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For most Americans, Independence Day is an opportunity to celebrate those American founders who risked their lives and their fortunes in a daring experiment in liberty. Such celebration is a form of gratitude, and all gratitude involves, to some degree, remembrance. So it’s heartening that many Americans, resisting the Progressive lurch of our contemporary politics, are embracing their American citizenship by learning about both the founders and their ideals.

But the ideas on which the American Experiment was based did not spring up ex nihilo in the minds of Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton, Washington, Adams, Jay, et al. They also have a history. And if we are to recover the ideas of the founders, we would do well to recall the foundations of those ideas.

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Image by www.thebirthoffreedom.com.

Jim Wallis announced last week his desire to start a “dialogue” on this question: “Just how Christian is the Tea Party Movement—and the Libertarian political philosophy that lies behind it?”

Of course, Wallis isn’t suggesting that the movement be judged by whether it is explicitly Christian, but rather, by how it measures up to what Wallis refers to as “biblical ethics.”

This is a perfectly reasonable question for a Christian to ask of any political movement. And as it happens, I agree with some of Wallis’s points. Still, Wallis’s attempt at an answer doesn’t inspire confidence that he’s thinking clearly about the relevant issues.

The problem begins immediately. He says he wants to talk about the Tea Party movement, but he identifies it with “Libertarianism,” and even spends a couple of paragraphs talking about Republican Senate Candidate Rand Paul. But Libertarianism, Rand Paul, and the Tea Party movement aren’t all the same things. In fact, strictly speaking, the capital “L” refers to the Libertarian Party rather than the broader philosophy of libertarianism. In any case, the Tea Party movement is a broad, spontaneous movement of citizens concerned about out-of-control spending and lust for power by the federal government. Sure, there are libertarians of various stripes involved in it. But of the half dozen people I know who have attended Tea Party events, not one is a straight-up libertarian. And even casual observation suggests that Tea Parties are not a philosophically homogeneous gathering of Libertarian Party members or philosophical libertarians.

As becomes clear in his piece, however, Wallis is interested in tarring Tea Partiers, so focusing on one libertarian thinker wouldn’t have served his rhetorical purpose. So he constructs an extreme libertarian caricature, attacks that, and then applies it to Tea Parties.

At least he does provide a (tendentious) definition of Libertarianism:

Libertarianism is a political philosophy that holds individual rights as its supreme value and considers government the major obstacle. It tends to be liberal on cultural and moral issues and conservative on fiscal, economic, and foreign policy.

So. How Christian is Tea Party Libertarianism according to this definition? Not very, according to Jim Wallis.

Now I’m not a libertarian, and I am a critic of aspects of the thought of Ayn Rand, but Wallis has so poorly executed his critique that I feel compelled to offer a few words of clarification, if not quite a defense of libertarians.

Wallis lists five fundamental faults with libertarians. Let’s take them one at a time.

First, he says:

The Libertarian enshrinement of individual choice is not the pre-eminent Christian virtue. Emphasizing individual rights at the expense of others violates the common good, a central Christian teaching and tradition. The Christian answer to the question “Are we our brother’s keeper?” is decidedly “Yes.” Jesus tells us that the greatest commandment is to love God and love our neighbor.

This is Wallis’s strongest point. True. Individual choice is not the pre-eminent Christian virtue. But so what? The relevant question is, what principle or principles ought to shape our political and economic life? If defense of individual rights is one of those principles, then it might still have many of the consequences that Libertarians defend.

Moreover, only the most cartoonish Libertarian would argue that individual rights violate the common good. They could just as well argue that the best way to promote the common good is with a rule of law that steadfastly protects individual rights.

Second, he observes:

An anti-government ideology just isn’t biblical. In Romans 13, the apostle Paul (not the Kentucky Senate candidate) describes the role and vocation of government; in addition to the church, government also plays a role in God’s plan and purposes. Preserving the social order, punishing evil and rewarding good, and protecting the common good are all prescribed; we are even instructed to pay taxes for those purposes! Sorry, Tea Party. Of course, debating the size and role of government is always a fair and good discussion, and most of us would prefer smart and effective to “big” or “small” government.

Revelation 13 depicts the state as a totalitarian beast—a metaphor for Rome, which was persecuting the Christians. This passage serves as a clear warning about the abuse of governmental power. But a power-hungry government is clearly an aberration and violation of the proper role of government in protecting its citizens and upholding the demands of fairness and justice. To disparage government per se—to see government as the central problem in society—is simply not a biblical position.

Wallis’s points about Romans 13 and Revelation 13 are spot-on. The Christian view of government (to generalize) is that it has legitimate but limited powers, and that it can become a totalitarian beast. But again, it would be easy for a Libertarian and even easier for a Tea Partier to agree with these points. One can think that the federal government, which has grown exponentially in size and power in the last few decades, is out-of-control, without being opposed to government per se.

Third, he claims:

The Libertarians’ supreme confidence in the market is not consistent with a biblical view of human nature and sin.

It is here that Wallis’s argument really falls apart. The universality of human sin is one of the best arguments in favor of a free market, which is one of the best checks on extreme concentrations of power and is perhaps the best way we’ve discovered of channeling human sinfulness into socially beneficial outcomes. Every one of Wallis’s suggestions for “correcting” the market involves increasing the power of the federal government, which is already one of the most powerful entities (if not the most powerful entity) on the planet. Do federal employees get an exemption from the Fall in Wallis’s theology?

Fourth, he says:

The Libertarian preference for the strong over the weak is decidedly un-Christian.

This is the weirdest of Wallis’s complaints. The whole drift of Libertarianism is to maximize the freedom and rights of individuals, to resist and prevent centralizations of power, in government especially, but also in big business, which tends to collude with the government and mobs, which can do violence to individuals and minorities of all sorts. As David Boaz explains it, libertarianism is committed to the non-aggression ethic: “No one has the right to initiate aggression against the person or property of anyone else.” One could raise criticisms against this idea, but it’s beyond me how Wallis could refer to this as a preference for the strong over the weak.

And fifth, he claims:

Finally, I am just going to say it. There is something wrong with a political movement like the Tea Party which is almost all white. Does that mean every member of the Tea Party is racist? Likely not. But is an undercurrent of white resentment part of the Tea Party ethos, and would there even be a Tea Party if the president of the United States weren’t the first black man to occupy that office? It’s time we had some honest answers to that question. And as far as I can tell, Libertarianism has never been much of a multi-cultural movement. Need I say that racism—overt, implied, or even subtle—is not a Christian virtue.

Here we reach the nadir of Wallis’s argument. It’s also the point where an editor at Sojourners should have intervened. Wallis has been talking about Libertarianism as he defines it. Now he tells us that because there are lots of white people at these Tea Parties, therefore “an undercurrent of white resentment” is “part of the Tea Party ethos.” And this is the result, apparently, of racist backlash against a black man now occupying the White House.

What evidence does Wallis cite for these claims? None. What logical connection is there between Libertarian ideas and the shade of the skin of the person defending the ideas? None. (Although I hate even to raise the point, Wallis is apparently unfamiliar with two of the most prominent defenders of broadly libertarian ideas—Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell.)

Although it’s often difficult to apply what Wallis calls a “biblical ethic” to specific policy issues, there’s one thing of which I am quite certain. Neither logical non sequiturs nor baseless attacks on the motives of others is part of that ethic.

Image by World Economic Forum.

Last week I mentioned the Harvard Business Review debate on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), called What Does Business Owe the World? This week, Harvard Business Review published my take on the issue, “In Defense of the Unabashedly Profitable.”

I intended my argument as a via media between Milton Friedman’s famous argument that the only responsibility a corporation had was to make a profit, and the view of what we might call the “CSR Left.” That’s the view that corporations have all sorts of “social” responsibilities that are contrary to their economic interests and so ought to be imposed upon them by the state, and these responsibilities just happen to correspond to the various political preferences of the Left.

So here’s how I start:

A business is not a family or a charity or a government. It has a specific social function with a specific purpose, which implies specific duties. One of its responsibilities — its duties — is to make a profit. I know that Milton Friedman argued famously in 1970 that profit-maximizing was the only responsibility of executives, and that’s an overstatement.

Still, think about it.

The opposite of profit is loss. Unprofitable companies disappear, along with whatever goods, services, and jobs that they provided. If executives act willfully against their responsibility to seek and make a profit, they will have failed in one of their primary duties.

We all have other moral responsibilities, and that applies to corporate executives too. Their moral responsibilities, by extension, apply to their corporations (which are not themselves agents with responsibilities).

But, perhaps the title was distracting, because one respondent, Michael Palmer, misunderstood me at several crucial points. He seemed to think I was agreeing with Friedman and denying that corporations have responsibilities. My appeal to “duties” rather than “responsibilities” also seemed to be confusing, although I use the words more or less as synonyms.

In any case, my basic point is that a primary duty/responsibility of corporations—indeed, one of their unique functions—is to create economic value and so derivatively to be profitable. But I don’t claim that that is a corporation’s only responsibility.

Some critics of CSR have objected that only individuals and not corporations can have responsibilities. I noted that they, too, have a point. Corporations are not strictly speaking agents with responsibilities. They’re not conscious, they don’t pursue purposes or have intentions. Nevertheless, we still rightly apply responsibilities to corporations by extending the responsibilities of the relevant agents involved—such as corporate executives.

And for that reason, we ought to understand the other responsibilities that corporations have in terms of the good, old-fashioned moral responsibilities that apply to all of us as individual moral agents:

The solution . . . will lie . . . in carefully defining real duties, including the duty of businesses to seek profit; and then making sure these duties are aligned properly with corporate leaders’ other basic duties to their fellow human beings.

What we should esteem, in other words, are businesses that avoid lying, cheating, stealing, or otherwise abusing the public trust, and at the same time are robustly and unabashedly profitable.

Perhaps there’s something wrong with my argument; but I hope it’s clear that I do think corporations have moral responsibilities. I just think a lot of the debate about “corporate social responsibility” has gotten muddled by bad politics and bad moral reasoning.

Image by BigBeaks.

Since the 1970s, business ethics has talked about this thing called “corporate social responsibility,” which implies that corporations have responsibilities to society, the public good, and so forth, over and above their well-defined business interests. Milton Friedman disputed this idea early on. In 1970, he wrote a famous article in the New York Times Magazine arguing that the only responsibility a business had was to make a profit. But most people suspect that there’s more to the story. We all have various responsibilities to others, after all, and these are not suspended when we enter our place of business.

But the question of corporate responsibility continues to vex thoughtful analysts. Unfortunately, in the intervening years, “corporate social responsibility” has too often become a euphemism for various fashionable left-wing causes, and a justification for all manner of political regulation of business on behalf of societal “stakeholders” (as distinct from shareholders). These causes are rarely in the economic interest of the corporations. Companies well-attuned to cultural fashion have figured out how to appear to conform to the ever-changing norms of corporate social responsibility, but not actually to do so. And such duplicity, in turn, gives activists incentive to call for greater government regulation over business, always in the name of society’s interests.

In an article in the April 2010 issue of Harvard Business Review called “Leadership in an Age of Transparency,” Christopher Meyer and Julia Kirby propose a way to think of corporate social responsibility in a way that makes economic sense. Their basic proposal is that companies begin to think of ways to internalize the detectible, negative “externalities” of their activity. Externalities are side effects of a business transaction that are not adequately represented in the economic exchange. The classic example is pollution, which cost innocent bystanders who do not benefit from the production that gives rise to the pollution. Meyer and Kirby give several examples of successful corporations such as Apple who have learned to anticipate and internalize the externalities of their work.

The details are complicated and controversial, so Harvard Business Review has set up a blog forum for a diverse group of thinkers to weigh in on Meyer and Kirby’s proposal, called “What Does Business Owe the World?”

My own view is that the corporate social responsibility dilemma can only be resolved by first recognizing that businesses are distinct social institutions with specific responsibilities. One of their key social responsibilities is to create value, especially economic value. A sign of success in that regard is profitability.

Their other responsibilities derive, in turn, from the basic moral responsibilities we all have to others, and should not be defined as a grab bag of left-wing goodies that make no economic sense. If we define corporations’ other “social responsibilities” so that they conflict with their key economic responsibilities, we put them in the impossible situation of having to violate one responsibility in favor of another. Instead, we should understand a corporation’s social responsibility as including the universal demands of the rule of law (don’t lie, don’t steal, don’t defraud, etc.) as their particular responsibility to create economic value. Regulations that make it impossible for a company to do all these things, then, are bad regulations.

American Catholics are beginning to notice a trend: Many young priests fresh out of seminary seem to be more conservative, and more interested in preserving the tradition, than many older priests who came of age in the 1960s. Using the 1960s reforms of Vatican II as a pretense, many priests imbibed the heady spirit of the age, and never managed to sober up.

It seemed so hip and cutting-edge at the time. Liberal priests and religious orders claimed they were the wave of the future; but much of the ideological residue of that decade now looks almost quaint. Swiss theologian (and dissenter) Father Hans Küng has long been portrayed by sympathizers as riding the crest of the wave. He has been telling the Vatican for decades what it needs to do to become relevant to a modern age. He is one of the only contemporary Catholic theologians that I was ever assigned in (Protestant) seminary.

In an open letter to Catholic bishops in April, Küng offered an unhinged attack on Pope Benedict, while reiterating his calls for all the same left-wing shibboleths he’s been advocating for 40 years. Sam Gregg keys in a single of his many claims—the overpopulation myth:

There was, however, one claim in Küng’s letter worth further scrutiny. This was his assertion that Africa—and, by extension, the developing world—is suffering from an “over-population” problem, and that, by implication, Catholicism’s 2,000 years of unbroken teaching on the subject of contraception is dooming millions to poverty and starvation.

It’s hardly a secret that many people disagree with Catholicism’s position on contraception. But Küng’s claim of an “overpopulation” problem in the developing world shows just how much he remains an unreconstructed creature of the 1960s.

Gregg points out that the Malthusian myth of overpopulation is based on a false and anti-Christian view of human persons as mere consumers, rather than as creators and innovators. Küng’s view is just the opposite of Pope Benedict:

In his 2009 social encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, Benedict XVI—the primary target of Küng’s most recent public venting—spelled out the economic logic of a declining birth-rate. “The decline in births,” the pope wrote, “falling at times beneath the so-called ‘replacement level,’ also puts a strain on social welfare systems, increases their cost, eats into savings and hence the financial resources needed for investment, reduces the availability of qualified labourers, and narrows the ‘brain pool’ upon which nations can draw for their needs” (CV 44).

In this regard, Pope Benedict shows himself as not only more prescient than Hans Küng in terms of helping Catholicism avoid the fate of those Christian communities that have embraced the vacuity and incoherence of liberal Christianity. He’s also a better economist.

In fact, as a Christian theologian, Küng ought to be among the first to realize that human beings don’t just consume; under the right conditions, they also create. But, alas, his view of the world seems to be far more a product of the ’60s orthodoxy, rather than Catholic orthodoxy.

To see why reducing the population wouldn’t improve the lives of the poor, check out this video short by the Population Research Institute (h/t to John Couretas).

I’m pleased to announce that my book Money, Greed, and God has just been released in paperback. So if you were holding out until the paperback came out, you can order it now. My tentative title for the book had been The Christian Case for Capitalism. I had even referred to it that way for a couple of years while I was working on it. But the publisher came up with Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism Is the Solution and Not the Problem. I have friends who still think my original idea is preferable, but I’m not so sure. I’ve haven’t gotten a sense that anyone has been confused about the title. The only negative effect is that a few wags have suggested that “Money, Greed, and God” sounds like the platform for the Republican Party. I gotta admit, that’s pretty funny.

In any case, the more controversial question has been, why did I choose to defend something called “capitalism”? Wouldn’t it have been better to put “free enterprise” or “free market” in the title? I do have some thoughts about that, which I’ll write about later. But I should say that I was quite intentional in defending something called “capitalism.”

This past weekend, I spoke to a men’s group at a church in New York and was asked about the role of greed in the financial crisis. I’m frequently asked this question. I said, as I always say, that greed is present wherever there are human beings because of the fall, so of course greed was involved. Nevertheless, I didn’t think it provided an especially insightful explanation of why the crisis happened. After all, I doubt the guys in suits on Wall Street are greedier now than they were 10 or 20 years ago.  I went on to summarize some of things that Peter Wallison has explained so well here over the last several months.

My questioner objected to my answer, and seemed to think that I was implying that bankers and traders weren’t greedy. My impression was that the only satisfactory answer would have been: “Yes, the whole thing was caused by a cabal of capitalists in New York City, because they were greedy.”

Unfortunately, there’s a lot of bad moralizing from religious leaders on this matter, and its main function is to provide theological cover for sloppy thinking when it comes to financial regulation. At Acton’s Powerblog, John Couretas discusses Jim Wallis’s recent reflection on the subject.

Wallis talks about Wall Street financiers who come to him with feelings of guilt for the “greed,” “recklessness,” and the harm caused by the financial crisis. In other words, there are sinners on Wall Street. Wow. What a surprise.

But of course, this is merely a pretense for Wallis to provide, not the good news, but partisan talking points on financial regulation. Alas, for serious moral and economic analysis, Couretas must turn to . . . economist Russ Roberts. In “Gambling with Other People’s Money,” Roberts, too, argues that the problem with the financial crisis is at least partly moral, and it implicates Wall Street. But the core of the problem isn’t mere greed, but perverted incentives which channel greed, ambition, and the legitimate pursuit of financial gain into disastrous large-scale behavior:

How did this happen? Whose fault was it? Some blame capitalism for being inherently unstable. Some blame Wall Street for its greed, hubris, and stupidity. But greed, hubris, and stupidity are always with us. What changed in recent years that created such a destructive set of decisions that culminated in the collapse of the housing market and the financial system?

In this paper, I argue that public-policy decisions have perverted the incentives that naturally create stability in financial markets and the market for housing. Over the last three decades, government policy has coddled creditors, reducing the risk they face from financing bad investments. Not surprisingly, this encouraged risky investments financed by borrowed money. The increasing use of debt mixed with housing policy, monetary policy, and tax policy crippled the housing market and the financial sector. Wall Street is not blameless in this debacle. It lobbied for the policy decisions that created the mess.

In the United States we like to believe we are a capitalist society based on individual responsibility. But we are what we do. Not what we say we are. Not what we wish to be. But what we do. And what we do in the United States is make it easy to gamble with other people’s money—particularly borrowed money—by making sure that almost everybody who makes bad loans gets his money back anyway. The financial crisis of 2008 was a natural result of these perverse incentives. We must return to the natural incentives of profit and loss if we want to prevent future crises.

Once again, insightful analysis requires not reflexive moral indignation, but clear moral categories coupled with economic good sense. Unfortunately, demagoguery rather than discernment seems to be more fashionable.

Image by epicharmus.

At Crosswalk, Jim Tonkowich writes about a new effort by an organization called the Statue of Responsibility Foundation, which seeks to build a companion for the Statue of Liberty in some West Coast city. Here’s how the foundation describes its purpose:

The Statue of Liberty has served as a symbol of liberty, both in America and throughout the world. Its counterpart, the Statue of Responsibility, will likewise serve as a symbol—a visible representation and call to responsibility—both in America and abroad. These two principles—liberty and responsibility—when linked together, will help engender and secure freedom for the present generation, and for generations yet unborn, wherever a thirst for freedom exists. Only by balancing Liberty with Responsibility can Freedom be sustained.

This sounds reasonable. Since Seattle (where I live) is one of the potential sites for this $300 million statue, I don’t want to say anything to pour cold water on the idea. Still, it’s a little depressing, as Tonkowich notes, that such a strong visual reminder would be necessary. But, unfortunately, liberty in the American founders’ sense of ordered liberty has gotten confused with a debased sense of “freedom,” which means, basically, getting to do what you want to do.

That’s not at all what the founders, or the great thinkers in the Judeo-Christian tradition, meant by liberty. They understood that liberty required and presupposed rule of law and self-restraint, in which people are then free to do what they ought to do, not merely what they want to do. A popular illustration of ordered liberty is playing a musical instrument. If you don’t know how to read music, you may be “free” to sit down and bang on the keys of a piano. But it is only the person who has learned to read music, and who been trained in the discipline of playing, who is truly free to play beautiful music. That is what philosophers sometimes call “freedom for excellence,” and it is that sense of “freedom” or “liberty” for which the founders fought.

But if we can’t manage to remember that more robust sense of liberty, then maybe we need two statues.

Image by Kenneth Linge.

I read USA Today whenever I’m in a hotel, and was pleased to see a major piece on, of all things, the debate and craze over raw milk. This is milk that has not been pasteurized, which is a heating process that kills dangerous pathogens (if any are around), but also, according to fans of raw milk, degrades certain nutritional benefits. So, in defiance of the advice of all the official scientific and medical groups, they go to great lengths to get raw milk, which is actually illegal in most states except for limited personal use. There is now a website designed to provide a reasonably balanced approach to the debate.

I have no opinion on this subject. What I do know is that raw milk enthusiasm, like other “crunchy con” issues, defies a lot of simplistic social analysis. To the casual observer, this looks like a typical lefty, granola, anti-business cause. But, as it happens, there are lots of people on the “left” and “right” who are into raw milk. I know this from direct experience, perhaps because I live in Seattle and interact with not only your typical lefties, but also, say, ultraconservative homeschooling Catholics with a fondness for organic food. Any really serious analysis of American society somehow has to accommodate this dimension. I grappled with it a bit in chapter seven of Money, Greed, and God, but I felt like I barely scratched the surface.

Much to my surprise, the reporter for USA Today, Elizabeth Weise, reports on this crossover appeal of raw milk. She even provides a quotation from a guy named Bill Marler that would normally end up on the editing room floor because it defies conventional wisdom. He has funded a new website (www.realrawmilkfacts.com), which is “meant to carefully lay out the research on raw milk, without being as dogmatic as government sites that just tell people not to drink it.” Marler observes:

Raw milk is where the right and left come back together. It’s an intersection for the “back to nature” and the “don’t tread on me,” people—they’re the granola tea-partiers.

As it happens, Marler is, ahem, a Seattle-based food safety lawyer.

My own, off-the-cuff observation is that this raw milk phenomenon represents, among other things, a growing skepticism on the left and right toward big government/big business/big science collusion. People are becoming more willing to challenge the official story. This leads to a lot of cranky ideas, of course, but it also suggests, I hope, that Americans naturally counteract political tendencies to over-centralize authority. Perhaps this a positive spin-off of the statist trends in Washington, D.C.