Part two in a series to divide and illuminate. Why do we believe in liberty? Not as a question of natural rights versus consequentialism – that’s a different debate entirely. There are (at least) two fundamental ways to answer this question that cross both sides of the aforementioned argument:

I believe in liberty because I have faith in my fellow man that unconstrained, the market will drive society towards universal opulence.
I believe in liberty because I have no faith in my fellow man to wield unconstrained power in any respect.

As a Christian, the only proper answer to the question is the second. For all his brilliant work on spontaneous order, F.A. Hayek held to a very positive Libertarianism; was unduly optimistic about human nature. James Buchanan and the Public Choice school, on the other hand, have a great conception of negative Libertarianism: whatever good guy you give power to, you have to be prepared for that power to be used badly as well. We have to depend on institutions, not people.

Negative Libertarianism also quells the utopian vision of a lot of market theorists. The market is composed of people, and will fail at times. It’s not a panacea – Anarcho-Capitalists and other market apologists waste a lot of time convincing themselves of the positive benefits of liberty – unrealistic benefits, in a lot of cases (the public goods problem, for example). The real issue, as the Public Choice school would put it, is that though market failure can be bad, government failure is always worse. It is so because a government is sovereign: it faces little to no competitive pressure in its internal endeavors; nothing to constrain it.

We will not achieve utopia on this earth under any system, as if we could by our own will and intellect bring about the Kingdom of Heaven. It is unrealistic to expect any system to live up to that ideal. In truth, to ape a quote from Winston Churchill, “The market is the worst system there is, except for all the other ones”.

It’s well known by most people now that “Conservative” and “Liberal” are, by their naked selves, mostly useless terms. The politically sophisticated talk about social Liberalism and Conservatism and economic or fiscal Liberalism and Conservatism, dividing the spectrum into two dimensions. The terms “fiscal conservative” and “economic conservative” are thrown about almost interchangeably among politicians and the electorate. But are they really the same?

Being a fiscal conservative is easy. In fact, most people in America are probably fiscal conservatives. All that’s required is an aversion to government spending, debt, and taxes – something that intuitively sounds good to most people. There are varying degrees of aversion to government spending, but even the most ardent fiscal conservative is not necessarily an economic conservative.

What do I mean? I will use myself as an example. For a long time I fit that description: an ardent fiscal conservative, but not an economic conservative (though I made no distinction at the time). I wrote my endorsement of Mitt Romney in such a state of mind. I lauded him for his tenacity in overhauling the Massachusetts healthcare system “from wasteful and incomplete to lean and complete”. This is the fundamental difference between mere fiscal conservatism and true economic conservatism: if the government can nationalize an industry without spending a dime, or even make money from it, the fiscal conservative says, go for it. The economic conservative says no, regardless of the government’s prospects.

A salient example of this is the bailout of Chrysler in the 80s. The government guaranteed billions of dollars of loans to Chrysler. In a few years, they had paid off the loans and the government had even made interest back. In every respect it seemed a success to fiscal conservatives; even the ones who opposed it solely because of default risk. But economic conservatives knew it was a failure from the beginning, a failure by design. Where is Chrysler now? Failing again, being propped up again.

This is why there are so many fiscal conservatives and almost no economic conservatives by comparison. It makes intuitive sense to be a fiscal conservative: It frightens a lot of people to owe so much money, and rightfully so. Their fundamental issue is the government’s balance of payments. It takes a little more economic sophistication to be a true economic conservative, though. People have become accustomed to pervasive government involvement and regulation in their lives, and even been convinced to like it. How many people can effectively argue that the government’s monetary, fiscal, and regulatory meddling was the cause of this financial crisis? Dishearteningly few. They take the platitudes that deregulation caused the crisis at face value, maybe cringing at the trillion dollar sums of stimulus and bailout money, but never batting an eye at perverse incentives, subsidies, and regulations.

Fiscal conservatism already enjoys wide support among the public. What we need now are true economic conservatives.

Star Trek often catches a lot of flack from the American Right for portraying a Socialist space utopia. Certainly there is a vast, far reaching central government, and the human race is indeed portrayed as enlightened beyond self-interest. But should Star Trek be totally thrown out for its political philosophy? I believe there’s more to redeem it than to condemn it.

Humanity is constantly portrayed as completely altruistic in the Star Trek universe – it has evolved to the point that selfishness is no longer necessary. Indeed, those interested in personal gain are often portrayed in a less than flattering light. As a sidenote, only replicator technology would allow the utopia of the Star Trek universe by eliminating scarcity of most things – the show is hardly based in economics, but the fundamental importance of the replicator to the Starfleet economy is usually neglected (I suspect the technology was put in for another purpose, coincidentally the necessary technology to sustain their economy). Nevertheless, there are still devious Capitalists – mostly harmless, but sometimes a deadly nuisance. Star Trek is obviously not friendly on the surface to Libertarian ideals.

But there is a more fundamental theme to Star Trek, one that is by all accounts completely commendable: a strong commitment to individualism. Though Starfleet is indeed a Socialist utopia, it is not always a perfect one. One of the most common themes of all the series is the captain’s deliberate defiance of a direct order, and saving the day by doing so. Successwise, captains have a vastly better track record than Starfleet, illustrating extremely well the knowledge problem of centralized government (though Starfleet never does seem to learn to back off the regulations. Often times one gets the impression that they’re just suggestions).

Star Trek is in fact rather schizophrenic in its attitude towards its utopia. It is generally good and enlightened, though often misinformed, having to be corrected by intrepid Enterprise captains. Occasionally though, the writers let Starfleet embody every problem of tyrannical government, making the captains not only occasional rulebreakers with exceptionally good judgement, but outright traitor-heroes. The story of Insurrection, for example, puts Starfleet stopping barely short of genocide, forcibly relocating an eternally youthful race to another planet where they would eventually die. The crew of the Enterprise has to renege, fight against Starfleet, and save the Ba’ku. And there is never a bit of moral ambiguity in their decision.

Where the original series and The Next Generation have these themes implicit in the actions of their captains, Voyager states them explicitly. How many times throughout the Seven of Nine rehabilitation subplot did Janeway lecture Seven on the virtues of individuality? She’s even been known to lecture the Borg Collective on the evils of collective consciousness. They’ve been called a race “as close to pure evil as any race we’ve ever encountered” – where the defining feature of that evil is their collective consciousness, their forcible homogeneity.

So Star Trek promotes a Socialist utopia with a strongly individualist culture? Star Trek has always had a moralizing component to it. Though their stereotype of Capitalists could be called unfair, their utopia could be excluded from the moral, thanks to the replicator. Heck, if we eliminated scarcity, why not have a Socialist utopia? It’s the best of both worlds: universal opulence without the servility that is for now inevitable in Socialist attempts to promote it. With the moral component of its political structure falling to the consequences of simple economics, the strong individualist themes of the show commend it far past its unfair stereotypes condemn it.

The balance concept of works is one of the most bedeviling concepts in pop religion. The idea goes, if I do more good things than bad things, God will accept me. It’s essentially Karma stripped of its Eastern flavor. Lacking the despair of one’s own salvation that is ultimately necessary for salvation, the balance model makes a lot of sense to the unregenerate mind.

Unfortunately, even Christians all too often buy into the balance model. Not so crude a balance model as exists in pop religion – we take James 2:10 “For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles in one point, he has become guilty of all” to mean that even one act of sin outweighs all the good works in the world. This is passably true on the surface, but it is still fundamentally a balance model. Ask most Christians if a person were to live a life entirely by the law, never breaking it and yet not knowing God, would be saved, they would say yes. It’s the loophole in their faith – an unattainable loophole, granted, but a loophole nonetheless.

Such a concept takes depravity as a matter of works, and salvation as a matter of belief: that we are lost because we act badly, and we make up for it by believing, since it’s impossible to right the balance by good works. God removes the sin from the balance, allowing us to effectually weight the other side with good works (if I’m not mistaken, Roman Catholic doctrine states – or at one point stated – this explicitly).

This conception, however, misses the nature of our salvation: neither depravity nor salvation are matters of works. There is no balance at all, even a balance irrecoverably weighted by sin. Our actions, both good and sinful, mean nothing in themselves, except as they indicate our nature. The essence of depravity is not that we do sins, it is that our desires are not for God, which leads us to sin. The essence of sanctification is not that we are freed to do good, it is that our desire is for God, which leads us to good.

That is not to say that actions are not significant as indicators of our desires; only that they have no significance in themselves. Thus our hypothetical man who lives by the entire law for its own sake is nonetheless unfit to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Though his outer face is clean, even completely clean, his nature is nevertheless fleshly. His desire is not for God. There are no loopholes.

That means that neither is our own salvation an ad hoc salvific loophole created by God for those who could not keep the law. It is not as if keeping the law is the preferred method of salvation, and barring that, God lets us get on with a salvation by grace through faith. There is no “option”, as if we could either keep the law or trust in Christ to the same effect. All salvation at all times is only effected by the apprehension of the value of God, even if that apprehension is imperfect here on earth. The law is only the outward manifestation of such a valuation, and is always powerless to save – even in its perfection.

What we call “Socialist” is almost never more than a fundamental belief in fairness of opportunity constrained by moral and practical concerns in varying degrees across the spectrum. This leads to a heap of individual beliefs that, though they may be palatable and feel good, are hopelessly inconsistent.

If we want to go after inequality in opportunity as such, the way to do it is not by handing out healthcare and welfare and social security. These completely miss the fundamental engenderer of inequality by decades. The only consistent application of the Socialist ideal is to create and nationalize a child-raising industry, removing that right from their parents.

Ultimately, no argument for the redistribution of wealth cannot be applied and applied better to public childcare. If one requires a certain amount of capital to “get off the ground” economically, how much more does a child require a certain baseline of care to succeed in life? If a man’s economic situation in a free economy is the fault of external factors like exploitation and oppression, how much more is his disposition the fault of external factors like poor parenting? Essentially, where redistributionists want to level the economic starting point after the fact, the consistent socialist knows that the starting point can only be leveled at birth.

The only solution, then, is national standards in childcare. Each child is raised in the same manner, and from there chooses his path in life, allowing his natural talent and disposition to shine through. With each child raised in the exact same manner, the rest of the economy could be quite free, as every child has exactly the same starting point. Parents may not bestow any resources upon their children except as a donation to the general pot, for one child may not be given an “unfair” or “unnatural” advantage over the rest, whether developmentally from loving care, or through resources.

The solution, in short, is complete homogenization. This is the essence of the Socialist aesthetic: individualism is threatening, both economically and politically. To engage in a brief reductio ad absurdum, this principle could even be taken so far as to outlaw free procreation and force sterilization, as free choice in pairings engenders inherent genetic inequality as well. It would also make the business of illegal child-rearers easier to deal with if they can’t have children at all, but this is only speculation for a time when technology would allow this to be widely feasible (though it is hardly unimaginable that the capability lies in our power, should the people be complicit).

The rest of the Socialist ideal, however, is independent of technology. Though the government may (and probably will) still have a safety net for those who make especially poor decisions anyway, there is no longer any excuse for redistribution. In fact, no real theory of political economy can have redistribution as an ideal, for even if we accept that the ills it purports to fix are indeed ills, it is only an ad hoc solution; a bandage that tries and fails to represent itself as part of a more generally applicable principle.

So, to those who would advocate Socialist policy to remedy inequality, stop piddling around with inconsistent feel-good ideas about ex post facto redistribution and take your ideas to their logical conclusion. Unless, of course, that reveals your moral and just ideals to be unacceptably immoral and unjust.