I Am Not Hamlet

Phillip Blond is talking about Britain, but his point could be taken here in America. In essence, the left needs a conservative account of society in order to create the vibrant civic space through which its goals can be most ably achieved.  At the same time, true conservatism needs to recognise crushing economic inequality and its harmful effects on precisely those institutions which conservatives instinctively cherish.  This requires dedication to equity and fairness, to distributed wealth and asset ownership, as much as to inherited culture and ethical traditions.  Social harmony does not flow from centrally enforced unity, and social justice does not spring unaided from libertarian indifference.  If the health of society is the common goal, then society itself must be valued higher than both state and market. --From Red Tory 

There are but three social arrangements which can replace Capitalism: Slavery, Socialism, and Property.                                                                                                 --Hilaire Belloc                                                   ...

      During breakfast today I was reading an excerpt from a play in The New York Times Magazine (I know, I was a day behind and read Saturday's edition yesterday) entitled Rust .  The play, written by a professor at Grand Valley State University, here in Michigan, is a nonfiction drama about the closing of a GM plant in Wyoming, MI.  The play itself sounds interesting and I enjoyed the excerpt, but what caught my eye was something a character said.  The character is "Academic" and plays a historian and guide to the playwright, also a character.  He is explaining the rise of the automobile factories and the effect of the car on American culture.  He says, "Women became independent, they go from producers of food and clothing to consumers of food and clothing."  This was meant as an earnest, praiseworthy point.     I would counter with "How far we've fallen."  To say that a woman (or a man) is independent because she has m...

From "America and Foreign Trade" by James Muir Waller from Who Owns America? published 1936. The idea that foreign trade is necessary or even desirable for our political and economic well-being should be abandoned.  We should look solely to the domestic market, the world's largest and richest, for a place to sell the products of our fields and factories.  We should move quickly toward creating a completely self-contained national economy as the best cornerstone on which to build a safe and permanent American prosperity, untouched by the political and economic turmoil of the outside world.  The best method to bring about self-sufficiency would be to devise immediately a program of protection for all manufactured articles and raw commodities that can be produced in the United States, even if the cost here is very much greater than abroad.  These higher costs may result from unfavorable natural factors such as soil, climate, and mineral resources, as well as from hig...