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Grant Me Freedom and Small Government — But Not Yet
da mihi castitatem et continentam, sed noli modo — St Augustine
Ricochet contributor Rachel Lu wrote an article in the FEDERALIST yesterday, taking the left-anarchist wing of the libertarian movement to task for wanting to dissolve the bonds of family and community. At least I think that is who she is attacking — it is never quite clear who actually holds the views she disagrees with (although she almost implies it is Ben Domenech). Nevertheless, the core of her argument is that, yes, freedom is great and all, and small government is a fine idea in theory, but until a strong conventional morality is re-established in society they are just too dangerous.
Small government will not succeed unless people have a strong ability to govern their own affairs. That requires a culture that provides people with clear norms and expectations, and replaces the hard and impersonal boundaries of law with the softer forces of social approval and sanction. What we need, in short, are traditional morals.
I don’t think Lu ever explicitly says that the state — and, by the logic of her argument, it must be the not-small state — should be the vehicle for fixing the culture, but it is implied by everything she says.
[N]eutrality [ed. which I take to mean ‘state neutrality’] [in the culture war] won’t work either, at least if we’re thinking about the broader conservative outlook. All conservatives agree that government should be smaller than it is. But the culture also needs to recover its moral bearings if freedom is to have a chance.
This view seems rooted in a conception of big government as a mechanism detached from the culture war, so that all it takes is the right set of policies to animate the vast bureaucratic apparatus and the decline of civil society will be reversed. Thus Lu takes the small-government reasoning (which she rejects) to be:
The main reason culture wars have reached such a fever pitch is because the state is too big. If we can limit the size of the state, then people can simply live as they like without settling hotly contested moral questions.
But there are those who would argue quite differently. The reason we have a society of atomized individuals is precisely because big government inevitably accrues power at the expense of family and community. Big government is a player in the culture wars, has its own side, and — by its own ineluctable logic — dissolves the conventional morality Lu would like to see restored.
In short, small government is not a way of surrendering in, or stepping away from, the culture wars, but the indispensible first step in winning them.
Add into the balance the undeniable fact that, in the big government we already, the apparatchiki are all on the other side. One can but conclude that this attempt to smuggle big government ‘conservatism’ back on to the agenda under the ‘libertarian moment’ flag will do much for the government part of the equation, and, like all the attempts before it, nothing for conservatism.
Image Credit: Flickr user penguincakes.
Published in General
Or perhaps shaming her into having an abortion. Anyway, the stigma of illegitimacy (or “bastardy,” as the stigmatizers would call it) historically fell on the child.
Well, I like it better than, “Hey babe, how bout I ruin you for marriage and stigmatize you as a slut.” But you can try it either way. Let me know how that works out for you.
Do you have daughters?
Doesn’t mean it would in future.
Right now, before we worry about stigmas, could we perhaps stop celebrating single motherhood and funding it through transfer payments?
True, they don’t. They further don’t like to admit that the economy actually stayed stuck until the government also started paring back the wartime taxes and regs.
Yes, that is a risk. If unwed pregnancy is shameful enough, some women will abort, no matter what the laws regarding abortion say. And honestly, though I disapprove of abortion, I’m OK with this risk. Being so afraid of abortion that girls are congratulated for having babies out of wedlock simply because they didn’t abort them has always struck me as a bit strange.
It can’t be disputed that premarital sex has created an expansive welfare state due to out of wedlock childbearing. But besides that, you may be trying to prevent divorce by giving your daughter that advice, but the research indicates the opposite–premarital sex increases the risk for divorce.
I’d like to believe that, but newer studies of higher statistical power are more inconclusive on that point. It’s like the abortion / breast cancer links – the more this is studied the less certain it is.
There is also the causal issue – the cart/horse problem: Are people more likely to divorce because of premarital sex, or are the sorts of people who do it statistically less stable marriage partners? The difference is fundamental.
It’s a weak argument against loose virtue and should not be used. There are far more compelling moral reasons to cite for premarital virtue.
I’m not sure what you mean by “newer studies.” The latest study at the link was from 2011. All told, the link cited six studies indicating the same thing. Can you provide a reference? I’d like to see it.
Engaging in an activity that risks diminishing your marital prospects and needlessly complicating your life isn’t quite the same thing as utterly ruining yourself for marriage. Nor is stigmatizing girls who stumble in their sexual virtue with the vague catchall “slut” particularly helpful, in my opinion. (Besides, where’s the evidence that more permissive attitudes toward premarital sex have actually led to fewer girls calling each other sluts?)
If sexual virtue is a virtue like any other, then people who fail to live up to it are like people who’ve failed to live up to any other virtue. Honesty, sobriety, punctuality, patience… those are all virtues, and we all know people who haven’t completely lived up to those virtues who are still basically OK people. Such failures don’t make a person worthless; nonetheless, they do tend to make life harder for him and the people around him.
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes!
It can be disputed, and I dispute it. Lefties created an expansive welfare state, by worshiping their government God, that is supposed to right all wrongs and cure all ills. This is not a chicken and egg issue. If you pay people to do something, more people will do it. The government pays women with children to be single. The answer to this is to get government out of the picture. The answer is not to fiddle with government to get better results.
The thing about the survival of the fittest is that even if you try to prop up the not-fittest, it doesn’t work in the long run. Natural laws have a way of doing that.
But what are these training wheels? Laws against bestiality? The EPA? The welfare state? Surely you don’t need the latter two to keep the former. Indeed, wouldn’t most type A folks (using the category above) agree that the welfare state has been disastrous for society?
Or is it that the type A’s want to strap on more or different ‘training wheels’? (Which are awfully close to chains — and not the bicycle kind…)
What is the relationship between the decline of conventional morality (DCM) and the rise of the welfare state (RWS)?
Two with a dash of three seems most likely to me. One strikes me as ahistorical and mechanically implausible.
I think 2 mostly, with a dashes of 5 and 3, probably.
Yes, I do think some moral restoration is necessary to live freedom to its fullest, and that immorality and dependence can feed off one another. I just don’t think the government can effectively bring that restoration about. But I do hope that free people can.
Libertarians can be culture warriors, too. Though libertarian culture warriors are more interested in defending traditional culture somewhere other than the ballot box. Which may not be all bad: the ballot box may not be the most effective place to defend traditional culture, anyhow.
Might both be worked on simultaneously?
My argument based on what I am seeing here is basically the government has replaced the church as the local charity and social service. You can’t destroy importat institutions with-out replace it with another one. You would mostly likely cause major social unrest by completely destroying the government institutions in one stroke with-out replacing them with private ones . There has to be a society that has virtue both through personal actions but working through local private charities and churches that replace the governmental one. If you don’t have a virtues society that will voluntarily give its time and money to private social institutions, then you stand a high risk of losing the civilization you have built.
It is a lot easier to destroy than it is to build. There are some institutions such as education which would thrive with zero government involvement/funding via private and free market money because we value it as a society. However there are others what I am not sure we have the virtue to support voluntarily. So my argument is make the government smaller in areas we currently value because we already have private money and actions supporting it.
I’ve read dozens of articles on Jezebel asserting as much. You mean those don’t count? ;)
Personally, I don’t think it’s a causal connection. They exacerbate each other, to be sure, but I wouldn’t say either is a cause of the other.
Let’s remember some details. The welfare state basically started in the 1930s, but throughout the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s, it existed within a benign moral climate. Norman Rockwell, for goodness sake, was from those times.
What changed? JFK’s death shocking people into nihilism? The Pill? Vietnam? Vatican II? Drugs? The Beatles? We could trot out an almost endless stream of possible cultural shifts that might explain the relatively sudden deterioration of previously traditional cultural values.
That’ll have to be left to historians, however. Our immediate problem is that, as Rachel argued, our free-market and limited-government society can only work if we can trust fellow citizens to behave in predictable, responsible ways – and it’s that dependability which is the social utility of traditional morality.
Progressives try to supply that predictability through government regulation, and not take a chance on individual morality. Doesn’t work.
Unfortunately, many church bodies have little interest in doing that, as their charity arms are largely funded by the government. For example, Catholic Charities USA got 66 percent of its $4.4 billion dollars of 2012 funding from government at all levels. The individual dioceses’ Catholic Charities arms I looked at have similar ratios.
My own confession’s charity organization appears to be no better: Lutheran Services doesn’t break out its national funding, so I picked one state — Illinois — and found that approximately the same percentage of its 2012 funding came via government.
To Brian’s point: the very institutions that should provide for the poor, widows, and orphans have become agents of what Rick Wilson the other day called the Deep State.
(quoting still not working, erg)
I’m not in a position to quote contravening studies at the moment, but let’s examine the article you linked. To me anyway it appears that Focus Insights is drawing its own conclusions from the studies it cites.
Kahn and London (1991)
“women who are sexually active prior to marriage faced considerably higher risk of marital disruption than women who were virgin brides.”
“non-virgins still face a much higher risk of divorce than virgins.”1
Okay, but does it say why, or is merely noticing a correlation? The quotes make no claims at causation.
Lauman etc. (1994):
“those who are virgins at marriage are those who go to greater lengths to avoid divorce.”
Seems to indicate that those who preserve chastity before marriage are already inclined to preserve marriage. Yet the commentary in the linked article says
“Essentially, non-virgins typically appear to do more to harm their marriages while virgins do more to strengthen them.”
This is reading into the first quote and drawing a conclusion that just is not there.
(cont)
(cont from 112)
Reading through the rest of the excerpts and commentaries we do see strong correlation between premarital sex and unstable marriages, but I’m not seeing the causations (save for when such experience was unwelcome, which is a separate issue).
One can just as easily conclude that those who are prone to engage in premarital relations are already the sorts of people who are not able to commit to a stable marriage. This is a different statement than saying “engaging in premarital sex diminishes your chance for a stable marriage.”
Put another way: take the case of a heroin addict. Does a person start to have problems because he gets addicted, or is his addiction a symptom of other underlying problems? The difference again is key, and treating the addiction requires getting the addict to confront the underlying problems that drove him to the drugs.
Dealing with virtue means not attacking the actions of premarital sex so much as helping people value themselves and their futures so that they don’t feel the need to engage in the act.
The succinct John Adams classic applies well here:
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
or Liberty cannot survive in a population of Libertines.
The question is how far down the Libertine rat hole are we? The generation that elected JFK and LBJ had a 5% illegitimacy rate – without easy access to abortion and contraceptives. Now the heroine of both political parties is the single mother. Regardless of the protestations of the libertines among us, absent a trust fund, single parenthood is a recipe for poverty and dependence.
Without government support for bad behavior, would our current crop of randy youngsters return to the sexual habits of their grandparents? If so, we’re still the virtuous society that Mr. Adams desired us to be. If not…..???
Perhaps you can link me to any quote from any Republican claiming that single mothers are his or her heroines?
Also, it seems to me that a single mother is pretty strange idea of a libertine. A true libertine would use birth control, and would certainly have an abortion rather trying to be a single mother. Twenty hour days trying to hold down a job or two and raise a child doesn’t leave a lot of time for bacchanalia.
I’m just going to drop in a note here to say: I don’t have a strongly-held or well-worked-out view on what, precisely, government should do. I think the administrative state is too large and too controlling, but I don’t have a concrete plan of action for rolling it back, nor do I have a precise idea of what the state would look like once we’d properly done the job.
Also, I write for libertarian populists now, and calling for “reeducation camps”, even if I thought we needed them, would be highly impolitic for me personally.
My point is merely that virtue is a necessary component of a functional small-government society. How we get to this virtuous-and-free society is a different question, but I don’t think it will help if libertarians join in the efforts, as some do. And even the ones who don’t, often seem to feel that they’re in position to sit back and regard moral teachers (preachers, social conservatives) with a kind of bland “impress me” attitude. That just doesn’t cut it in my mind. If you want the state to be small, you should be overflowing with zeal to build a culture that would enable the state to be small
You’d be surprised. I actually do know some welfare queens first hand and they are most adept at always having a man (or two, or three) around. The really prolific ones I know usually have one + a spare. Then there are the child support payments from their exes, the state assistance, etc.
Their lifestyles are definitely libertine, not in the sense of Bacchus of course, but still in the sense of gratifying their own pleasures: pregnancy actually being one, power over their children, and also a fierce craving for power over weak-spined men.
Sex and booze are by no means the only expressions of the libertine.
Well said.
Is this second sentence quite what you mean?
I completely agree with your first sentence, for what it’s worth. (:
I do live in a culture that doesn’t require a large state.