Does Marc Barnes like money?
Money makes you more predictable, less creative, and more controllable. Surprise, surprise, Marc Barnes and Jacob Imam still don't like money. But they give you some ideas on how to use it to become more free, creative, and virtuous.
Do not build wealth without virtue of liberality?
Don't build your wealth without building the virtue of liberality: a habit of giving so as to be an icon, rather than an idol, of God. Marc Barnes and Jacob Imam discuss how they each fail at this.
Why is politics all about virtue?
Politics is all about virtue because virtue is all about preparing for Heaven. Read on to see how politics is a theological project (and how the Liberals get it wrong).
Is it possible to govern less?
It has been said that we’d all be a good deal better off if we governed less. This is wrong, for the simple reason that it isn’t possible. Governing less is a form of government as available to overuse and overreach as any other. Inactivity is a choice, and an active one at that. Nero never governed Rome with so hot a passion as when he fiddled while it burned.
How does postliberalism work?
Unlike the ideologies of right and left, postliberalism does not seek to gain control of the institutions of power, of the state and market, but rather to reduce their significance through fostering ways of life that do not rely upon their dominance . Small government is not merely about shrinking the apparatus itself; it is even more about becoming the type of people who are not governed externally but who govern ourselves internally, through charity. Postliberalism would see the creation of smaller communities that do not look to the State for their order. This, and not merely passing legislation, is the path toward small-government and political effectiveness and is simultaneously the path laid down by Christ. The intellectual and the practical are therefore bound together in postliberalism. We must come to understand that we might act and act that we might come to understand.
What is liberalism in the world?
Liberalism reduces the world of human relationships into an abstract world of legal rights, juridical actors, and private property. Liberalism asserts that this abstract world is the real one and that the world of our loves, of our loyalties, of our self-emptying relationships is merely a private world of sentiment, important to us, no doubt, but ultimately without social consequence. Within the “truth” of liberalism, men are ultimately arrayed against each other in a relentless scramble to satisfy individual desires. Within the logic of liberalism, law transforms from a positive participation in the Eternal Law into a negative constraint on our subjective freedom. Instead of an ordering principle of society that demands a response from each of its members, justice becomes a merely technical fairness, arbitrarily decided and distributed by a welfare state. Freedom, which Christianity considers as a gift of God that allows us to become happy, devolves into the mere ability to satisfy our whims and desires. Liberals believe that wealth, which Christianity justified as existing for the sake of the common good, exists for the sake of consumption and power. Ultimately, liberalism denies that the defining characteristic of human societies is their fundamental orientation towards or away from God, by redescribing religion as the mere private choice of peculiar individuals. Liberalism is characterized by the assertion that man has a world apart from God. Postliberalism inverts this vision.
