An Answer and a Question
This story, in two paragraphs, explains why I am no longer a Libertarian, and why I have never been a Leftist.
… a decision by the Department of Health and Human Services in late September to end funding to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to help victims of human trafficking, or modern-day slavery. The church group had overseen nationwide services to victims since 2006 but was denied a new grant in favor of three other groups.
The bishops organization, in line with the church’s teachings, had refused to refer trafficking victims for contraceptives or abortion. The American Civil Liberties Union sued, and HHS officials said they made a policy decision to award the grants to agencies that would refer women for those services.
[…] On the trafficking contract, senior political appointees at HHS awarded the new grants to the bishops’ competitors despite a recommendation from career staffers that the bishops be funded based on scores by an independent review board, according to federal officials and internal HHS documents.
I am no longer a Libertarian because under Libertarian political theory it is morally wrong to give taxpayer dollars to a Catholic charity to help the victims of slavery.
Libertarians are so in love with liberty that they will not help slaves.
I have never been a Leftist because I have always been a man of logic, reason as cold and clear and shockingly clean as the streams of water from an Alpine peak. Logically, reality is real and symbols only refer to reality. When the symbols are substituted for reality, that it is a fetish.
Leftists would prefer victims of slavery not to be helped if they cannot be given abortions and condoms, and the other things Leftist fetishize as symbols of freedom, but which are either indifferent to freedom or antithetical to it. (Certainly the dead baby is not free except in the most cynical sense of the word: free of life.)
Leftists are so in love with liberty that they prefer slavery to life itself. They would rather we not help the slave at all, if we will not help her kill her child.
To the Left, it is better than the mother remain a slave than that she not be helped to kill her baby in the womb. Rather than a free mother and living child, they would prefer slavery, suffering and death.
Here I am assuming some loss of services, that is, by turning the charitable funds over to someone an independent board finds to be less efficient, in effect, the Administration is provided less aid to the victims. Whatever that percentage is, those victims who otherwise would have received aid, now will not, in order to pay for the moral preening of the ACLU.
I understand what the ACLU gets out of it: it is an act of masturbation. They get momentary pleasure to boost their self-regard. I do not see what the slaves get out of it.
We Christians made the abolition of slavery possible, by presenting the pagan world with a worldview that elevated the value of the meek and weak and humble to a sacred thing; we then eliminated slavery first throughout the European continent, and then worldwide.
The credit is solely our own — before the coming of the White Man, there were no abolitionist or antislavery societies among the Confucian, Taoist, Mohammedan, Hindu, or Buddhist, or anywhere in the Americas, nor any sentiment or philosophy native to those lands which could have supported such a thing, or even imagined it.
Where Christianity is triumphant, human liberty is possible. Where Christianity fails, as in communist nations, or in the Dar al-Islam, the House of Submission, slavery slowly or swiftly returns.
There is nothing akin to the abolition of slavery in history: a worldwide elimination of a universal and prehistorical wrong in defiance of economic and cultural reasons, purely for reasons of moral sentiment.
We have no objection to using the institutions of government and using institutional religion to accomplish this single monumental triumph of the moral evolution of mankind. Libertarians, because they object to all but the minimal institutions of government, and Liberals, because they worship evil, pardon me, because they object to binding their conscience in obedience to an objective law, and on those grounds object to institutional religion, would both prevent taxpayer funding of a Catholic charity that helps freed slaves.
Here is my question to Liberals and Libertarians and all modern ideologues who say they love liberty: What have you done to make men free?
Aside from getting in our way, I mean.
Here is my question to Catholics: a small cadre of revolutionaries in Russia overthrew the government by force. They changed the society down to the roots and changed everything. In a democracy, there is never a need to overthrow anyone by force, merely to persuade the majority by force of reason.
We Catholics far outnumber the smelly Bolsheviks, and we have angels and archangels to do battle for us. We have a large, ancient, and well organized international organization: a Church against which the gates of Hell cannot prevail.
And yet Catholics vote for, support, fund, and defend politicians loyal to abortion, to contraception, to sexual perversion, and to all the bogus salvific ideologies of an Antichrist.
My question to you is the same: What are we doing to make men free?
Are we to be less zealous in saving mankind as the Bolsheviks were in enslaving?
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
