectionable on the face of it. To adapt the opening sentence of one of your posts: "How could any decent person be opposed to natural justice?" What would be the alternative? Unnatural justice?

I'd love to read your own thoughts on this, if you're inclined to share them.

I wish I had a worked-out theory and I wish I had a good answer for Professor Anderson. But I won't let the absence of both stop me from making a few remarks. Nescio, ergo blogo.

As a sort of joke I might suggest that 'subsidiarity' be used by conservatives instead of 'social justice.' The trouble with that word, of course, is that it conveys no definite idea to the average person whereas 'social justice' seems to convey a definite idea, one that the average person is inclined to embrace. It sounds so good! Who could be opposed to social justice and a just society? But once one understands what 'social justice' means in the mouth of a leftist, then one has excellent reason to oppose it. The Left has hijacked the phrase and now they own it; it would be quixotic for a conservative to try to infuse it with a reasonable meaning and win it back. Let the Left have it!

Anderson and I therefore agree that we conservatives should never use 'social justice,' or 'economic justice' for that matter. Beyond that, we might take to using 'socialist justice' as an informative and accurate way of referring to what leftists call social justice. But what word or phrase should we use? How about 'local justice'? That's not very good, but at least it points in the the subsidiarist direction. Plain old 'justice' is better. Anderson's 'natural justice' is serviceable. It has the virtue of combating the notion that justice is a social construct. But it doesn't combat the top-down control model of socialists and collectivists. This brings me to subsidiarity.

David A. Bosnich, The Principle of Subsidiarity:

One of the key principles of Catholic social thought is known as the principle of subsidiarity. This tenet holds that nothing should be done by a larger and more complex organization which can be done as well by a smaller and simpler organization. In other words, any activity which can be performed by a more decentralized entity should be. This principle is a bulwark of limited government and personal freedom. It conflicts with the passion for centralization and bureaucracy characteristic of the Welfare State.

The principle of subsidiarity strikes a reasonable balance between statism and collectivism as represented by the Obama administration and the libertarianism of those who would take privatization to an extreme. By the way, one of the many mistakes Rick Santorum made in his campaign was to attack all government-sponsored education. He was right to question whether the Federal government has any role to play in education, but to question the role of state and local government in education was a foolish extremism that befits a libertarian, not a conservative.

I take it that subsidiarity is easily detachable from other Catholic doctrines. Professor Anderson needn't fear that he will be driven in the direction of papal infallibility or Transubstantiation. In any case, Catholics don't own subsidiarity. In the ComBox to this excellent post, we find:

"SPHERE SOVEREIGNTY: A principle of Reformed Christian social ethics, usually associated with the thought of Dutch Prime Minister Abraham Kuyper*, that identifies a number of God- ordained creational spheres, which include the family, the state, culture, and the church. These spheres each have their own organizing and ruling ordinances, and each maintains a measure of authority relative to the others. Just social and political structures, therefore, should be ordered so that the authority of each sphere is preserved (see Limited Government and Subsidiarity, The Principle of)."

Subsidiarity also fits well wth federalism, a return to which is a prime desideratum and one more reason not to vote for Obama come November. By the way, 'federalism' is another one of those words that does not wear its meaning on its sleeve, and is likely to mislead. Federalism is not the view that all powers should be vested in the Federal or central government; it is the principle enshrined in the 10th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

Permit me to coin 'malaptronym.' If an aptronym is a name that suits its bearer, then 'federalism' is a malaptronym, a name that not only does not suit its bearer, but misleads as to the nature of said bearer. And the same, of course, is true in spades of 'social justice.'

I say we consign it to the dreaded index verborum prohibitorum!

What is Social Justice?

How could any decent person be opposed to social justice? Don't we all want to live in a just society? But as Barry Loberfeld points out,

The signature of modern leftist rhetoric is the deployment of terminology that simply cannot fail to command assent. As [George] Orwell himself recognized, even slavery could be sold if labeled "freedom." In this vein, who could ever conscientiously oppose the pursuit of "social justice," — i.e., a just society?

One of my criticisms of Bill O'Reilly is that he will use the phrase 'social justice' without explaining what it means. He will say something like, 'Obama is for social justice.' The average person who hears that will think, 'Well, what's wrong with that?' This is where the lately lamented (here and here) anti-intellectualism of conservatives comes back to bite them. Too many conservatives fail to realize the importance of defining one's terms before launching into a debate. Of course, I am talking about ordinary conservative folk and their political and talk-show representatives; I am not talking about conservative intellectuals.

Define your terms! This is is such an obvious demand that I feel slightly embarrassed to make it; but given the low level of culture one must make it and make it again.

Walter Block, here, offers a characterization that Mr O'Reilly should be able to wrap his 'no-spin' head around:

First, this concept [social justice] may be defined substantively. Here, it is typically associated with left wing or socialist analyses, policies and prescriptions. For example, poverty is caused by unbridled capitalism; the solution is to heavily regulate markets, or ban them outright. Racism and sexism account for the relative plight of racial minorities and women; laws should be passed prohibiting their exercise. Greater reliance on government is required as the solution of all sorts of social problems. The planet is in great danger from environmental despoliation, due to an unjustified reliance on private property rights. Taxes are too low; they should be raised. Charity is an insult to the poor, who must obtain more revenues by right, not condescension. Diversity is the sine qua non of the fair society. Discrimination is one of the greatest evils to have ever beset mankind. Use of terminology such as "mankind" is sexist, and constitutes hate speech.

Now I refer you to an excellent First Things article by Michael Novak which you should carefully study. Excerpt:

From this line of reasoning it follows that “social justice” would have its natural end in a command economy in which individuals are told what to do, so that it would always be possible to identify those in charge and to hold them responsible. This notion presupposes that people are guided by specific external directions rather than internalized, personal rules of just conduct. It further implies that no individual should be held responsible for his relative position. To assert that he is responsible would be “blaming the victim.” It is the function of “social justice” to blame somebody else, to blame the system, to blame those who (mythically) “control” it. As Leszek Kolakowski wrote in his magisterial history of communism, the fundamental paradigm of Communist ideology is guaranteed to have wide appeal: you suffer; your suffering is caused by powerful others; these oppressors must be destroyed. We need to hold someone accountable, Hayek notes, even when we recognize that such a protest is absurd.

Novak seems to think that there is such a thing as social justice "rightly understood." I am not convinced that right-thinking people should use the term at all. The Left has destroyed it and now they own it. Anyway, what is wrong with plain old 'justice'? How could justice fail to be social? 'Social justice' as currently used carries a load of leftist baggage.

As I have said many times, if you are a conservative, don't talk like a (contemporary) liberal. Don't use question-begging phrases and epithets such as 'social justice,' 'Islamophobe,' and 'homophobe.' Never acquiesce in the Left's acts of linguistic vandalism. If you let them command the terms of the debate, you will lose. Insist on clarity of expression and definition of terms. Language matters.

'Social justice,' then is a term that our side ought to avoid except when criticizing it. Novak, however, thinks that the phrase has a legitimate use:

Social justice rightly understood is a specific habit of justice that is “social” in two senses. First, the skills it requires are those of inspiring, working with, and organizing others to accomplish together a work of justice. These are the elementary skills of civil society, through which free citizens exercise self–government by doing for themselves (that is, without turning to government) what needs to be done. Citizens who take part commonly explain their efforts as attempts to “give back” for all that they have received from the free society, or to meet the obligations of free citizens to think and act for themselves. The fact that this activity is carried out with others is one reason for designating it as a specific type of justice; it requires a broader range of social skills than do acts of individual justice.

Ron Paul and Libertarian Extremism

Ron Paul made a strong showing in Iowa last night despite his coming in third behind Santorum (second) and Romney (first). But there is no way that Paul will receive the Republican nomination. His irresponsible foreign policy positions alone disqualify him. You may disagree with that, but most agree with me, and that includes the better pundits such as Krauthammer. So Paul's electability is zero. It is too bad because Paul and libertarians generally have many good ideas which serve as correctives to the socialist drift of the country and can help us move back in the right direction towards limited government, self-reliance, and individual responsibility. But libertarians cannot seem to control their tendency towards extremism. This is why the Libertarian Party will always be a losertarian party. Paul had the good sense to join the GOP, but he hasn't had the good sense to rein in the extremism that seems bred-in-the-bone with libertarians.

Paul is right that the the U.S. is overextended abroad, but he can't seem to make the point in a moderate and nuanced way. He has to say, foolishly and irresponsibly, that Iran is no threat. And so he comes across as a crazy old man who cannot be trusted with the power of the presidency. His 19th century isolationism was already outmoded in the 19th century.

The extremism of libertarians is connected with their being doctrinaire. It is good to be principled but bad to be doctrinaire. It requires the subtlety of the conservative mind to understand the difference and the dialectic between the two, a subtlety that is often lost on the adolescent mind of the libertarian who wants nice clear exceptionless principles to cling to.

I'll give an example of how libertarians, most if not all, are extreme and doctrinaire. Individual liberty is a very high value. One of the pillars of this liberty is the right to private property. The defense of private property against collectivists is essential to both libertarian and conservative positions. So far, so good. The tendency of the libertarian, however, is to absolutize the right to private property. He has a hard time grasping that principles and values often butt up against competing principles and values that also have a serious claim on our respect. So he cannot see that well-crafted eminent domain laws are right and reasonable. He cannot see that there is something we can call the common good which is in tension with the right to private property.

A second example is how libertarians typically absolutize the value of liberty while ignoring the claims of such opposing values as security and equality. For more see my post, Liberty and Security.