Ron Paul at the 2007 National Right to Life Convention, held at Crown Center Hyatt Regency in Kansas City, MO; June 15, 2007, (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I have a comment on this article, “Fiscal Conservatism Needs ‘Social’ Conservatism”. I’m sending this commentary to his email as well as posting it on my blog:
http://jewishworldreview.com/0113/prager012213.php3#.UlFduCTMos4
Dennis Prager deserves attention from those who disagree with him, because he makes his arguments, as he says it, from the head and not from the heart.
FIRST CLARIFICATION
I am one of many Christian libertarians, but strongly Christian. There are more of these than you think, who very much believe in practicing our Christianity in private and in public, and for us there is no separation of economic and social values. Economic values are only a part of the social values, and every so-called “conservative” who makes that difference, especially for the sake of pragmatism, is a victim (or perpetrator) of the mistake of lifting up the love for things over the love of his fellow-man.
I do marvel at the fact that applying the principle of freedom to economic issues, though, is the absolutely best thing that can happen to the poor in any society, as a general principle. Stealing is a moral issue, in fact, and taxation is a form of theft, because it is the forcible expropriation of goods or services without even the formality of requesting it.
There is an overlap there. But Dennis, note that Israel in the time of the book of Judges, before the kings, they had no formal taxation. There was no taxation to support an army, or police force. Armies were raised from volunteers as an answer to prayer for deliverance from enemies.
In fact according to the jew it was actually a moment of moral weakness that drove the Israelites to demand a government. In their case, it was a king. God warned them through Samuel against what they were asking for: the king would require their sons to send them off to war, and he would require burdensome taxes, and their sons and daughters in future generations would be sorry.
I don’t think rabbis or pastors pay too much attention to this, and its implications.
SOCIAL CONSERVATISM AND LIBERTARIANISM
I absolutely agree that all principles are a package, and that the divide is a false one. I believe it is mostly engendered with the use of propaganda in the Establishment Media, and politicians who put position and power over principle.
I also would agree that it is wrong to deprecate the value of American history from even before 1776 as being an incubator of respect for the time-proven moral principles that have a substantial near-equivalence with what is known today as “conservatism”.
Where we differ is a result of the misunderstanding about libertarian morals, that unfortunately, I believe many libertarians also do not understand about the real world.
I’m not talking here about the small minority of libertarians that just want what they see as “benefits”. Many of the members of the namesake Libertarian Party are like that, but not all of them either.
RON PAUL VS. GARY JOHNSON
The difference between Ron Paul and Gary Johnson are significant in this respect. Gary Johnson points to the benefits of marijuana, whereas Ron Paul points to the moral difference between you deciding what is good for you, and some self-appointed smarter-than-thou committees so deciding. Ron Paul is the one who also points out that at least for Prohibition they realized they could not ban alcohol on a federal level without a constitutional amendment.
In the same way that it is immoral to arrest an Amish farmer for providing raw milk to his neighbors, in principle, the same principle has to be applied, as you say, to the extreme cases.
Another couple of examples would be what we call the “natural right” of atheists to speak as they will, and the right of the “gay gang” to say what they will. And we support this in spite of the enormous damage that the advocacy of both of them wreak upon the general society.
In other words, the moral imperative of allowing the free exchange of goods and services as the parties that engage in such activity may voluntarily do so, this is a moral principle that also applies to other moral and ethical contexts.
Take so-called “same-sex marriage”, for example. The only reason the propagandists have been able to make this an issue they can impose upon the rest of us is that the Christian and Jewish and other religious persuasions have allowed the state to usurp this cultural and social institution.
Before the Mormons appeared, historically, for example, monogamy was a universally accepted norm in the states where they originated and grew. But monogamy laws were passed specifically because many Mormons practiced polygamy. So they migrated to other states and the process repeated until they finally got to the Utah area, where the federal government passed their law and threatened to blow up their city. (A Mormon once told me their people were scattered across the countryside at that time).
Before that, marriage was more common-law, I would think, with some formal recognition in the respective religious institutions of each different religious faith.
But the de facto situation today is, that the state controls it. The USA has completed its evolution into a nation that thinks it has to tolerate a ruling regime that is actively hostile to all religious faith except the faith of materialism, with special hostility toward Christianity. Statist-power politicians regard Jews as little problem for secularization of the populace in the interest of a docile subject populace, because most Jews have adopted secularist-state views in the States.
(As a parenthesis, in my opinion, there are two reasons for this. One, many Jews have this big bugaboo about a Christian majority population, fed in the background by thousands of Hollywood productions that keep bringing back images of the Holocaust. One judge I heard about on a talk show once actually allowed certain prayers in some official activity, but banned the use of the name of “Jesus”.)
There are a great number of libertarians who are also Jews, of every “kind” of Jew there is, of course, and that includes even some Jewish settlers in “Samaria”.
At the core of libertarian thinking is the non-aggression principle. That principle is based in the very moral principle of non-aggression. This principle is a sort of dumbed-down version of the second greatest commandment: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself”.
That commandment from the laws of Moses is akin to the Christian’s “Golden Rule”, which in a way restated it in terms of its application, its practice. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”, is also a paraphrase of what Jesus said, but is an abbreviation of the same thing.
That of course includes avoiding aggression against your neighbor, meaning avoiding the use of force or threat of force or aggression by fraud to get something from that neighbor or to force him to do something.
There was no command to force the world to come to the morality embodied in the Ten Commandments, no divine order to go forth and convert the entire pagan world by force, and there is no way to interpret it as such, much as some less ethical atheists try to do. It’s easier to do that with the Koran, maybe, but even in the most brutal version possible you can extract from the laws of Moses it doesn’t work. At least not without some hilarity (if it were not so serious a subject).
So there is credible content to a moral and even religious objection to the imposition of moral law upon others by any individual or any group. The laws of Moses are full of admonitions to respect the stranger among you, the travelers that journey through the land round about, and so on.
And even Dennis Prager would have to admit that even though the USA may be a good nation and exemplary in morals, that it has no “right” or obligation to conquer North and South America to impose those ideals, even if it could somehow be made to work in some weird way.
GAY MARRIAGE
It is true also that many libertarians in the USA and elsewhere believe that state-sanctioned same-sex marriage is a matter of equal treatment or somehow an issue of more freedom somehow, whereas it is no such thing at all. One propagandist says there are 10,000 specific benefits from marriage that same-sex couples do not get because of the bans on same-sex marriage.
In my opinion, this is the only reason that any visible number of homosexuals support the idea. A tiny minority gets marriage licenses where it’s legalized, the rest don’t care for it but might vaguely support the activist stand on it. Another tiny minority of currently practicing homosexuals have called talk shows to express strong objections to the idea, I’ve heard them, one of them citing the same reasons Dennis Prager does.
WRAPPING UP
Mr. Prager asks some questions that
Do you really want to live in an America that is godless, where liberty derives from the state and where moral values derive from each individual’s heart? In an America that ignores genocides abroad? In an America that so radically redefines marriage — the union of anyone who loves anyone — that it no longer has a moral justification to prohibit polygamy or incest? In an America that has no moral opinion on abortion, even if performed solely, let us say, for reasons of the fetus’s gender? In an America that embraces multiculturalism rather than the melting pot ideal?
So libertarians do NOT want liberty to derive from the state. Moral values can never derive from an enforced monopoly on the use of force. But you have no right to decide moral values for anyone else, by the force of violence or the threat of violence (that’s exactly what laws are), whether you’re an imam, rabbi, or minister, or guru, or priest, except for the ban on aggression.
To say the contrary is to say whoever has the guns decides the morality. That has not worked out well for Jews, nor Christians, nor Muslims, or anybody else really. That’s why atheist-driven and secularist-driven bans on the free expression of religion by majorities is so hypocritical, and the censorship on the Creation science point of view in government schools. Or the censorship of any point of view in them.
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