The other day, this Twitter novice took to the Twitterverse and "tweeted" the suggestion that Michael Sean Winters's post, "The Catholic Case Against Libertarianism," occasionally indulged in some straw-mannery in invoking the threatening prospect of "laissez-faire" "libertarianism": “’Laissez-faire’ is a straw man, I think. Doesn’t exist.”
Today, in this post, Michael Sean took issue with my "pithy, but woefully inadequate, comment." Fair enough. The tweet was, certainly, inadequate as a response to all the things that Michael Sean said in his post (much of which I agree with) about "libertarianism" as a philosophy or ideology. And yet, although inadequate, the comment was right, I think. Again, I agree with much of what Michael Sean says about moral anthropology and the centrality of the person. He says, "To be clear, for a Catholic, the criterion for evaluating a solution to any human conundrum is not to ascertain if that solution is a government solution, and to support it because it is a government solution, nor is it to defend a free market solution because it is a free market solution. Our criterion, as Catholics, is the human person, not an abstract commitment to the state or the market." I agree.
And yet -- no one really thinks that "the market" should be entirely unregulated. And, in fact, it is pervasively, thoroughly, comprehensively (and sometimes stupidly) regulated. Everyone agrees – that is, everyone who is in the conversation agrees – that “the market” is not and should not be entirely “free.” Or, put differently, a “free market” – in order to be meaningfully free – is a (reasonably and intelligently) regulated one. We enforce contracts. We impose liability for harms caused. We regulate all the time and everywhere. The real debate (among people who concede the basic point, which Catholic teaching firmly and unambiguously affirms, that ordered-freedom, not statist command-and-control, should characterize “the economy”) is about how to locate the point at which regulations begin to stifle, rather than to promote, human flourishing and the common good, properly understood.
It is not, in my view, helpful to label as “idolatry” the unremarkable view that we can and should evaluate policies with respect to their effectiveness and that the effectiveness of policies is related to, and perhaps depends on, a number of things that the economists like to remind us about. No one thinks that government should do nothing. But, some of us think – and there is absolutely nothing not-Catholic about thinking – that there are limits to (a) what governments are morally authorized to do and (b) what governments, practically speaking, do well. To say this is not to make an “idol” of the market (though it is to avoid the error of making an “idol” of populism or statism)
Like Michael Sean, I have no interest in (my understanding of) the "objectivism" of Ayn Rand. It seems to me that the best and most morally attractive legal-and-economic regimes will be democratic-capitalist and constitutionalist with appropriate and effective social-welfare-protecting programs and constraints. But, it is not “Randian” to think that the basic “liberal” ("libertarian"?) insight -- i.e., governments should be limited by law and non-state ordering and associations should be protected and respected by law remains, well, insightful.
I agree with Michael Sean that conversations about public policy should be couched in terms that treat ideas like "competition" and "consumer choice" as means and mechanisms. But, it's worth remembering that they are, often, very effective means and mechanisms. To the extent they are, let’s use them! Sometimes, “libertarian” (or "free market" or "non-state" or "private ordering") policies are the better ones, not so much because of imperatives connected with deep anthropological premises or because of an idolatrous attachment to autonomy, but because . . . they work better (at bringing about human flourishing and common good, properly understood).
Dahlia Lithwick in Slate calls attention to--and eviscerates--the campaign, by a couple of University of Virginia students (one actually a new alum) and an LGBT advocacy group, against Doug Laycock of UVA. The campaigners claim they want to open a "dialogue" with Prof. Laycock about "the [allegedly harmful] real-world consequences" of his work in defense of religious freedom in the contexts of gay marriage and the HHS mandate. They claim they don't want to silence or harass him but only to make him aware of how conservative groups have used his writing. But the campaigners have initiated their "dialogue" with a FOIA request for telephone and email records in order to see Doug's communications with conservative groups.
Lithwick's article says most of what needs to be said against this. (So does our MOJ friend Steve Bainbridge: "You don't start a dialogue with FOIA requests.") It's remarkable, the disingenousness of these campaigners in claiming they're simply seeking to educate one of the leading and most thoughtful religious-liberty scholars of our time--and that a FOIA request is somehow part of an effort to promote dialogue rather than to harass an academic because of some of his positions.
The dark lesson one could draw from this (and other episodes like Brandon Eich at Mozilla) is that left-ish activists will increasingly try to intimdate those who depart from their views on even one important matter--even on whether to protect religious dissenters (since Prof. Laycock, as many MOJ readers will know, is a supporter of same-sex marriage itself). That kind of pressure will no doubt intensify in the future. (The FOIA tactic, it should be noted sadly, is increasingly being used by both sides in political/cultural wars.) More optimstically, however, one could note that this pressure campaign drew no support from major gay-rights groups, at UVA or elsewhere, and has quickly been condemned by Lithwick and Brian Leiter--neither of whom, to put it mildly, sympathizes with the traditionalist position on gay marriage.
Wednesday, May 28, 2014
The Washington & Lee Law Review just published the papers from the “Roe at 40″ conference held at W & L on November 7, 2013. Much of the funding for this conference came from University Faculty for Life (UFL). The conference was largely made possible through the efforts of Sam Calhoun (who is a member of the W & L faculty and a member of the UFL Board). The hospitality of everyone at W & L was extraordinary. One of the W & L law review hosts was Lara Gass who was tragically killed in a car accident a few months after the Symposium. The law review issue is dedicated to Ms. Gass and also contains a tribute to her.
The papers are available here, http://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/wlulr/
The conference included speakers from varying perspectives. I strongly encourage people to take a look at the conference papers.
Richard M.
Over at First Things, George Weigel has a very nice post up about the new book by my colleagues Prof. Nicole Stelle Garnett and Prof. Margaret Brinig, Lost Classroom, Lost Community. (Buy it here!) Here's a taste:
It’s commencement season and tens of thousands of students are graduating from inner-city Catholic elementary schools. As decades of empirical research have shown, these kids have a better chance of successfully completing high school and college, and are better prepared for life-after-the-classroom, than their peers attending government schools. These inner-city Catholic schools are “public schools” in the best sense of the term; they’re open to the public (not just to Catholics), and they serve a genuine public interest, the empowerment of the youthful poor.
There is ample research to demonstrate inner-city Catholic schools’ educational excellence, going back to the pioneering Coleman/Greeley studies in the 1970s. Now comes an even more comprehensive claim about the positive impact of these schools: For, according to two law professors at the University of Notre Dame, Margaret F. Brinig and Nicole Stelle Garnett, inner-city Catholic schools are important factors in urban renewal as builders of “social capital” on inner-urban areas. . . .
