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Re: Common Good vs. Don't Tread on Me
[Jonah Goldberg 02/23 05:19 PM]Angelo Matera asks: "Before we move on, can we agree that Bruce is right, and societies and governments are never neutral? Can we agree to get past the coercion issue? If so, can we couch our arguments in the language of the common good? Might that be a good definition of a conservative?" I say yes and no. It is one thing to say that government polices are never neutral in their outcomes and quite another to say that because this is so we should give up the ideal of government neutrality. Much of what conservatism has fought against in the last fifty years has been the notion that elected and unelected government officials (and even democratic majorities) should be allowed to decide what's good for everybody. Obviously the federal government needs to mind the general welfare and one can get into trouble when one gets absolutist on either side of this either/or framing. But as a general proposition I want my federal government as libertarian as possible and my local community as communitarian as feasible. What scares me (or one of the things that scares me) is that so much of this Crunchy Crunchy stuff buys into the view that the "personal is political." I don't want the federal government to be able to pick winners and losers based on that worldview.
A federal government which considers neutrality a dogmatic first principle will still violate that principle out of necessity (and error) from time to time. But a government which believes that neutrality is a myth, and that everything is a power struggle between champions of "what's good for you" and what isn't has in effect been granted a warrant for totalitarianism. As I've said many times paraphrasing Buckley and Chesterton, a society that argues seriously over whether it is a good idea to privatize lighthouses will not argue about whether to socialize medicine.
One of the flaws of the Crunch paradigm as I understand it is that it rejects libertarianism (and hence fusionism) as a useful standard. I'm no libertarian but I think no major government decision should ever be made unless there's a libertarian in the room explaining to people why he thinks it's a bad idea. The libertarian won't always be right, but he'll be right often enough that he should always be listened to.
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