There is an ongoing battle today between conservatives who want to use government’s power to enforce morality and libertarians. The former believe that the nation’s moral decay is a product of classical liberal policies that allowed or even encouraged immorality. It is not. It is a product of a half century of expanding government policies dedicated to ameliorating pain.
My father-in-law worked with patients suffering from Hansen’s Disease – leprosy. One of the terrible symptoms of the disease is that people lose their sense of feeling. We tend to think of pain as an enemy, but, as my father-in-law observed, pain is “the best friend no one wants.” Imagine putting your hand on a hot stove and not realizing it until you smell your flesh burning. We need feedback mechanisms to keep us alive and in one piece.
Government can create a sort of moral leprosy by weakening or even destroying the feedback loops that make it possible for people to know when their actions are destructive or self-destructive. People learn by acting and then observing and bearing the consequences of their actions.
Private Charity
Government-based welfare also helped to de-moral-ize society by shifting the locus of charitable giving and work away from local communities and toward Washington.
Marvin Olasky’s, The Tragedy of American Compassion, documents the tens of thousands of lodges, charities, mutual aid societies, missions, civic associations, and fraternal organizations that existed across the country in the 19th and early 20th Centuries. These organizations helped pull people out of poverty by addressing individual causes – ignorance, addiction, or simply bad luck. Thanks to the power of the free market and organizations like these, the poverty rate plummeted from 80% of the population in 1800, to about 15% in the 1960s.
Unfortunately, the government stepped in with its “Great Society” programs and displaced private charitable organizations. After nearly 60 years of effort and trillions of dollars in spending, the poverty rate has dropped only a few more percentage points. The government is very good at writing checks, but while that helps to make the poor more comfortable in their poverty, it does little to address the unique issues that keep them in poverty. That takes compassion. Real compassion isn’t feeling pity for the less fortunate, it’s climbing into the foxhole with them and sharing and understanding their individual problems.
Central planning proponents often admit that free markets deliver the goods but argue that governments distribute them more fairly. They point to people who, because of age or disability, are incapable of producing anything. The government must control the economy, they claim, so that it can redistribute goods to these few.
But rewarding need yields more of it, adding those who will not produce to those who cannot. And taxing demonstrated ability yields less ability demonstrated. By taking from each according to his ability and giving to each according to his need, government produces more need. By contrast, under the free market, need does not pay, production does, so need declines and production grows.
The choice between government control and the free market is the choice between government coercively combating growing need amid growing poverty and individuals voluntarily combatting shrinking need amid growing wealth.
Conclusion
When they are allowed to work, free markets reward the “bourgeois values” of thrift, honesty, persistence, hard work, prudence, tolerance, and civility. At the same time, markets punish profligacy, dishonesty, sloth, and bigotry.
The solution is not to add more layers of government control – layers that can be used and misused by the next set of politicians elected to office – but to restore freedom.
Richard Fulmer worked as a mechanical engineer and a systems analyst in industry. He is now retired and does free-lance writing. He has published some fifty articles and book reviews in free market magazines and blogs. With Robert L. Bradley Jr., Richard wrote the book, Energy: The Master Resource.
READER COMMENTS
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Jan 14 2023 at 11:40am
This is a reasonable position concerning idiosyncratic misfortune. Private and individual charity can be better tailored to providing assistance in ways that prevent the recurrence of the need for the assistance. At the same time there are economies of scale in assisting with systematic need such as medical care, unemployment, and old age.
Richard W Fulmer
Jan 15 2023 at 2:00pm
Medical Care
Government intervention in the healthcare market has led to a third-party payer system that creates perverse incentives for patients and healthcare providers. Reference: Overcharged: Why Americans Pay Too Much for Health Care.
Unemployment
Unemployment insurance is a form of forced savings that reduces people’s incentive to look for new jobs and their ability and incentive to save for possible periods of unemployment. Government job training programs have long been a bad joke.
Old Age
Social Security is a financially unsustainable Ponzi scheme; by 2035, it’s estimated that there will be only 2.3 workers per beneficiary. Like unemployment insurance, Social Security reduces both the ability and the incentive to save. Reduced savings means reduced investment, which translates into less growth, less wealth, and more poverty.
Mactoul
Jan 14 2023 at 9:03pm
Your example of private charity doesn’t address the conservative-libertarian contention.
Conservatives are for private charity and aren’t known to be fans of state-run welfare. You are confusing them with liberals.
The conservative-libertarian contention arises from the libertarian denial of moral authority of the community.
MarkW
Jan 15 2023 at 6:31am
The conservative-libertarian contention arises from the libertarian denial of moral authority of the community.
No, it arises from the conservative inability to distinguish between community and government (a problem that conservatives share with progressives). The community is welcome to all the moral authority it can muster via religious organizations, shared values, etc and all that it can enforce by means of setting good examples on the one hand and expressing disapproval on the other. But conservatives want to enforce their ‘moral authority’ by state power. That is the problem.
Mactoul
Jan 16 2023 at 4:26am
A community (a political community, to be precise) is not merely a club of likeminded individuals.
To be more precise, the community is likeminded because it largely forms minds of the individuals comprising the community. But this general likemindedness is very different from likemindedness of a club.
Government is merely an executive of the community and thus moral authority of the community is enforced through the government. It could not be otherwise.
MarkW
Jan 16 2023 at 6:19am
But this general likemindedness is very different from likemindedness of a club.
Why?
Government is merely an executive of the community and thus moral authority of the community is enforced through the government.
That sounds suspiciously like the progressive bromide of a few years ago that government is ‘merely’ another name for the things we all do together!
It could not be otherwise.
Of course it could be, and was, otherwise. All kinds of good bourgeois behaviors were formerly encouraged and enforced by example and social disapproval, not by law. Conservatives seem to want to bring in the heavy hand of government to make up for their failures to persuade.
Richard Fulmer
Jan 15 2023 at 9:20am
My point isn’t that conservatives support the welfare state. My point is that social conservatives are incorrectly blaming classical liberals for de-moral-izing society. I’m placing the blame where it belongs: on the weakening of communities and of the free market system by, among other things, the creation of the welfare state.
I’m also predicting that social conservatives will only make the problem worse if they try to use government to enforce their vision of morality. That will serve only to strengthen government and further weaken communities and the private sector. Moreover, it will hand more power to Progressives when they regain control of Congress and the White House.
Warren Platts
Jan 15 2023 at 12:14pm
As a social conservative myself, it seems to me that we blame woke liberals for “de-moral-izing” society. We blame classical liberals for deindustrializing society.
Richard W Fulmer
Jan 15 2023 at 1:00pm
In what sense has the United States “deindustrialized?” We’re manufacturing more goods than ever:
https://www.macrotrends.net/2583/industrial-production-historical-chart
The so-called “China Shock” is estimated to have cost just over a half million manufacturing jobs between the years 2000 and 2007. There is more churn than that in American job markets every month.
If you’re worried that the number of service jobs will exceed the number in agriculture and manufacturing, that ship sailed back in the 1950s. Just as automation reduced the need for farm laborers, it has also reduced the need for factory workers.
For the last few years, there have been over a half million manufacturing jobs going begging. The problem isn’t that we’re shipping manufacturing jobs overseas, the problem is lack of skills, an unwillingness or inability to relocate to where the jobs are, and government payments that make unemployment more attractive than work.
Jim Glass
Jan 15 2023 at 4:46pm
As a social conservative myself, it seems to me that we … blame classical liberals for deindustrializing society.
When was society deindustrialized? US industrial production is at its all-time high right now.
Warren Platts
Jan 15 2023 at 5:31pm
Jim, take a look at your chart. Industrial production is up a grand total of 2.15% over 15 years. That’s equivalent to an average annual growth rate of 0.14%.
Jim Glass
Jan 15 2023 at 5:52pm
Warren:
So industrial growth to an all-time high — at a net slow rate during the period including the Great Recession and the pandemic — is “deindustrialization”?
Warren Platts
Jan 15 2023 at 6:58pm
Jim, a 0.14% annual rate of increase for 15 years is not properly called “growth”. The standard term is “stagnation.”
In general, in economics, the question is never “What is?”, it’s “What could it otherwise be?”
From 1970 to 2000 just prior to the beginning of the China Shock (that was the brainchild of classical liberals — and so everything that happened subsequently is on them), the rate of growth for your industrial production index was 3%. Prior to that it was even higher.
Thus, if your index post 2000 had done as well as the 1970 to 2000 period, your index should be reading 175 in the year 2022 instead of 105.
Richard W Fulmer
Jan 16 2023 at 1:35pm
Warren,
You’ve made a classic “motte and bailey” argument, retreating from “the United States has been deindustrialized” to, “yes, manufacturing output increased, but it would have risen faster if it weren’t for classical liberal policies.”
But your evidence for even the “bailey” argument is very weak. The much-hyped “China Shock” accounted for the loss of about 0.55 million jobs over some seven years. But at least a million jobs are routinely lost every month in our dynamic economy. The China Shock is responsible for fewer than 6,600 of those million jobs. Moreover, as I pointed out earlier, there are currently some half-million manufacturing job openings in the country. Employment is available to nearly anyone who wants it.
There have been three economic downturns in this century: the bursting of the Dot-Com bubble, the bursting of the housing bubble, and COVID. The dips in manufacturing output coincide precisely with these downturns – none of which was the fault of classical liberal policies. In fact, classical liberals opposed the easy money policies that contributed to the first two busts, and they opposed the government-mandated lockdowns that contributed to the third.
Jim Glass
Jan 16 2023 at 10:20pm
Ah, so you ARE saying that the level of industrialization being at an all-time high is “deindustrialization”, if it follows a period of average growth at a slowed rate due to a Great Recession and a pandemic. I just wanted to be sure I understood you!
Ok, if so, what could growth rates “otherwise be” during a global Great Recession and global pandemic, apart from reduced? Maybe … unchanged? Accelerated?
Jon Murphy
Jan 17 2023 at 7:38am
Warren Platts’s inaccurate motte-and-bailey aside, I think it’s also odd to discuss US “deindustrialization” when manufacturing job openings are considerably higher now than they have been in the past 20 years.
Also note the prima facie evidence against Warren’s claim that protectionism can protect US manufacturing. During Trump’s trade war with China, US manufacturing job openings fell and they were generally rising (recession aside) during the China Shock.
Warren Platts
Jan 17 2023 at 4:36pm
The “motte” here is a cherry picked chart (Industrial Production that includes electricity & mining, including oil & has production) that if you look closely, you can see that mathematically, sure enough, it shows a gain of 2.15% over 15 years. An all time high!
That is certainly true, but if that were real GDP growth over 15 years, would you be dancing in the endzone over that? I certainly hope not.
Let’s take a look at some more charts:
Industrial production: Manufacturing Down 3.9% over same period
Industrial Production: Consumer Goods Down 5.7% over same period
Meanwhile, Real Personal Consumer Expenditures on Goods: Up 52.3% over same period
PCE Goods is actually up 89% since 2002, so probably up 100% at least since right before start of the China Shock. At the same time, manufacturing employment has declined by nearly 5 million workers. However, if manufacturing output kept up with consumer demand for goods, we’d pretty much have to double the manufacturing work force. It would be well over 20 million workers and we’d be setting all time records in manufacturing employment.
Meantime, the EPI estimates that the China Shock/trade deficit has actually lowered wages for the hundred million workers who don’t have a college degree (the majority iow), mainly through two channels: export-competing jobs tend to pay less than import-competing jobs (I guess ketchup manufacturing pays less than steel), and jobs in the service sector pay less than export-competing jobs. Then of course many displaced workers simply dropped out of the work force, while demands on the taxpayer-funded social safety net drastically increased. The result is a lowering of overall worker productivity and consumer demand among the working class, putting a further headwind to GDP growth.
So basically, our manufacturing capacity is about half of what it should be. If you doubt that, consider that our admirals & generals are starting to freak out over exporting our arms stockpiles to Ukraine because we simply don’t have the surge capacity to backfill the inventory. If you don’t want to call that a “hollowing out” that’s fine. Just don’t count it a resounding success.
As for the three (count ’em) downturns since 2000, the first two are arguably caused by the chronic trade deficit, that is the obverse of the global savings glut. Bernanke himself noted this decades ago & predicted the 2008 turndown: the excess foreign savings fuel the asset bubbles that then cause the downturns once they burst.
As for the Covid turndown, that too can be blamed on a willy-nilly globalism (the brain-child of classical liberalism) that allows pandemics to spread worldwide like wildfire. More importantly, it’s pretty clear the virus came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology that’s China’s equivalent of the USA’s Fort Detrick. And it is the desire for willy-nilly globalism that makes possible insane policies like using US tax dollars & expertise to help the Chinese Communists build the biolab the virus escaped from. Anyway, social conservatives were far more opposed to the lockdowns than the classical liberals, at least half of whom were all for vaccine mandates & passports etc.
As for excessively high job openings, why do you guys think that’s some sort of a good sign? What it means is that the labor market is not clearing. If under Trump mfg openings were down, that’s because offered wages matched what workers were demanding! If there’s excessive openings now, it’s quite clear what’s happening: owners are not raising wages to keep up with inflation and are thus offering lower real wages & workers are pushing back.
In sum, social conservatives have lots of real good reasons to be mad at classical liberals, although the de-moral-ization of America is not one (other than the discarding the once sacrosanct moral principle that a government ought to give top priority to the interests of its own citizens first).
Jon Murphy
Jan 18 2023 at 7:59am
We’re just fact checking your chosen claim. It cannot be “cherry-picked.” That’s like fact-checking the claim that the Tampa Bay Bucs won last Monday and then claiming it is cherry picking just one game to show that no, they did not.
What Jim and Richard and I are pointing out is the data do not mach your claims. That’s why you’ve had to constantly adjust your claim (you went from “deindustrialization” to “slow growth” to merely asserting that the countrfactual would be higher).
Richard W Fulmer
Jan 18 2023 at 9:16am
I’ve filtered out mining and utilities from the FRED’s interactive chart, and here’s the graph for manufacturing only:
Industrial Production: Manufacturing (SIC) | FRED | St. Louis Fed (stlouisfed.org)
As nearly as I can tell, the index’s high was 108.4 in November 2007, just before the housing bust. The last datapoint is 101.6 in November 2022. So, manufacturing isn’t currently at an all-time high as with total industrial production, but the U.S. has hardly been “deindustrialized.”
The graph shows the same three dips in the 2000s: Dot-Com Bubble, Housing Bubble, and COVID. It’s unlikely that the trade deficit caused either of the first two busts, but it probably contributed to both. As you know a “trade deficit” can also be called a “foreign investment surplus.” No doubt some of that foreign investment was made in dotcoms, real estate, and mortgage-backed securities. That would have made the bubbles bigger, but it didn’t cause them.
My list of housing bubble “villains” is:
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation – For bailing out Continental Illinois in 1984 and for other bailouts, creating a “moral hazard” – that is, convincing financial firms that they could make risky investments knowing that they would be bailed out if their investments failed.
The Federal Reserve – For pumping money into the economy and inflating the currency.
Congress – For pushing Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to purchase sub-prime mortgages and for lowering borrowing standards.
Jimmy Carter – For signing the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA).
Bill Clinton – For putting teeth into the CRA, which fueled the housing bubble.
George W. Bush – For signing the American Dream Down Payment Initiative, which further fueled the housing bubble.
The SEC for requiring companies to follow mark-to-market accounting, which amplified the effects of both boom and bust. Mortgage-based securities, overvalued when housing prices soared, became undervalued as the panic grew and financial institutions saw their assets become virtually worthless almost overnight.
The Basel Accords, an international banking agreement that encouraged banks to use bundled sub-prime mortgages as “reserves.”
Loan originators who, realizing that they would have nothing to lose once they sold their mortgages to Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae, recklessly gave loans to people who couldn’t afford to pay them back.
Home “flippers” – Who drove up housing prices then walked away from their mortgages when the values of the homes they purchased dropped.
States whose laws allowed people to walk away from their mortgages with no penalty.
It’s a long list, but it’s almost certainly incomplete. There was a lot more at play than trade deficits.
As for offshoring jobs, I think that you can chalk that up to the same sort of Progressive policies that helped put the rust in the Rust Belt. Taking Detroit as an example, the auto companies had every reason in the world to stay: hundreds of millions of dollars invested in factories, trusted local suppliers, a transportation network that included railroads, skilled workers, workers who wrote and spoke the same language, workers who had pride in their families’ tradition of auto work, a pipeline of new workers from local high schools and universities, and all the benefits of agglomeration.
Labor unions along with the city, county, and state figured that the auto companies were trapped, so they demanded ever higher and more wages, benefits, and taxes. At the same time, government at all levels piled on one new regulation after another. Socialism depends upon a cow that can be milked forever. It collapses when the cow either dies or bolts. In this case, the cow bolted.
Cut taxes; simplify and reduce regulations; pass right-to-work laws; start educating our students rather than indoctrinating them; eliminate barriers to relocation such as zoning, rent controls, and job licensing; end the government’s subsidies for unreliable “green” energy; stop the Fed’s monetary manipulations; cuts federal spending; stop Washington’s war on fossil fuels and its incessant anti-business rhetoric; and you’ll quickly see massive onshoring. All these changes – essentially stripping away Progressive interventions – would be supported by classical liberals and conservatives of all stripes.
COVID would have spread regardless. The United States is a nation of immigrants, and many U.S. citizens have family in Asia (there are some 5 million Chinese Americans, 4.4 million Indian Americans, 4 million Filipino Americans, etc.). In any case, there is hardly a corner of the world – no matter how “unglobalized” – that COVID hasn’t touched. The villain is the Chinese government, which hid (and is still hiding) information and which allowed Chinese citizens to travel abroad even while it was forbidding travel at home.
None of the libertarian websites I frequent supported the lockdowns, though no doubt you can find exceptions especially at the beginning of the pandemic when we knew so little about the virus – how it spread and who would be the most susceptible to it. I know of no libertarians or classical liberals who support paying the Chinese (or anyone else) to create superbugs in their laboratories.
I don’t think anyone believes that unfilled jobs are a good sign. Go back and look at my explanations: lack of job skills, unwillingness or inability to move, and government payments that make unemployment attractive. None of those are good things. The job openings do, however, counter your claims that there are no jobs available in the industrial sector. And, by the way, the U.S. manufactures far more than ketchup. The country’s top exports include machinery, electrical equipment, computers, vehicles, medical equipment, pharmaceuticals, and plastics.
Warren Platts
Jan 18 2023 at 9:31am
Jon, you must have skimmed over this part of my last post:
I am reminded of the Humpty Dumpty quotation someone posted the other day. Since there is obvious confusion, here is the standard, English-language, economics definition of “deindustrialize”:
Clearly, what has happened to the United States economy in the last 20-30 years fits the above definition. The data I provided supports that.
Now the job of the classical liberal is not to deny the facts on the ground, but (since it all happened by design) to clearly explain why the evident deindustrialization is actually a good, win-win thing. Right?
Richard W Fulmer
Jan 18 2023 at 10:56am
“Now the job of the classical liberal is not to deny the facts on the ground, but (since it all happened by design) to clearly explain why the evident deindustrialization is actually a good, win-win thing.”
First, I agree that, even though industrial output has risen over the last century, its “importance” (to use your term) has fallen relative to other economic sectors. This has happened not only in the United States, but in the West generally. Part of that is due to the rise of entirely new economic sectors such as computer software and graphics design.
Also, as people have become wealthier, the service sector has grown in such areas as consulting, management, financial services, tourism, safety, cleanliness and sanitation, and health care.
In addition, our increasing wealth has led to entire industries devoted to supplying what I call “radical customization.” Everything from customized cars and trucks to craft beers and boutique distilleries have become commonplace.
At the same time, automation has enabled us to produce more goods with fewer people and, not incidentally, less raw material and energy.
Second, none of this was planned any more than the explosion in agricultural productivity that enabled us to grow more food with fewer farm workers and less land was planned. The Green Revolution wasn’t a conspiracy promulgated by “globalists.” The invention of whole new technologies and the rise of previously unknown forms of employment weren’t “deep state” plots.
You remind me of the Physiocrats who believed that all wealth was derived from the land and who dismissed manufacturing as a source of national wealth. The difference is that you’re convinced that manufacturing is the sole source of wealth rather than farming. You’re horrified that someone might choose to work in an air-conditioned office cranking out computer code or legal briefs rather than working on a factory floor.
Warren Platts
Jan 19 2023 at 5:06am
Well, you’ve just told the majority of American workers to figure out how to eat cake. We will see you at the ballot box.
Richard W Fulmer
Jan 19 2023 at 10:50am
Learn how to code; do graphic design; make craft beer; use 3D printers; customize cars, clothing, gifts, or packaging; cater to the growing elderly population with mobile services such as dog grooming, bike repair, auto repair, home repair, product installation and setup, computer servicing, car wash and detailing, landscaping, healthcare services.
In Houston, people have put canning factories into semi-truck trailers and are canning beer at small breweries that, otherwise, could only afford to bottle their product. Mobile trash bin cleaners mounted on state-of-the-art trucks service whole towns. Computer-driven embroidery machines are available to customize blankets, sheets, and clothing. Carpenters are building and installing door-mounted shelving for pantries and linen closets. Others are building custom treehouses.
Blue collar jobs are available in construction, steel work, building inspection, gas plant operations, chemical plant operations, power plant operations, retail, mining, sanitation and waste management, shipping, and warehousing. Companies need equipment operators, electricians, auto mechanics, machinery mechanics, aircraft mechanics, welders, boilermakers, machinists, millwrights, drivers, wind turbine technicians, and solar technicians.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, the number jobs in service industries surpassed those in manufacturing back in the 1950s – long before libertarians “controlled the world.” Yearning for the world as it was 60 or 70 years ago is futile.
Mactoul
Jan 16 2023 at 4:36am
As I see it everyone seeks to realize his personal vision of the Good or the moral, not merely social conservatives. How it could be otherwise?
Thing is you may not agree with their particular vision of the Good. Which is what politics is– conflict of different visions of what should be.
Considering the thought experiment of a welfare state without the social liberalism of 60s and after. Is the role of social liberalism in social decay to be entirely ignored?
Jon Murphy
Jan 17 2023 at 7:45am
Of course. That’s the point. A good society should have elbow room for all to practice their vision, not just social conservatives.
Richard W Fulmer
Jan 17 2023 at 8:19am
Not at all. But don’t conflate classical liberals, who value individual freedom and individual responsibility, with social liberals who want freedom from responsibility.
Jim Glass
Jan 15 2023 at 4:40pm
The Right’s Unnecessary Civil War
There is an ongoing battle today between conservatives who want to use government’s power to enforce morality and libertarians.
Alas, I don’t see it. I wish it were so. Are there any regular libertarian commentators on Fox doing battle with Carlson and Hannity and the rest? (I don’t watch Fox so I don’t know.) Where is the libertarian army in this “civil war” based? It’s so small I’ve missed it.
It looks to me like during Trump Times libertarians have been plain wiped out of any right-side alliance, losing even the minor position they’d gained during the Reagan – Milton Friedman years. Paul Ryan was a Speaker of the House who understood libertarian ideas, and was purged by the Trumpistas. Who in power do the libertarians look forward to working with now? Ron DeSantis? Kevin McCarthy?
Anyhow, the interesting issue is not “conservatives are wrong” (duh), but why are conservatives so wrong as to be denigrating libertarians!? And also why are libertarians so inept at organizing any popular political support — to the point of being so thoroughly wiped out? (What’s happened to the Libertarian Party?)
Here’s a very short video of Jonathan Haidt at CATO describing the unique personality traits of libertarians — hear the libertarians laugh because they know it’s true!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9u9ySLadNo
“Libertarians and conservatives are a very odd couple indeed.”
Maybe this is a start to answering those questions. Libertarians, if you want to get into this civil war, it’s not enough to go around telling how everyone else is wrong — look to thyselves!
I’ll be rooting for you.
Mactoul
Jan 16 2023 at 4:19am
Conservatives are thoroughly infused with libertarian premises. That’s why they kept on losing the cultural wars. In other countries, the question why gay marriage has to do with your marriage is not raised. Conservatives were defeated by a strong libertarian faction which insisted that marriage should be privatised. And government should be kept out. But of course, marriage is not a private reality but a social one and the confusion in conservative ranks led to victory of the new concept of marriage.
Richard W Fulmer
Jan 16 2023 at 8:45am
We live in a heterogenous society and if we’re going to be able to “just get along,” we must, to the extent possible, leave space for people to live in accordance with their beliefs.
There’s no question that the Left has been the aggressor in the culture wars; rejecting any idea of coexisting with people who have differing views. For example, pro-choice advocates refused to just “taken the win” with Roe v. Wade, and, instead, tried to spike the football. They worked to promote abortion in public schools, force Catholic hospitals to perform elective abortions, force all doctors and nurses to perform elective abortions, and require all Americans to pay for abortions both at home and abroad.
Had they simply agreed to peacefully coexist, leaving room for people who believe that abortion is wrong to live in accordance with their beliefs, they would not have engendered such a strong reaction, and Roe would probably not have been overturned.
Recently, the Michigan Attorney General announced that there should be a “drag queen for every school,” leaving no room for parents who would rather not subject their children to such displays.
We saw the same sort of intolerance in the case of the Colorado baker. It’s not enough that Americans acquiesce to gay weddings, they must also be made to affirm, celebrate, and subsidize them.
But tolerance is a two-way street; the Right must also agree to coexist. Gay marriage is a done deal. Let it go.
steve
Jan 19 2023 at 11:18pm
I call BS. I chair a medical department. No one is forced to participate in abortions in our system and any system of which I am aware. 2 guys making an argument that its unethical to not do them is not the same as people actually being forced to do them. You are acting like an internet wonder commenting on stuff you dont really have any expertise in. You found a single article that kind of, sort fo supports what you want to believe. The other abortion links are similar. Feel free to provide a name of a specific hospital forcing people to do what you claim. I dont think you are going to find one.
Just to educate you the huge majority of abortions are not done in hospitals. When they are done it is usually due to financial reasons or pt has significant medical issues. We haven’t done one in may years but we maintain a list of people who do not want to do them.
Steve
Richard W Fulmer
Jan 20 2023 at 12:12pm
Go back and read what I wrote: Pro-choice advocates worked to force doctors and hospitals to perform elective abortions. And (just to educate you) it was more than two guys writing in a medical journal who were pushing this:
In 2010, the ACLU requested the Department of Health and Human Services to compel Catholic hospitals to provide abortions.
In April 2016, a Michigan judge threw out an ACLU lawsuit that attempted to force Trinity Health Corporation, a Catholic institution that operates healthcare facilities nationwide – to perform abortions.
In November of 2021, the Supreme Court ordered New York’s supreme court to reconsider its ruling forcing Catholic diocese to cover abortions (Diocese of Albany v. Emami).
Earlier that same year in Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, the Court ruled that the city of Philadelphia couldn’t deny a contract to Catholic Social Services because its foster care agency would not certify same-sex couples.
In 2019, the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal from a Catholic hospital being sued for refusing to perform a hysterectomy on a transgender patient (Minton v Dignity Health).
A California school system did invite Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider to run its sex education program. And it would have happened had parents not objected.
American taxpayers are currently being forced to pay for abortions both here and abroad.
Anders
Jan 16 2023 at 6:04am
In the UK, the poor laws of the early Victorian era are highly symbolic as the pinnacle of the era of laissez-faire that Thatcher according to her detractors looked back at sentimentally. Giving people the basic necessities should be linked to restrictions and checks not only on peoples ability to make a living, but on their moral character.
This strikes me as bizarre. Not only were the poor laws, as far as I know, the earliest example of anything approaching public welfare provisions (although it was the parishes, I think, that had the obligation to help); it should also not be a surprise that the constraints were politically necessary for the enfranchised minority to consent to such a radical step.
Meanwhile, despite her intents and infamous ideological bent (did she not slam the Road to Serfdom on the table and proclaimed that this is what we believe – a pamphlet written in the throes of war where capitalism was out and FDR admired Mussolini openly?), it is striking that Thatcher presided over increasing public expenditure (mostly legacy obligations of the Wilson era) and selling nationalised assets at firesale prices – the last thing Hayek would recommend.
So cutting expenditure is well-nigh impossible – where it has happened, it has typically come from the left in the aftermath of massive financial crises. In addition, US politics have shifted – the left stopped talking about class, embraced hawkishness, and flirts with big business; the right is struggling to find its bearings, is obsessed with sticking it to the left rather than proposing an alternative approach to, say, cutting GHG emissions; and has ousted leading members that stood for actual conservatism rather than Trump; but populism and big government is clearly winning out against the few liberals that remain.
This means that the discussion is not about big government anymore; it is not even about big government and morality; it is about which moral values should have primacy – and about framing the discussion so that the other side appears to reject those moral values altogether. To MAGA hat wearers, in Los Angeles so shunned that Larry David, in Curb Your Enthusiasm, used it to get out of unwanted lunch dates and aggressive bikers, the rejection of the left implies opposition to a thriving America; to the rejecters, the hat implies attachment to the thin end of the wedge that ends up in KKK and Nazis. Meanwhile, a point as simple as that America IS great at absorbing and integrating immigrants, in blatant contrast to supposedly social democratic Europe, appears lost on both sides. Or for that matter that the Constitution, so deified on the right, was written explicitly to minimise the power of the federal government. Or that if you ask people supporting Bidens massive spending plans if they trust the federal government to spend funds wisely, few say yes. Or question the inordinate power of the judiciary – and that rejecting the bizarre state of affairs where jurisprudence dictated politicised issues with trade offs, such as abortion, could be seen at least as much as an invitation to legislators to deal with the issue as a wholesale rejection of the right to choose (whether to abort; not whether to wear masks).
Meanwhile, Pew surveys show us pretty clearly that a majority would consent to sensible compromises, such as government funding of high-cost (as a percentage of income) health care only or the right to abortion in the first trimester and restrictions after that. Congress has become unable to come up with anything close to those solutions in favour of patently worse ones almost across the board.
To my mind, what saves America is competition among states and municipalities. Good ideas appear to spread when they are out of the purview of the federal government and identity politics. That might be why Switzerland, a country obsessed with delegating authority and duplicating public services as far down as possible (there is no federal authority for collecting taxes, license plates, and education), tops the Forums competitiveness rankings.
Richard W Fulmer
Jan 16 2023 at 1:43pm
“did she not slam the Road to Serfdom on the table and proclaimed that this is what we believe – a pamphlet written in the throes of war…?”
She did not. Thatcher slammed Hayek’s “The Constitution of Liberty” on the table. The book was published in 1960.
Anders
Jan 16 2023 at 2:04pm
Right. So not quite as dramatic as the readers digest version of Road to Serfdom, then. Still, what is telling is how little she managed to do that would be in line with the Constitution of Liberty. Tony Blair took up her reins, in many ways more Thatcherite than she herself was.
Roger McKinney
Jan 16 2023 at 10:50am
Thanks for mentioning The Tragedy of American Compassion! It’s great history. Christians in the 18th and 19th centuries feared giving too much to the poor for very good reasons. Then Christianity began to wane and people bought the socialist nonsense that we are born good and turn bad only because of oppression and property is the greatest oppressor.
National conservatism is very wrong that economic policies cause moral decline and the state can improve morality through legislation. They have bought into the socialist nonsense that people are born good.
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