Comments Which Conservatives Block From Their Blogs For September 25, 2019

Sept 21

To Bradley Birzer and his article on who was the American of 1775. This appeared in the Imaginative Conservative blog.

One should note the following from the article above. First, there was no one American in 1775. There were various Americans from those who owned no land to farmers. From bondholders to slaveholders, From who lived in the cities and those who didn't. There was no one American because Americans were not a monolith. Even those who lived on the farms or in the cities were diverse just as slave holders were a diverse group. And perhaps Birzer acknowledges this when he mentions

Second, guess who wasn't an American in 1775. Those who weren't Americans were Native Americans who land America stole and blacks many of whom were enslaved, all of whom were considered to be inferior to white Americans. I guess that that could be chalked up to the new prejudices that Americans embraced. We should note how American Blacks were in 1775 by noting when they were respected as having the right to vote.

So was America really a world unto itself? Were we really that unique or just narcissistic for thinking so? Benjamin Barber wrote in his book Fear's Empire that the claim to uniqueness, especially in terms of being the unique source of good in the world, has been the claim of multiple nations, not just the US--remembering that America is really a hemisphere divided into North America, Central America, and South America. Perhaps that tells us about the status of our claim to being unique source of good in the world.

Conservatives, in an effort to preserve tradition, like to selectively look at the past. And in so doing they either erase or minimize our past atrocities. But those past atrocities should not feel special because of the treatment they receive. Too much loyalty blinds all of us to the atrocities and other faults that we practice in our groups regardless of the groups we belong to. That is true for conservatives, liberals, and leftists.

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To Rev Ben Johnson and his article that challenges claims that cuts in government funding was responsible for 120,000 people dying from inadequate healthcare. Johnson goes on to support a free market approach to healthcare. This appeared in the Acton blog.

In other words, don't change how we do things here is the message of this article. But whether the claims being examined above are true or not doesn't affect our need to change.
First, let's talk about austerity in general. That and the movement of capital is part of neoliberal capitalism. But the IMF states that in a choice between debt and austerity measures, it is better to choose debt. Austerity measures hurt the economy because they amount to a consolidation of wealth rather than true growth in wealth. The short of it is that Neoliberal capitalism has not delivered on its promises and has been viewed and harmful (see https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2016/06/ostry.htm  ), not helpful, to both a nation's economy and its political life.
If memory serves, in a another report the IMF also stated that the growing wealth disparity caused by Neoliberal capitalism, not only hurts economic grown, but causes political distrust and unrest. We only need to look at our nation as providing evidence in supporting that claim.

Second, here is the real kicker. Political conservatives constantly cry fiscal responsibility when public funds under the government's control mostly go to people as individuals. But they act like drunken sailors when it comes to spending public funds that things provided by corporations. What we see in this article as well as other Christian defenses of Neoliberal Capitaism is a near fatal repeating of history where the Church sides with wealth an power in times that eventually saw revolutions. The pre-revolutionary times of France, Russia, and Spain serve as examples once their revolutions took place.
Third, we might want to look into the specifics of the claim that cuts in funding contributed to, not caused the deaths of 10s of thousand of people in Great Britain. There is a difference between saying that a factor contributed to from saying that it caused.
Fourth, the free market approach to healthcare has provided sterling results for the wealthy and those fortunate enough to have garnered good healthcare. But for many others, the free market approach has either denied them adequate healthcare to their physical detriment or has caused others to suffer significant financial hardships and even bankruptcy.