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Jim Kalb
Administrator
5/21/2002
08:03:28
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 Subject: Functions of government
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What should they be?
American right-wingers usually take a much more restrictive view than the Europeans on this point. I think part of the reason is that "big government" to Americans means "big Federal government," which has somewhat the significance "big active EU bureaucracy" would have in Europe.
I suppose another difference is that to the extent American government is expressive rather than functional what it expresses is not particular national tradition so much as Enlightenment ideals, and the more you can get Enlightenment ideals to leave you alone the better.
So anyway it seems to me that in America traditionalism has to involve an effort to restrict the functions of government, and so common cause on many issues with libertarians even though the fit is far from perfect. In Europe it may make more sense to try to revive the state as expressive of nation, religion and so on, although from a distance I'm doubtful that can be a success.
Ideas? Comments? Specific situations?
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John
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5/21/2002
13:14:03
| RE: Functions of government
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Three Functions of National Gov't:
1-National defence, foreign policy, border patrol & immigration, and warmaking.
2-Criminal law & enforcement: Punishment of murderers and other rogues, etc.
3-Use of tarrifs (or other taxes) to collect the monies necessary to fund the above.
Basically, it would be like cutting down the Federal government to the Justice, War, and State Departments to lessen the power of the Federal gov't while upholding what it should be doing. Also, limiting the gov't to these realms would enable people to have more of their own money to spend on charitable organizations and other institutions.
This may be slightly off topic:
To work with the Constitution, perhaps another check on the power of the Supreme Court. Perhaps more oversight (from State legislatures or whathaveyou) of the Court to act as a balance to its sometimes confusing and often arbitrary power. This, of course, would be relatively easy to sell to mainstream parties due to the last Presidential election and the abortion and medicinal marijuana issues. Perhaps not repealing the 14th Ammendment directly (one does not want to look "pro-slavery") but effectively doing so via an ammendment could be one way to accomplish this goal.
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Jim Kalb
Administrator
5/21/2002
14:31:44
| RE: Functions of government
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Still, I'm bothered by Eamon Sweeney's point in the other thread. The federal government is responsible for national defense and so necessarily claims our life-and-death loyalty. That means it has to stand for something higher than utilitarian concerns. So the approach can't simply be one of reducing its significance in as many ways as possible (although I do believe in radically cutting down on what it does). There has to be something positive as well.
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John
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5/23/2002
01:46:12
| RE: Functions of government
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"That means it has to stand for something higher than utilitarian concerns."
Hrmm... a difficult question... but doesn't tradition also often act as a bulwark for
utilitarian concerns (in the abstract, of course)? And didn't St. Thomas Aquinas consider defending one's community in war an act of charity?
If the government should stand for something more than utilitarian concerns (which are of course, open to interpretation by all), what should that be?
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Jim Kalb
Administrator
5/23/2002
08:41:02
| RE: Functions of government
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Tradition does support utilitarian concerns, and charity often involves looking out for those concerns, but it doesn't follow that all those things are the same.
I suppose I'm asking whether the secular state makes sense. Take Arlington National Cemetery, or the flag, or any other patriotic symbol. They're supposed to correspond somehow to complete sacrifice of one's own interests. How can they do that if the state is based solely on secular concerns, if they're really just symbols of physical security, economic prosperity, the right to do what you feel like doing and so on?
Or take punishment of crime. How can you make sense of that from a purely secular perspective? Is locking a man up in a cage justified simply because it's useful to do so?
So it seems to me the state is necessarily based on some sort of religious understanding of the world and man's place in it, of ethical demands that transcend all practical interests, and government necessarily expresses that understanding in various ways. That is in fact a function of government - it couldn't perform its other functions if it didn't carry it out.
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Eamon Sweeney
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5/24/2002
07:13:15
| RE: Functions of government
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My main problemn with the E.U. is not business regulation but them enforcing abortion,sexual perversion,contraception on to Christian countries like Ireland and Greece.Also their mis planned and rude attempt to end my nation's long mono-racial existence I belive will end in tragedy.Again, I have no intention of dying for Israel.
In terms of the super-state as it is now I agree that it needs majior re-working, but I trust big Capitial less than I do big goverment.The guild system seems to me the best balance between the individual, the community and both their spiritual aswell as material needs.Corporative states like Salazar's Portugal or even modern day Libiya would be examples of such principles working in the modern world.
The main thing should be the defense of cultural and spiritual values aganist they who would reduce everything to a price and deny the soul ;
Is the difference of view less between European and American views than between Catholic and Protestant ones?
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Jim Kalb
Administrator
5/24/2002
08:18:27
| RE: Functions of government
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But the business regulation and social welfare schemes can't be separated from the sexual and ethnic restructuring. All of them have to do with an attempt to turn the world into a single rational supervised system whose substantive good is economic security and prosperity and whose moral ideal is equality. That's the goal modern thought and managerial elites naturally favor.
Give those elites the power to supervise the economic system in a comprehensive rational way - create the EU or even the modern welfare state - and the supervision will extend to personnel, training, social relations and business environment, and therefore to education, family policy, migration of workers and in fact all aspects of society. All those things will be reconfigured in the interests of rational economic management, which means among other things that institutions like the traditional family and ethnic loyalties will be abolished, because they work on different and sometimes adverse principles.
To me it appears more a European/American than Catholic/Protestant opposition. It appears at least from a distance that the Europeans are convinced everything can be managed, the Protestants (e.g., the Scandinavian countries) as much as any. Perhaps the Catholic/Protestant distinction is this: Catholic thought presumes that there is no single ultimate social manager, because institutional authority is divided between Church and State. It therefore doesn't have to be as concerned with limitation of state power or preservation of popular liberties. In Protestant countries the church is either an arm of the state or else a private enterprise. In either case limitation of the state becomes a very serious matter.
It seems to me today we're more in the Protestant than the Catholic situation. The things you've mentioned - Chesterton, the guild system - all require ultimately that there be no general social management, that institutions be independent and sovereign within certain domains. The question is how to bring that about. I don't think that today we can depend on an authoritative universal church to keep the state from becoming overly powerful and reducing everything else to strict subordination. We need some more definite limitation on state power.
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John Bakas
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6/29/2002
16:50:19
| RE: Functions of government
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ESTABLISHMENT OF RELIGION AND THE PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE CASE
My wife and I have been discussing the Ninth Circuits pledge decision, and I told her that the Ninth Circuits opinion is based on a widely held, but faulty interpretation of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. That faulty interpretation includes the notions that no law can advance or inhibit religion, or endorse religion.
The writers of the First Amendment knew the difference between 1) laws respecting an establishment of religion, and 2) laws respecting religion. If they had wanted to state that Congress could not pass laws that advanced religion, or endorsed religion, they would have said so. They knew what functions of government they wished to bestow and restrict.
Courts should begin any analysis of the First Amendment by discussing an establishment of religion. The Ninth Circuit never did, in fact the only time the Ninth Circuit even mentioned the term that obviously controls the issue in the case was the one time the court quoted the First Amendment. In the rest of the opinion, the court never used the phrase. Instead, the court spent all of its analysis on such terms as advance religion or endorse religion or participate in religion, or being neutral with respect to religion. By saying the First Amendment prohibits one thing when it actually prohibits something else, it is easy to achieve virtually any result. For example, if I could say the First Amendment prohibited Congress from passing any law respecting any tax on John Bakas, Wow, I could ...... well, you get the picture.
However, all of the above is an aside, actually. As part of my discussion with my intelligent wife, I said that we had heard little in the media about the source of the Ninth Circuits error the deliberate reformulation of the First Amendment into something never stated by those who wrote it. So, I started to do some Internet research. I immediately found your excellent article on an establishment of religion. Your work is super. It is well organized, thorough, and cogent. The additional references are comprehensive and easy to review. Thank you very much.
It is too bad the Ninth Circuit did not read your article too. You provided all the relevant considerations that would have led them to the truth and the constitutionality of the pledge.
(I hope this is the proper place to post this message, if not please delete or more as you see fit.)
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Jim Kalb
Administrator
6/29/2002
17:10:51
| RE: Functions of government
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Thanks for the note! If someone wants to say my work is super he can post wherever he wants ...
I agree the courts have inflated the term "establishment" beyond reason. As Robert Bork points out, they've landed themselves in a positon in which in some cases if the government does X it's establishing religion and if it does not-X then under other Supreme Court decisions it's violating free exercise by not making reasonable accommodations to religious expression.
Another point you could make is that the purpose of the First Amendment religion clauses was to keep the federal government out of the religion business, which included interference with state religious establishments. Those clauses weren't applied to the states until the mid-20th century. So the Ninth Circuit decision was itself federal action of the very kind the First Amendment was designed to prevent.
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