33.
Leo Linbeck III:
Great post, W.
Perhaps faith is the art of tentative
answers.
I’ve always thought that reality is like a a set of nonlinear
partial differential equations, sort of like a much more complex version of the
Navier-Stokes equations. It can’t be solved as-is, so we are all forced to throw
out terms to make the problem tractable. Trying to solve it as-is will simply
drive us crazy.
Thing is, different people throw out different terms, but not
all simplifications are equally valid. Throwing out the wrong term will give you
a really wrong answer. Sure, the problem is solvable, but the answer is not
true. (Kind of a variation on Gödel.)
In the end, then, our world view is
defined by what we ignore. So choosing what to ignore is the art of faith, an
art that relies on both Athens and Jerusalem. But while all answers are indeed
tentative, if we ignore the right terms we never stray too far from the truth.
And that is a comforting thought, especially when we are confronted with
evil.
Cheers,L3
Apr 27, 2009 - 5:37 pm
here is more leo
3. Leo Linbeck III:
Every dysfunctional social movement has, at its core, at least one major misconception. Socialism’s is the perfectibility of human beings. Nazism’s was the superiority of the Aryan people. Juche’s is the infallibility of the Kims.
The current brand of American liberalism believes that a public good is any product or service that can be provided by the government. If the government can provide something, the government should provide it.
This is not the economic definition of a public good. By that definition, a good is a public good if, and only if, it meets both of the following criteria:
1. The marginal cost of providing the product or service is low.2. The marginal cost of excluding someone from the product or service is high.
Goods that meet these criteria must be provided by the government because a private provider could not prevent free riders, therefore has no incentive to produce the goods. Also, because the marginal cost is low, there are significant economies of scale that can make everyone better off if they can be realized.
A classic example of a public good is national defense. If we protect our nation against invasion by a foreign country, and a baby is born, the cost of protecting that additional baby is basically zero. However, the cost of excluding that baby from our security shield is very high.
The fact is that most goods are private goods. There are very few public goods, and even some “traditional” public goods are becoming private goods as technology changes. For instance, roads were once considered a public good, mainly because they didn’t meet the second test (how could you exclude drivers from entering a freeway without slowing down traffic and imposing a very high cost on everyone else?). Now, however, with RFID tags and license plate recognition systems, the cost of keeping people out has dropped dramatically, and probably will continue to drop. This means that roads could eventually become fully privatized.
However, the modern American liberal believes things like health care and education are public goods. But they’re not; it’s pretty cheap and easy to keep people out of hospitals and schools, and the marginal cost of healthcare is pretty high. What they really mean by public goods is that they want the public (ie. the government) to provide them.
It is pretty clear the Framers understood the rarity of public goods, even if they did not have a neat economic definition to go by. That is why they had a set number of enumerated powers which were supposed to limit the scope of the Federal government to only those things that were clearly public goods (national defense, postal service, minting money, diplomacy, etc.). But over the past 80 years, the scope of government has expanded inexorably. Now mortgages are held by some to be goods that must be provided by government. GImme a break.
Barnett is right in that the only way the expanding writ of the Federal Government can be stopped and reversed is by constitutional amendment. Whether the Tea Party movement is the right vehicle for advancing this agenda is open to debate.
But it certainly can’t hurt…
L3
Apr 27, 2009 - 8:34 pm
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