A reponse I for some reason wrote to a piece by Jim Wallis: “How Christian Is Tea Party Libertarianism?”
No doubt the various things the Tea Parties and/or libertarians stand for can be honestly and rationally debated, but this is sophomoric drivel.
1. Is there anyone who actually believes that what’s at issue for the Tea Party movement is whether those in need should be helped, rather than whether an elite, comprised of those purporting to be better and more intelligent than the rest of us, should rule without constitutional constraint and without regard to economic or cultural consequences?
But in any event, the distinction between helping someone and forcing someone else to help him is not trivial. Should the police powers of the state be deployed to force people to do what they ought to do? The answer, I assume, is sometimes yes and sometimes no, and it takes some cognitive effort to discern the proper moral constraints on the state’s use of its coercive powers.
Do those who belong to the Tea Party movement actually give less to those in need than their leftist critics, or is this, like the accusation that they are motivated by racism, another invention out of whole cloth?
2. The Tea Party movement, like the founders of the republic, embrace “a political philosophy that holds individual rights as its supreme value and considers government the major obstacle.” The defense of individual rights, and the attempt to devise and sustain a government which defends, rather than violates, these rights is, for many of us, the supreme political value. I doubt that few Tea Party people regard this as the supreme value simpliciter.
Whether the political theory which regards this as the supreme value in politics comports with the Christian faith is a further question. But the conclusion that it doesn’t, and that some form of statism does, cannot be established by such sophistic reasoning as:
(1) God wants people to help the poor.
(2) We can help the poor by using the power of the state to force them to.
Therefore, God wants us to use the power of the state to force people to help the poor.
Even if the second premise were generally and in the long run true—it isn’t— the reasoning would still be fallacious, analogous to:
(1) God wants people to go to church.
(2) We can get people to attend church by using the power of the state to force them to.
Therefore, God wants us to use the power of the state to force people to attend church.
3. Libertarians do not place “supreme confidence” in free markets, but we do believe that they are much more likely to promote justice and the common good than state action. Also, for libertarians, the issue of the moral limits on what governments do is at least as important as whether they are “smart and effective.”
4. Rhetorical questions like, “Should big oil companies like BP simply be allowed to spew oil into the ocean?” are doubly disingenuous. First, few of the people involved in the Tea Party movement are ideological libertarians, let alone anarchists. They are not “anti-government” nor are they opposed to government regulation of corporations. They are opposed to the attempt to empower and enlarge the Federal Government drastically beyond its constitutional limits. Second, those of us who are libertarians do not believe that what it is immoral for government to do is ipso facto wrong for various individuals and institutions in a free society to do.
The political lie that the Tea Party is racist having run its course, it now appears that the left’s new strategy is to brand it as a libertarian. This is less egregious, since a visible, even if small, minority of Tea Party folks actually are libertarian. Nonetheless, when the serious question is, “Should the US government spend trillions of dollars it does not have to do things a majority of citizens do not want it to do and which it is not constitutionally empowered to do?” it’s a sad departure from intellectual honesty to pretend that’s what at issue is whether offshore oil drilling should be subject to any regulation at all, or whether the civil rights legislation of the 1960’s should be reversed. Trotting out the straw men might be effective political propaganda, but it’s not worthy of anyone who aims to discern “God’s politics.”
