Interesting Post on Religion and the Left

I was in the grocery store this weekend, and saw Andrea Bough adding a Time Magazine to her purchases at the check-out stand. "I don't normally read it," she explained, "but the cover story looks like it's worth reading."

Sunday evening, Steve Bough penned this post covering the same topic, observing that

The Time article quoted Howard Dean on the 700 Club as saying that Democrats "have an enormous amount in common with the Christian community." I would think so - BECAUSE I AM BOTH, you knucklehead. A political party should not hold God hostage; rather people of faith should work to achieve results focused on loving your neighbor.

It's good to see more and more Democrats and liberals being unafraid to acknowledge the role of their religion in their life. It's also good to see that Steve has such a wonderful muse . . .

How Do You Define Tyranny?

Two of the three Republican front-runners were asked a simple question - do you think the president should have the authority to arrest U.S. citizens with no review?

By any rational standard, this should be a simple one to answer, right up there with "Do you support the US Constitution?" and "What's your position on mom and apple pie?" The answer to this one is a clear and easy, "Hell, no - that's not the way our country is set up, and, as long as I can draw a breath, I'm not going to see us slide into an abyss of totalitarianism!" Other acceptable answers would be, "Are you out of your freaking mind?" or "Do I look like Stalin?".

But that's not the answer we're getting from the Republicans. Rudy Guiliani "said that he would want to use this authority infrequently." Infrequently?? Presumably, that means he would only use it when political enemies really, really deserved it.

Mitt Romney's answer was less clearly a rejection of our country's core principles. His merely showed the utter lack of a moral compass - "Romney said he would want to hear the pros and cons from smart lawyers before he made up his mind." Isn't that comforting - the fate of our democracy would be decided by a couple guys in suits, playing a verbal game of rock, paper, scissors?

There was a day when Republicans really did stand for something. Men like Jack Danforth, Bob Dole and Gerald Ford knew that the US Government was not to be trusted, and that power entrusted to it will inevitably be abused. Even with the fresh news of how the Bush administration has abused the Patriot Act to play politics with the US Attorney's office and to spy on Americans through the FBI, Giuliani and Romney think we ought to go ahead and trust them with the power to throw anyone in jail, without review.

Folks, you can't be any more wrong than that.

Libertarianism is Immoral

In an email conversation today, I opined that libertarianism is immoral, infeasible and undesirable. One of the participants acknowledged that I had arguments to support the infeasibility and undesirability of libertarianism, but questioned how I could say that libertarianism is immoral. I responded with what follows:

The easy answer is to tell you to go ask the nearest minister or priest - they'll tell you that Libertarianism is adverse to what Jesus had to say. The elevation of self-interest and self-reliance over your neighbor doesn't really capture the essence of Christianity. (I don't presume to speak of other religions with which I'm less familiar.)

Some libertarians will claim that they just don't want the government involved, and that, privately, they will be completely Christian in charitable support. Maybe. But that ignores another of the underpinnings of libertarianism - charity is destructive to the self-reliance of the recipient. And it also supplants what I think is a societal duty with an individual duty. I don't want my society to allow people to starve in the streets, even if it allows me to feed those I can.

This religious objection, however, leads me to the fact that libertarianism is anti-democratic. If 100% of Americans support taxation of tobacco, they wouldn't be allowed to make that decision. Economic freedom would trump democracy. Similarly, if 100% of us thought that the most effective solution to having people starve in the streets would be to levy a tax on us all to buy them food, we would not be allowed to do so in a libertarian system.

Perhaps impacting morality more directly, a libertarian world would be an environment in which immorality would be free to flourish. Polygamy, sex with animals, and selling heroin would be condoned. Racial discrimination would not only be legal, it would be economically necessary in many communities.

Ultimately, though, my objection to libertarianism is that it is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the human condition. Libertarianism is based upon individualism. The problem is that while I have met a few delusional people who actually believe that they are "self-made men" or "self-made women", I have never met a self-made infant. We begin our lives, and spend a good amount of our lives exceedingly dependent on others for survival, guidance, formation, etc. We cannot even survive as individuals - each of us owes our lives to others. Radical individualism ignores that we would not exist outside of some form of society. Even if we could survive from birth on our own, our very essence is determined by DNA from other people. My personal view of mankind is that we are not really absolute owners of our own lives. We, as individuals, are bound by genetic connections, received history, inherited society and, in my personal belief, a debt to a higher power. No man is an island.

Oddly enough, every libertarian I have ever met has run up a large debt to society. Many have held government jobs, and many have gone to state schools (not that private universities aren't state-supported in many ways, as well). It seems immoral to me that they who have drunk so deeply from the public well would deny the ladle to those who thirst now.

Even ignoring the inconvenient truth of their (and our) debt to the benevolent society our ancestors have delivered to us, I think it would be immoral to abandon our messy, contentious, gray area of a country in favor of a utopian view of pure economic freedom. I like public art. I'm happy that some farmers in mid-Missouri were coerced to sell their land at a reasonable price so that I can drive to St. Louis on I-70 and visit my mother. I appreciate the fact that public schools exist. I sincerely believe it would be immoral to sacrifice all that is wonderful about America for ONE chosen freedom.

Economic freedom is a fine thing, and I'm glad we have it, though I appreciate the limitations our society places on that freedom. Elevating personal economic freedom to exalted status in libertarianism is just as immoral as elevating collectivism to exalted status in a communist system.