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We Need Real Change

The pope speaks rather forcefully in Laudato Si about our technocratic paradigm of economic and social organization. It doesn't take much awareness of the social doctrine to understand the numerous problems with that paradigm. When your favorite presidential candidate doubles down on the paradigm, it causes chagrin. Apparently, we need fewer philosophers, because they don't produce anything, says Marco Rubio.

On the contrary; philosophers remind us of first principles, and to make arguments, instead of having them. Back to the point, you wish to lead a party whose greatest achievements led human beings out of soul-crushing slavery, but you seem to want to trade one slavery for another. It doesn't do any good   to rescue a man from the socialist state in order to sell him to the corporate one.

The great genius of limited government is in allowing people to find the best solution to a problem themselves. The true conservative does not question the legitimacy of government as such, but makes a prudential judgment about when it's not necessary. If the Republican Party continues to chase macroeconomic indicators and growth in the abstract without reference to the common good, it has nothing to offer the American people.

The real flourishing of people, from the least to the greatest, must be actively sought, not assumed to have taken place. We cannot continue to listen to economists and philosophers who believe the common good is fictitious! We cannot speak endlessly of morality, while believing that markets and transactions within them are morally neutral.

Economic growth is not opposed to community, but it is when sought as the primary goal of economic organization. There are no better technocrats; we have to change our goal.

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