A myth. A utopian scheme. And an amoral one. Of course, Catholic Social Teaching offers absolutely no support for it. Even if you squint really hard you still can't see how libertarianism can contribute to the Common Good.
Vince "Stop squinting" and open your eyes wide enough to read the statistics In Catholic terms Adam Smith's Invisible Hand is nothing more than the composite result of the Catholic position on "subsidiarity" applied to economics. Catholic Social Teaching informs and instructs how the individuals should "vote" in the free market of the invisible hand. The church's job is to educate and inform on its moral principles to affect the exercise of the free will decisions of its members.
The Church is not equipped or intended to construct , endorse , or design economic systems. As an aside: you might define what you think constitutes "The Common Good". What happened in the mid 's to change the world.
Before that time most hadn't changed in several thousand years. Slavery and serfdom were the norm in most of the world. The answer is free market capitalism originating from England and Holland and spreading to the English speaking colonies which eventually became the United States and Canada. It then began to spread in northern Europe. One has to be blind not to see it or insensitive not to recognize it.
It then slowly spread to much of the world and accelerated after WWII. All well documented. How many right-to-work states have come up with better health care results than Fidel Castro's Cuba? Not even half. One of the more absurd comments made on the America site. What do you know about Cuba? My guess it is widely inaccurate, especially their supposed health care system. I had a friend who went there from South America about 10 years ago who said their hospitals were dirty and chaotic and gurneys all over the hall ways because there wasn't enough room for them anywhere.
I suggest you go there and find out. Cosgrove, you have gone above and beyond the obligatory bashing of a comment about the common good. In , Cubans ranked 33rd with a life expectancy of 79 years. The U. The site reports 1,, visitors from countries and is being used every day by major universities, government institutions, corporations and even K schools in local communities. See the link below. The link brings up a listing and at the top select year otherwise the listing shows year Chuck You reference "a Freedom Index".
But you cite a World Life Expectancy Index There are about 8 of these alleged index. Presumptively you are not citing the Economic Freedom Index since it would indicate that the alleged Cuban pluses you like so well come it a very high expense in loss of such Economic Freedom You like the Cuban health care system and you love the. And Your reference to Union shop States fits perfectly in Cuba I repeat : go try living there. Or at least visit a bit. Stuart, in , the U.
Chuck You continue to abuse statistics In short you throw a sort of multi color jello on the floor above which you now stand and devine meanings and patterns. My favorite statistic based on your endless reference to how much better you devine Union Shop States are than Right to Work States:.
The highest rates of homelessness in the United States. Now that statistic, while interesting, has no claimed relevance to anything in the above discussion and proves nothing Stuart, an aversion to stats comes as no surprise. Stats show something about people, we the people. That potential also triggers comments intended solely to obstruct and derail the common good. Free market capitalism is based on freedom for all.
It is what has produced the incredible prosperity you see in lots of the world. Start with Hans Rosling and Jonah Goldberg. Chuck I have no aversion whatsoever to "Stats" In Cuba's economic freedom score was Its overall score was 0.
When you are pursuing your own interests, or interests that happen to compel your concern, you can be oblivious to the fact that you are hurting someone else. This is why we need government to determine if ones actions are hurting someone else.
This is how and why we have Civil Rights laws and why the Civil Rights laws on the books today did not all exist in the past. People were being adversely impacted by the actions of other people[based on their race, gender, sexual orientation, disability religion, etc. The unfettered free market resulted in Teddy Roosevelt coming in to bust the Trust. Libertarians of that time thought this was un Constitutional.
They were probably right. But he got away with it. You have the freedom to spread your elbows but doing so you may not see the person next to you.
Or you may think they don't quite count. Government intervention in labor was necessary because too may bosses did not think the people counted as much as their freedom to do whatever they wanted as capitalists! Are the majority of Americans living as long as people in Cuba? Or is it just the one percent?
Cuba's life expectancy exceeding that of most Right-To-Work states by two years sure riled up some commenters. Innovation can bring us medical advances, new technology, modern conveniences, the things some attribute to "free markets".
None of the top ten innovation states are Right-To-Work states. Your source for jobs, books, retreats, and much more. A Libertarian Case for the Common Good.
Stephanie Slade August 06, He was hoping to pump up the crowd, and he succeeded. Around me, people erupted into cheers. Treating People as Ends, Not Means Ask a libertarian why we believe what we do and the answer may be rooted in abstract moral principles: We think people deserve to be treated as ends, not means—which is to say we think their autonomy should be respected as long as they are not infringing the rights of others.
We think people deserve to be treated as ends, not means. Confessions of a Catholic convert to capitalism. Why is the A. Stephanie Slade Stephanie Slade, a contributing writer to America , is the managing editor of Reason magazine. Show Comments Comments are automatically closed two weeks after an article's initial publication.
See our comments policy for more. JR Cosgrove. Stanley Kopacz. Read Rosling's book. Chuck Kotlarz. Joseph J Dunn. China in could only move in one direction, having hit rock bottom. Jim Lein. And well said. Stuart Meisenzahl. Government can determine the extent the common good benefits from capitalism.
Steven Reynolds. Anne Chapman. Chuck Next time you are sick I live in one of the few right-to-work states better than Cuba. My favorite statistic based on your endless reference to how much better you devine Union Shop States are than Right to Work States: The highest rates of homelessness in the United States.
Freedom for some perhaps is the absence of the common good. Source: Wikipedia. Most popular. Are racial justice movements straying from Catholic tradition — or are Catholic leaders out of touch? Listen to Archbishop Gomez: Social justice begins with recognizing our common humanity. School President. Hidden Mercy. Home Health , Spiritual Resources.
Vatican Observatory Foundation seeks Development Director. Retreat Houses. See all Classifieds. The latest from america. Sunday, Nov. Steven P. Millies November 12, COP26 did not go far enough. The climate summit in Glasgow only reminds us that the Paris Agreement is weak and overly dependent on market incentives.
Griffin Thompson November 12, It is not sufficient for contemporary Catholics simply to repeat the formulas of the past. Thomas P. Bush 43 was only the latest in a long line of Republican spenders.
Some gravitate toward the Libertarian Party, which calls itself the third-largest political party in the country. But few of its candidates are ever elected. Infighting can also be a turnoff. Others buck the political system altogether. In , a graduate student at Yale named Jason Sorens wrote a paper arguing that if enough libertarian activists moved to a small state in the union, they could transform society—an undertaking he called the Free State Project.
About activists are already there. What they do once they arrive is up to them. Some Free Staters have won seats in the State Legislature. Others engage in acts of civil disobedience: One man, inspired by the movie Gandhi, got arrested for performing a manicure without a license. The last best hope for Libertopia may be the ocean.
In , Nevada real-estate developer Michael Oliver built an island in the southwest Pacific by dredging sand near an an existing reef, which he called the Republic of Minerva. The nearby Kingdom of Tonga quickly conquered it. While seasteading communities would start small—just a bunch of family-size platforms floating off the coast—Friedman imagines them harvesting energy and growing food.
What distinguishes seasteading from pure fantasy is money. Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and bought a stake in Facebook back in , has become the Johnny Appleseed of futurist libertarians.
Thiel is unapologetic about his disdain for government. It speaks to the breadth and versatility of libertarianism that it unites Teva-wearing California entrepreneurs and flag-waving tea-partyers under the same banner.
The aesthetic is different, but the ideas are the same. Both support civil liberties and gay rights. Both want to end the two wars. The cold-war alliance with conservatives has situated libertarians too far to the right, Lindsey argues. While the project drew attention in the D. In August, Cato and Lindsey parted ways. Wilkinson left soon after.
But it also channels the libertarian id of Penn Jillette. No one can make any form of travel percent safe. Jillette might choose his words differently today. More-efficient, less-intrusive security would be great. But none at all? Same story on issue after issue. No political movement deserves to be defined by its extreme elements. For Democrats, that way lies socialism. But middle-of-the-road libertarianism is already pretty far out.
But if Libertopia is the goal, no one knows how to get there. Step three is Utopia. Step two is a big question mark. Libertarian minarchy is an elegant idea in the abstract. But the moment you get specific, the foundation starts to crumble. Say we started from scratch and created a society in which government covered only the bare essentials of an army, police, and a courts system.
In Libertopia, I can sell them in exchange for money. Where does the money come from? Easy, a private bank. Who prints the money? Some libertarians advocate this. So we create charities to feed and clothe them. Some would be excellent. Others would be mediocre.
The poorest students would receive vouchers that allowed them to attend school. Where would those vouchers come from? Perhaps the government would have to set up a school or two after all. And so on. There are reasons our current society evolved out of a libertarian document like the Constitution. The Federal Reserve was created after the panic of to help the government reduce economic uncertainty.
Challenges to the libertopian vision yield two responses: One is that an economy free from regulation will grow so quickly that it will lift everyone out of poverty. The second is that if somehow a poor person is still poor, charity will take care of them. If there is not enough charity, their families will take care of them. Or, say, a stable world financial system? Most of the libertarians I spoke with said they would have let the big banks fail in TBL: Isn't one interpretation that some Democratic elites are simply out of step with the views of their own voters?
GF: I don't think so. Starting with the s, educated Democrats started to become the majority of voters supporting Democrats in presidential elections. And you saw a concurrent shift in the leadership of the Democratic Party toward cities and toward issues they care about. I've also done research suggesting that it is no longer just an educational issue, but also one of entrepreneurial occupations.
I did polling on gig economy workers — asking people in a representative way whether they worked for Uber or Lyft or other "gig economy" companies. These workers have a political profile much closer to tech workers than conventional blue-collar workers.
They're more friendly to high-skilled immigrants and more friendly to Hillary Clinton compared to people who self-identify with a labor union. This makes sense — they don't benefit from unionization any more than the tech industry. A growing demographic of self-employed workers who also subscribe to this Silicon Valley ideology could form a brand new labor alliance. You're seeing that in places like New York, where low-income and less educated workers are protesting against Mayor de Blasio's anti-Uber policies alongside high-income workers and high-income donors.
I think it is unfair to see this as class warfare. Rather, it's about two different visions of what government can be. Both are reasonable. Both are good for different types of people. I think it's a cheap shot to make it about wealthy people versus non-wealthy people. GF: When you start to think about this as a distinct ideology, you can start to wonder what are the signature policies they would support.
One example is a pro-urbanization agenda. Urbanization has always been associated with big innovations, and a number of researchers have suggested that the more densely people live, the greater the innovation.
Certainly the tech sector relies on density. You're starting to see a backlash against NIMBY ["not in my backyard"] policies that don't allow tall buildings and dense development. There's been a push to allow dense development, both in [San Francisco] and in [New York]. That was a big push under Bloomberg.
Silicon Valley Democrats tend to think that urban sprawl is bad for the economy and bad for inequality. A second example is a basic minimum income. This has become a very popular idea in Silicon Valley for a number of reasons. The promise of technology isn't income equality but the elimination of poverty. That is making things like food and education and health so cheap that it doesn't matter how much wealthier people make.
But in order to make things cheaper, there's a certain amount of efficiency and automation that goes along with those products — and that can produce unemployment. The answer is direct cash transfers to everyone in the country. So a basic income appeals to Silicon Valley types who love efficiency because it will replace a lot of government regulation and welfare services.
But it's also a very large redistribution of wealth, and will probably require a very large tax to pay for it. It is absolutely false to consider Silicon Valley anti-tax. They are not anti-tax, and they are not anti-redistribution. They are generally anti-regulation, but they are pro anything that uses their wealth to help the common good in way that doesn't inhibit economic disruption and innovation.
A basic income allows for a broad safety net where people can quit their jobs and try new ideas. That's one of the premises of Uber. Obamacare is pro-entrepreneurship. It took something that was tied to an employer and allowed people to quit their jobs.
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