Comments Which Conservatives Block From Their Blogs For November 1, 2017

Oct 31

To Kevin DeYoung and his blogpost on celebrating the Reformation and what it has brought. He also acknowledged challenge brought by the Reformation and today’s world. This appeared in the Gospel Coalition website

One of the challenges not mentioned above is that of removing the stumbling blocks that sinful acts done and positions taken in the name of Christ have provided. In our nation alone we have the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans from the land and the harsh persecution and oppression of Blacks pursued in various forms done by many in the name of Christ. Or we have our nation's seemingly carte blanche support for Israel as it practices a brutal occupation against the Palestinians and that support is promoted by many religiously conservative Christians as being biblical. Or we have the religiously conservative Christian support for the exploitation that has occurred because of our Capitalist economic, this is especially true with today's form of Capitalism called 'Neoliberalism.' Europe's empires and wars, along with America's previously mentioned sins, have played significant roles in ushering in Post Modernism. For Post Modernism makes a strong historical case for rejecting the metanarratives provided by faith, even the Christian faith.
If we are serious about checking today's growing secularization, we have to acknowledge our past faults and sins noting that because of time and the extent of our wrongs, we can't fix what was already done or make restitution for it. That makes us beggars for mercy.
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To Arthur Versluis and his blogpost extolling a conservative, Jeffersonian approach to relying on a smaller Federal government. This article appeared in the Imaginative Conservative blog.

I see two problems with this article. First, there is the proof by example attempt when arguing against the Hamilton model. Just because the Hamilton model has eventually produced what we have today doesn't mean that centralization always fails.
The second problem I see is that, for the most part, the evaluation of government is done by size alone. I've constantly argued that government is like love, size doesn't matter, fidelity does. The writer of this article acknowledges that  some projects require the assistance of larger entities than local government. So in some areas, the need for a good sized government is necessary. And that should apply to the federal government as well as state governments.

Where government has gone astray is not necessarily in size, but in representation. We have two ways of representing people by location. But what is absent, especially in the era of big money politics, is the representation by vocation. So what if all the states have two ways of being represented in government decisions. If the demographics of those representations draw on a limited population based on select vocations, then fewer people will be represented and those who are will tend to be those who have wealth and thus power. Limiting federal government does not limit power. Rather, limiting government can conveniently enable government to abdicate its responsibilities to private sector elites and we will get the same results as we get when corporations are able to buy representatives as mentioned in the article above.

Since Versluis mentioned Chomsky and his opposition to the centralization of government through the military industrial state, we should add that this severely imbalanced representation in government can start to be challenged when we allow workers to run their places of work rather than owners. And the first place this would be good to at least partially implement is in publicly owned companies where shareholders often act like dictatorial slumlords. And Europe's different implementations of codetermination show that we don't have to take all-or-nothing approaches at worker-run workplaces.

After increasing worker control over the workplace, we would still need to restructure our government to fix many of the current problems. That restructuring should not focus on size but on representation so that people from all walks of life, as well as all locations, are well represented. The idea of soviets that would eventually lead to either another legislative branch of the government or a revamped  the House of Representatives could increase representation of all Americans as opposed to just the representation that the wealthy have been able to purchase for themselves.

However, one other concern is important. That is the general ethical standard or moral code of the people also needs to change. We need to become a more person-oriented society where people are counted as being more important than gadgets, profits, and property rights. Without that, we are condemned to not only the racism, militarism, and materialism that King warned against, but an unfaithful and, perhaps, big government that is necessary to feed the appetites of those with wealth and who profit from racism, militarism, and materialism.

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To Joe Carter and his blogpost that introduces a paper on how the Church should approach wealth creation. This appeared in the Acton blog.

The relationship between wealth creation and the Church is oversimplified in the approach listed above. For wealth creation is portrayed as a whole pie rather than merely a slice of a larger pie. Thus, the emphasis on wealth creation as encouraged above, will focus on a financial bottom-line approach to creating and distributing wealth despite the concerns expressed for the poor and a fair wealth distribution. And without government's help, the Church, at best, will be impotent in making sure that the bottom-line doesn't become the only criteria in evaluating methods of wealth creation. The not at best scenarios have their historical precedents in the pre-revollutionary times of France, Russia, and Spain where the Church sided with wealth and power.

We need to see wealth as a piece fitting in a larger puzzle that describes how we will share society with each other. The relationships between people must take priority over any financial bottom line. If it does not, we will still have a thing-oriented society as described by Martin Luther King Jr. And for as long as we have a thing-oriented society, we will be plagued with racism, militarism, and materialism.