Politics, Economics, and Religion

I think part of the problem might be there aren’t enough Christian libertarians. As you said in your piece, you’re a personal conservative who might change your position if you were shown ill effects. That’s basically why I have leaned away from drug legalization and have strong reservations about gay marriage, fearing the marginal effects on society. However, I think a lot of Christians could be brought around to a less interventionist state, especially with regard to education.

Maybe it is possible to build off the changes from the Catholic Church over the past 15 years, which has become stridently pro-market (at least from the top).

I think the biggest problem libertarians have is convincing regular folks that just because we don’t advocate government intervention in every facet of life, doesn’t mean that we want some sort of jungle society. Based on my conversations, that’s the biggest hurdle people have to leap in order to come around. Both the Republicans and Democrats have successfully conflated government programs with “doing something positive.” Until we figure out how to effectively debunk that, we won’t get anywhere with non-libertarians.

No matter what the repents or apologies; the conservative mob will behave exactly like that, a mob. So do the progressives.

Cognitive awareness just make the mobs more efficient.

I fear Kling starts with a personal view and warps libertarianism to fit it.

I am equally aware of both camps; they both seek for government to expand its role in the private sector, they both use a fixed price variable service model to coherce ever larger portions of the private sector into government.

Note, both camps, especially the conservative, always seeks the line item veto; proof that he/she is a government expansionist.

Kling will never make a purse from that sow’s ear.

I would be careful about overstating the irreligiosity of the “political left,” although certainly traditional Marxists were/are atheists. But there has long been a “Christian social” movement in many countries (this was the term used in the US for its mostly Protestant one), that advocted a variety of government interventions in the economy. The Roman Catholic Church has never supported anything like libertarianism in economic policy, although it has become somewhat more pro-free market in recent years than it used to be.

For libertarians the problem is the Christian Right in the US, which does tend to lean to libertarianism in economic policy, but then gets all big government on social policy and sometimes on foreign policy as well. But, heck, there is a school of argument out there that one can find articulated by some at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University that says taxation is bad because it violates the Commandment, “Thou shalt not steal.”

Since libertarians think that society comes first and the government second and since the word “socialist” is already taken, maybe we should call ourselves “societists”. Would that be more appealing to the masses?

I posted before that I thought that Christians as a group could be more receptive to the moral argument for libertarianism. I agree with Kling that Christians on the right do tie their politics up with their religion too much. There is an argument that might be effective on these people that I came across in Dinesh D’Souza’s What’s So Great About America. In the book he compared religious followers in the Middle East and in the U.S. Those living under Sharia law are forced to adhere to moral standards. Violators are punished severely and often executed. In the U.S. millions of people live lives in accordance with their religions voluntarily. The people forced to live virtuous lives are not really virtuous; they are merely avoiding punishment. This leads to the money quote (I’m probably paraphrasing), “Virtue not freely chosen is not virtue at all.”