Thomas Sowell on The Anointed and Respectable Conservatism

You'll forgive the rather harsh assessment of both left-liberalism and conservatism. But in this video, Thomas Sowell really captures a) what's wrong with the liberal left and b) the only respectable form of conservatism. 

First, the liberal left -- "The Anointed" -- is concerned with grand ideas about what the world should be like. Sowell calls this the “unconstrained vision.” In his landmark Conflict of Visions, Sowell writes:

Without the underlying assumption that man's deliberate reason is too limited to undertake comprehensive social planning, an entirely different set of conclusions emerges in field after field. If, for example, effective rational planning and direct control of an entire economic system is possible, then it is clearly more efficient to reach desired results directly in this way, rather than as the end result of circuitous and uncontrolled processes. 

The left-liberal rarely asks what sorts of trade-offs are required to get to the vision they've espoused. Instead they are caught up in the moral high ground their unconstrained vision affords them. “What a vision may offer, and what the prevailing vision of our time emphatically does offer,” writes Sowell, “is a special state of grace for those who believe in it. Those who accept this vision are deemed to be not merely factually correct but morally on a higher plane.” They are the Anointed. Only they have replaced God with Government.

At the same time, however, Sowell outlines the only respectable form of conservatism -- at least from the point of view of this scribbler. That conservatism is based on three ideas: 1) That human beings are fundamentally flawed (i.e. not perfectible), 2) that all actions require trade-offs and 3) that looking for the best "trade-offs" ought to be a largely decentralized process.

Other forms of conservatism are less respectable because they manage to package in versions of the unconstrained vision -- only for the conservative's pet issues (which are usually social issues). In other words, practical application of Sowell's three questions in the video above are pretty much the long and short of any respectible method of looking at any issue through a conservative lens -- at least as Sowell defines it. 

Comments

[Shops UK]

I like what you guys are up too. Such clever work and coverage! Keep up the superb works guys I've added you guys to our blogroll.