Comments Which Conservatives Block From Their Blogs For January 9, 2019

Jan 7

To Bradley Birzer and his article on Christian Humanism. This appeared in the Imaginative Conservative Blog.

It seems that many of us religiously conservative Christians are forever searching for religious justifications for controlling society. This search is made evident here in the following quote:

Fourth, Christians (Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant)—in alliance with believing Jews and even virtuous pagans—must sanctify the world through the Grace of God. For men of good will to fight amongst themselves squanders precious time and resources, and it leaves the field to the Enemy.

We should remember that Western Civilization revolved around Caucasians. Thus any insistence on continuing the Western Civilization from the past in a multicultural and diverse world cannot escape racism. That doesn't mean that we can't maintain some parts of Western Civilization. It does mean that trying to continue the Western Civilization from the past either in its entirety or even most of it includes a call to promote racism.

We are not called to sanctify the world, we are called to preach the Gospel. We are also called to seek justice but unlike preaching the Gospel, our seeking for justice is most likely to be  done in partnership with unbelievers in society and that is where we need new Christian scholarship.
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Jan 8

To Patrick Oetting and his blogpost that praises the free market and condemns tariffs such as Trump’s tariffs. This appeared in the Acton blog.

The above uses Trump's tariffs to support its claims against tariffs. But there is a problem with that approach. The problem being  that tariffs can apply varying rates and thus making widespread conclusions based on one set of tariffs does not do the subject justice. In addition, the above evaluation of tariffs is based on immediate rather than long-range consequences. Thus a snapshot approach to examining tariffs is the approach used above to examine tariffs.

Finally, the claims made for free trade do not coincide with what we are seeing in today's world. Neoliberal capitalism has ushered in a stronger free trade than the previous form of capitalism. And yet, wealth disparity is growing within many nations so that even the IMF has listed detriments to neoliberalism. We might also note that the notion of comparative advantage can be used to keep a nation's economy in a global system.

Historically speaking, our nation employed tariffs from its beginning up to and through FDR's presidency. The long-term results of that use of tariffs was that America's industries were given ample opportunities to catch up and even surpass their global competitors.

Now the historical success of past approaches to tariffs implies neither that tariffs are always necessary nor that regardless of their rates, that tariffs always work. However, the historical success of past tariffs clearly shows that they can benefit the whole economy of a nation and thus articles that claim that tariffs always hurt the economy, like the above article, are easily proven to be wrong.