A Broken Scale

Everyone has a framework that they use for determining whether or not a law is good. They may not be conscious of it, or have thought through their heuristic, but like Brillat-Savarin, tell me what you eat, and I'll tell you where you stand on an issue and how you got there.

For both American conservatives and progressives, the defining filter of the second half of the twentieth century right up to this moment is individualism. Self determination is the only good. The question then becomes one of utility: is the greatest threat to self-determination government overreach, or systems of power? The fed, or the corporate oligarch.

One side says that a good law is one which does the least to impede the natural rights of the people. The other will say that the law needs to remove barriers to the enjoyment of human rights.

Well, okay, they won't say those things, but that is back behind it.

If you zoom out a little further, the one will believe that rights are negative; things you have inherently of yourself by nature, and which you may not be surrendered justly without consent. For the other side rights are positive and relative--justice demands that the individual does not go without the good things that are common to his time and place.

There is truth in both.

Before you balk, consider, is the laborer not worth his wages, and shall man not eat bread by the sweat of his brow. We live in a time where wicked men and wicked systems have grown only too adept at extracting the sweat of men's brows and keeping most of the bread. Where the fiduciary responsibility to shareholders far outstrips any sense of duty to the workers you laid off to replace with half baked AI customer service agents.

The reason we are in the pickle we find ourselves in these days is because these frameworks are destructive without strong mores. Adam Smith is not on Mises team. The market ought not to be guided by an invisible hand and the perceived self interest of each, but by moral sentiment. Stewardship, prudence, and self control. In the other corner, man is born a blank slate, but all these daggum systems of power went and scribbled on it; a man cannot be held accountable for what he is and it is incumbent on us to help him achieve self actualization (and the proletarian virtue that will necessarily follow!) through material support. By providing for his needs, we cut the marionette strings that have pulled him down a dark path.

There was a time where the first camp was closer to truth, finding that rights were empirically true and observable in nature, and thus put there by God. The other team arguably also has roots in deep seated Christian ideas about alms and our duty to our neighbor, but I think in the modern context, in both camps, the individual is god; sovereign and inviolable, so long as they don't break that NAP.

It is not surprising, then, that Christian ethics fell so deeply out of vogue with both camps. The separation of church and state went from being a hedge against government interference with religious liberty, to being a bulwark against any law that dare curtail the rights of the individual on an appeal to revelation. My God would never....

But the first camp is starting to split, and an increasing number are interested in what Christian government means. And that is why this is just a prologue, and I'll catch you tomorrow.