Anti-Climacus

CHRISTIAN LIBERTARIANISM:

I actually (though perhaps not surprisingly, being a liberal) side with Matthew Yglesias over Joe on this one.

The essential view is the Christian libertarian one, which (as I understand it) posits that each person should look after their own moral development, and apportion their money as they can to whatever causes strike them as the best to give their time/money/energy to. To bring the state in to act as a coercive agent in getting people's money from them is just plain wrong. Yglesias, I believe, concedes that, ideally, our selfish (self-interested, however you want to phrase it) desires would work out in the aggregate to benefit everyone approximately equally well.

But the problem, from the liberal point of view, is that it seems like a fact that not everyone is benefitting equally (though I'm not especially beholden to this as a desirable condition)--in fact, it seems to be the case that some people, in a pure economic libertarian system, are always going to go insufficiently cared for, or will be required to make choices that, ideally, people shouldn't be forced to make. This seems to create a moral dilemma: you can have total economic freedom, but only at the price of the well-being of others*.

When Yglesias says "The key is to help those in need by hook or by crook," what he means is that for those who feel the moral imperative created by the presence of insufficiently** well-off people, who know also that the job just isn't getting done in the private sector, something has to be done, and this is where the state comes in. I have some more to say about the Locke-Rousseau underpinnings to this particular argument, but I'll see how this first part gets received and maybe go from there.

*you might object, of course, that the number of people this applies to is very small--but then, I'd contend that the moral imperative to help your fellow human beings is the same whether the number involved is one or a million--I'm not a utilitarian, as you may recall. You might also object that perhaps all of the people who fall into this category have done something to put themselves there--crime, drugs, choosing to drop out of school. But, I'd reply, if you still believe they have a soul worth saving, I don't think it's a stretch to say you could imagine a sense in which you have an obligation to minister to the body as well as the spirit.

**When I talk about sufficiency, I mean it in a roughly Lockean sense--I have no problem with people dividing up what there is in whatever way they see fit, so long as they leave sufficient for everyone else to be able to live decently well. I punt, for the moment, on what constitutes 'decently well.'