Don't forget Part XI. Bibliography ;-)
 

LOL ! I knew you'd post that Dan.
 

I thuoght kirk had 10 elements of conservatism not 6. and I've never seen Strauss put among the likes of he and Hayek. He taught very very arcane elkements of philosophy. Quite well in some places, but not exactly the first person that springs to mind. I don't know that he even was a conservative or if he claimed to be.
 

http://www.kirkcenter.org/kirk/ten-principles.html


maybe i misinterpreted what the guy was saying?
 

Hi lester,

I've never read Leo Strauss, just Allan Bloom so I'm not sure. Ask the guy at JP, he has an interesting background.

Lex - if you are reading the comments here today, do you know ?
 

Let me see if I can sort out some confusion...

First I used Mr. Berkowitz's article as a jumping off point as it has sparked discussion. I enjoyed that, but felt something was missing.

Second, the various links to NRO actually go over the Kirk/Hayek/Strauss questions and I found those fascinating. That said, their presence or non-presence in a 'conservative canon' misses a point that they have been used and are the conceptual basis for policy and programs, beyond their guiding principles. That is the old: 'They may not have said they were something, but how they have been used since then places them close to or within the category'.

Thirdly, that these were attempts to deal with how industrialization did or did not impact freedom and personal gain by one's own hand. That is a concept of liberty, so that each may achieve according to their skills and that government has no place in trying to make things even as that is impossible, without the People becoming beholden to and ruled over by government.

That then brings the idea up: what have these idea spaces led to in the way of policy, government and personal liberty as the basis for freedom? The Left has become moribund and near lockstep with a belief that government is the sinecure of all that is good and if government can just be done *right*, then the common man will be granted the goodies of an easy life. Mind you, to do *that* government will be well nigh omnipotent and of gargantuan size and *everything* will be decided by bureaucrats.

On the Right is a stranger set of ideals that government is not the backstop to liberty, that serves as the final way to protect liberty and rights, but that it is being given a role of pure arbiter of what those rights are and what their form is. At its highest level that is also a threat and the move to put all questions to only that level of government by Left and Right is removing accountability at the lowest levels.

To deal with industrialization the Left moved to Marxist ideologies and away from that of the common man having ability to make a good life to the utmost of his abilities. Suddenly workers were a 'class' and it was about 'class warfare' and 'class rights' and a Balkanization of liberty and rights by that conception.

On the Right corporate views moved to put forth that such things as personal industry, liberty and freedom depended upon the greatest sway of companies to have trade that was unencumbered by anything. That is a move to make companies, with their long and near permanent lives, impossible to deal with as a common man. By not putting and social nor societal good to the actions of industry for the Nation, and imputing that this unencumbered trade was freeing to OTHERS then puts the question of: what is the good it is doing for ourselves?

The activity of trade is a human activity and it can and is accountable to these groupings together we call Nations and the societies that make them up. A consciously recognized social burden *for* taxation as a means of having common governance and protecting the societies that make trade possible is something I don't hear much about from conservatives. Nor of what the actual, real limitations of corporations, also constructs of man, should be.

I play with that idea further with this article. Do note that I do utilize the works of John Fonte on Transnationalism both Left (Progressivist) and Right (Capitalist) modes. These two modes have emerged from the stagnant Left and the Right that can only see *good* in trade, even when that means enemies of liberty and freedom can arm and organize cheaply and face no encumberance whatsoever because of that open trade.

This is an area that the Left has had so much say in for decades, that they do feel that they own the ground of corporate accountability via regulation all to themselves. An ancient house, that, with the timbers rotting and the roof falling in. By proposing *only* regulation and taxation, they have left out self-accountability by social threat of ending abusive companies.

The emergent behavior of government and society where such things are left unaddressed because the political elite no longer address citizens, but *groups*, be they ethnic, religious, social, corporate, private... that gets one Balkanization and playing faction against faction to get minimal sustaining coalition that is only a 'majority' for the few milliseconds that it can be held together and then cemented with payouts from the government treasury. Until a better set of bribes come along, that is.

That behavior by the Big Left and Right is one of disenfranchisement and disassociation of the People from their government. It is no mandate from on-high that mere legal fictions need be in perpetuity and be allowed to forever grow in power until they can no longer be held accountable to the People.

And yet the objective to have equal and accountable government to the People, so that society is not threatened by our own creations, is one that I do not hear very much of, these days.

That government is instituted among men to secure liberty and that it derives its powers from the consent of the governed.