Thru Walter Olson at Secular Right , I perused this morning the Buckley-hosted Sharon Statement , "adopted in conference at Sharon, Connecticut, on 11 September 1960." Olson wanted to get this point across:
the statement’s choice of language can also be seen as a deft stroke of compromise: the religious conservatives got one definite tip of the hat toward their views, if only of a Sunday-politeness sort, while the large secular contingent (who then, as now, would have tended to skew toward individual-liberty-based versions of conservatism) were in effect assured that to the extent the movement drew on religious sentiment, it would be for the purpose of asserting the individual’s “right to be free from the restrictions of arbitrary force”. That foreshadowed what Grover Norquist was later to call the “leave us alone” coalition that was to hold together for a good long time as a political matter, even if battered almost beyond recognition now.
Well I read the Statement (for the first time, as it happens; 500 heterodox cred points), and I thought, "aside from the obsolete bit about Communism, there’s really only one ‘eternal truth’ in here that’s currently controversial within the right."
That when government interferes with the work of the market economy, it tends to reduce the moral and physical strength of the nation; that when it takes from one man to bestow on another, it diminishes the incentive of the first, the integrity of the second, and the moral autonomy of both[.]
Controversy coming courtesy of (1) the arguably modern and simplistic reduction of any and all kinds, levels, or types of government to "government," and (2) the arguably modern, simplistic, etc. treatment of any and all people, definitively and decisively, as individuals ("one man . . . another").
Rather than go on in my own vein, I’ll throw it open: are these two points or conceptions — the One Government and the One Individual — misleading fabrications? Are they especially secular? Especially modern? No big deal? ???
