The exchange with Andy Puzder has been engaging and clarifying. I discern that we share many common concerns about the decrepit state of the nation, the corruption that is rife in our education system, and the need for strong civil society, voluntary associations, and family. Andy has been exemplary in his commitment to the protection of unborn life, an issue about which we vehemently agree. Thus, our areas of disagreement are all the more interesting and revealing, given many shared concerns and commitments.
Andy represents the viewpoint of classical liberalism, what has been labeled as “conservatism” for roughly the past half-century. In the view of such “conservative liberal” thinkers – who share a lineage to John Locke and F.A. Hayek, aligned strongly with the Reagan administration, and include such contemporaries as (the more recent) George F. Will, Samuel Gregg, and Jonah Goldberg – one can successfully combine an economic order dedicated solely to pursuit of profit with a social order in which families, schools, associations, churches, and communities flourish. By this theory, the logic of a capitalist and utilitarian economy can be limited to the economic sphere, leaving untouched the strong social, duty-bound, obligation-rich, and self-sacrificial ethos required for those other spheres to flourish. Any evidence to the contrary is ultimately attributable to the baleful interventions of government, which undermines freedom in both spheres, skewing at once our ability to pursue profits unmolested while undermining the more social ethos necessarily for the flourishing of the civic, familial, and religious spheres.
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