Wednesday, May 14, 2003
RICHARD POSNER ON COMMUNITY AND MARKET
One of my great heroes is former University of Chicago law professor and now federal court of appeals judge Richard Posner. My great torts professor at UT law school, James Treece, used Posner's then-new and unique case book for our first year torts class. The book was unusual at the time because it was among the first published that used the Chicago School "law and economics" approach to teach torts to law students in a systematic way. This book had a profound effect on my philosophical development: Studying from it probably marked the most distinct turning point in my development as a libertarian. (I was saddened recently to discover, when I was developing a curriculum for Chinese lawyers studying law in the U.S., that this book is now out of print.)
This morning, there's this wonderful essay from Judge Posner about the relationship of market and "community" in contemporary America. This is a gem of a piece, that begins by recapping in a most economical (ahem) way how the modern American left's and right's agenda's have tended to cancel each other out to steadily advance the return to classical 19th cenury liberal values in our country. He goes on to say that the only theoretically cogent challenge to this trend has come from what he calls "communitarianism:"
The most sweeping intellectual challenge to our reviving nineteenth-century liberalism comes not from the dwindling band of socialists, with their narrow focus on economic issues, or from the social or religious conservatives, with their narrow focus on abortion, homosexuality, religion, and a handful of other purely "social" issues, but from the communitarians. These political theorists think that liberalism as practiced in the United States today is causing people to lose all sense of communal responsibility. They argue that people are becoming self-preoccupied and thus indifferent to the claims of the community. As evidence they point to our high rates of crime and divorce and out-of-wedlock births; and to our declining rates of participation in communal activities such as voting; and even to the prevalence of commuting and the popularity of television-watching because these (the first especially) tend to be solitary activities.
Judge Posner then goes on to observe some factual matters that give the lie to the communitarian critique of contemporary American society:
Its diagnosis of the nation's ills is empirically off. We know this because in recent years, at the same time that the ties of community as they are imagined by communitarians have been fraying, the ills to which that fraying was thought to give rise have been abating rather than increasing. Crime rates have fallen, as have rates of abortion, teenage births, and births out of wedlock; welfare dependency has declined; racial tension is significantly reduced. The causality is complex; but the communitarians owe us an explanation for why their predictions have been falsified. A possible answer that they will not like is that commodification promotes prosperity and prosperity alleviates social ills. Think of the social and economic implications of abolishing life insurance, which commodifies human life; or re-instituting the draft or imposing other compulsory national service, which would deprive the economy of a significant slice of its productive labor; or ending Social Security and child care subsidies in order to strengthen the family. Not that many communitarians would endorse all these measures, but nothing in their theory tells them when to stop turning back the clock.
Posner concludes with an elegant and powerful point: That the all-volunteer Army is the best example of how the return to classically liberal (i.e. libertarian) values has worked an improvement in the life of the community. I highly recommend this wonderful essay!
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 8:37 AM
