Hi Kevin, On Dec 2, 2011, at 9:20 AM, Kevin Kervick wrote: > Yea, I can buy that but you jumped to the idea that community institutions > are necessarily government. When I read the piece my communitarian > sensibility was thinking the family, little league, churches, the Boys and > Girls Clubs, Cub Scouts, and also government schools. You seem to see a > larger role for government in the developmental landscape than I do. > > As an example of what I believe is wrong. Look at any place where there is > anomie. It is because the government supports and services have grown at the > expense of natural supports.
Um, no. You also see it places like Somalia and post-Saddam Iraq, where government has broken down completely (unless you define anomie very strictly, just to avoid that comparison). This is what i refer to as the Libertarian Blind Spot -- they obsess over areas where there's too much government, but refuse to even admit there exist places with too little government. > I don't think the government is modeling or nurturing much of anything these > days. I completely agree that our current federal government is by-and-large broken, as our most of our states. I also believe that our current corporate/financial structure is largely broken. This doesn't mean that *all* government is bad, any more than it means that *all* corporations are evil. Sure, I agree that any attempt to fix government is short-term in some sense of the word; but as they say, in the long term we are all dead. There are no perfect solutions that will work forever. But there are better solutions that will work for quite a while. And they do NOT just happen "spontaneously"; we have to invent them. That's what God put us on earth to do. I swear, sometimes Libertarians sound like a retread of Rousseau's noble savage: if we only didn't have all the trappings of civilization, how wise and noble people we would all be! -- Ernie P. > > Kevin > > Hi Kevin, >> Community institutions should nurture responsibility and fairness. >> >> This ethos is not an immutable genetic property, which can blithely be taken >> for granted. It’s a precious social construct, which can be undermined and >> degraded. >> > Exactly! Responsibility is not innate, it is something we learn socially by > example. We need Lean Government that models and nurtures responsibility. > Not a Big government that tries to be responsible for everything, nor a Small > government that is responsible for nothing. The former encourages > irresponsibility, the latter fails to discourage it > > E > > -- > Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community > <[email protected]> > Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism > Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org > > -- > Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community > <[email protected]> > Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism > Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
