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Entry: Civil Rights and Wrongs Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/civil_rights_and_wrongs#14769 Post contents: We don’t have Tory Conservatism in America. Scratch an American “conservative” and you find a libertarian. So Mr. Epstein. Of libertarians many fine things can be said. I’ll not go as far as Kirk and say we have nothing in common with them. Still it’s time to point out their flaws: 1. Reductionism and “dangerous simplifiers”. Everything is reduced to “private property”. Private Property is for them not the highest good; it is the <i>only</i> good. Private property becomes for them what The State is for Social Democrats: god. From it supposedly flows all good; there is no god but private property and Locke is its prophet. To oppose it is blasphemy. The sacrament of this god is the Market. Tory Conservatives know that the social order and human beings are too complex to be reduced to something simple. And many, many good things aren’t for sale. The libertarians are as reductionist as Marx is with labor and racialism is with race. 2. Labor Theory of Value. After Böhm-Bawerk demolished the idea, the labor theory of value, founded by Locke, creeps in the back door. Ask libertarians to justify Private Property, they fall back on Locke: It is the result of their own labor, they say. The libertarians and the Marxists share this in common. Real Conservatives know that value comes from other (and Other) sources. 3. Materialism. For libertarianism, the good is a material object that gratifies the senses. That man should not live by bread alone is a heresy for libertarianism. Again, a Marxist idea as well. 4. Epicureanism and Benthamism. Von Mises, in his economic treatises made sense. In <i>Human Action</i> he came a cropper. The good is the satisfaction of desire (which is reduced to a sensation in the glands or in the central nervous system that produces pleasure). Aristotle knew better what the good is, as did Aquinas. 5. No common good, only private goods, a thesis they share with another supposed enemy of theirs, Rawls. Also with Rawls, they celebrate the common instrumental good, and only differ what is (for Rawls the state, for libertarians the market). “In short, we’re everything Rawls is without coercion (of private property)”, forgetting all the while that the Market coerces. 6. An atomic concept of society, and a belief in the individual (conceived largely a laborer working to gratify his sensations). Real Conservatives believe in an organic concept of society and in (joining Catholic Social Teaching) Personalism. 7. Political inaction leading to political oblivion: Libertarians, from my experience, are such free spirits and such “my way or the highway” types, that they cannot unite behind a leader and work for what they believe. They are in fact comparable to Hyper-Calvinists, Quietists, and Millenarians. They think that as “sovereign individuals” they can survive the coming of a putative collapse. "Just do nothing, hoard gold, and wait it out." Our tyrants-would-be are laughing them to scorn. 8. Ineffective in another way. cf. Eliot’s splendid critique of what he called “Liberalism” in <i>The Idea of a Christian Society</i>. “Liberalism”/libertarianism is against things, not for things; “freedom”, like “democracy”, does not have enough positive content to stand alone against Stalinism, nationalism, Fascism, racialism. “If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God), then you must pay your respects to Hitler and Stalin.” (Eliot, <i>Christianity and Culture</i>, NY: 1940, 1949, p.50. Hannah Arendt put the matter differently in <The Human Condition</i>: If we have only homo labor and homo fabor, and not the pursuit of arete, then we’re going to get Eichmann. And Eichmann is just as dangerous working in a bank doing subprime loans. cf finally Orwell’s splendid demolition of Liberalism/libertarianism in his book review of <i>Mein Kampf</i>, <i>The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell</i>, Vol 2, pp. 27-29: Libertarians just don’t understand human beings. In short, Buchanan got it mostly right: The Marxists of the “Right”. We Tory Conservatives do have much to learn from them; they have more to learn from us. Both of have much to learn from Catholic Social Teaching. And Jim Crow had to go. That doesn’t mean that the Civil Right Movement didn’t have a lot of bad fruit. I wish readers to understand that my objections to Mr. Epstein are gentlemanly, and offered with respect, and with the aim of amendment. Sent at: 2008 11 21