In my last post on the Colorado Springs Experiment I wrote about the liberal/conservative divide over municipal services. Liberals, I suggested, failed to face the real economic costs of equal access to municipal services. Conservatives have rejected equality of services as a priority of municipal government. Here I’d like to approach the issues, especially the…
Citizenship
Christian Conservatism, Part II
Grant’s comment on my previous post reminded me of another area of disagreement with conservative Christians that is worth highlighting: I am comfortable with government as an instrument of our communal values and efforts in aiding others. If we as a group of citizenry feel a desire to help “the poor, downtrodden, sick, disadvantaged” (in…
Democracy and Technocrats II
As promised earlier, here are my main concerns with technocratic government, from the new governments in Greece and Italy to the emergency city managers cropping up in the United States. To begin with I would actually like to set aside one argument: that technocrats are often associated with autocratic government. There are plenty of historical…
When Capitalism and Citizenship Collide
Lately I’ve been hearing more references to an old argument: That our present (and growing) income inequality is ok as long as everyone’s life is improving a bit. This is an old conservative saw and one which I find particularly miserly. It’s as though the invention and seeming ubiquitousness of computers made it acceptable for…
Capitalism, Community, and Citizenship
Sunday’s episode of This American Life provided plenty of food for thought. The hour was devoted to stories about various fights about extracting the natural gas from the Marcellus shale below Pennsylvania. Several points in the broadcast led me to reflect upon citizenship, capitalism, and community. During the first act of the program, a politician…
Citizenship as a Foundation
In my last post I suggested that the concept of citizenship could provide the basis for a system of valuing individual worth, a system which was sometimes complimentary with and sometimes constraining of capitalism. In explaining this system of citizenship, I’ll start with the three qualifications I outlined earlier: It does not require a radical…
Capitalism and the Worth of the Individual
I’ve been thinking recently about how our capitalist economic system values individuals. The free enterprise system has been a great benefit to the United States in helping this nation accumulate unprecedented levels of wealth. But that system isn’t very good at distributing wealth equitably according to any standards other than the internal logic of the…