Successful lives in the postwar era involved effectively navigating our large institutions and making the most of the benefits they offered. Success in the coming era will increasingly involve effectively navigating a profusion of smaller networks, and a government that wants to help people flourish will need to retool—focusing more on enabling bottom-up, incremental improvements and less on managing top-down, centralized systems. Both empowering individuals and offering them security will look rather different in this era.
Read the whole thing. Even by Yuval’s standards it is a very pointed, articulate post.
He is responding to Charles C.W. Cooke’s provocative case for conservatarianism. I have a few posts scheduled on that same topic. While recognizing differences, Yuval is focused on the affinity between conservatives and libertarians. So is Veronique de Rugy. (The high quality of commentary on Cooke’s work speaks well for the book itself, which I have not read.) My focus instead will be on the tension between the two.
If you want to talk about subsidiarity, isn’t the largest local run institution the school districts? That seems like the largest area of US life that hasn’t been either taken over by the private sector or by the federal gov’t. And yet when I read the minicons and download their book and search for a discussion of common core – the Trojan horse directed at local control of education – I don’t see more than one or two mentions. If you really cared about subsidiarity, you would either be banging the table about school choice or at least loudly opposing common core. I don’t see that. Levin’s post in NRO is long on fuzzy generalities, but anything that uses the words “enabling” and “empowering” sounds like something about to be coopted by big gov’t. Individuals and groups are already enabled and empowered, they don’t need Levin’s help. What they do need is more help opposing the encroachment of big gov’t via things like common core. Every “enabling” and “empowering” innovation will ultimately be coopted by a centralizer. Obamacare is another example of that, same with carbon credits.
Another quote from Levin:
“But in every area of our national life—or at least every area except government—we are witnessing the replacement of such large, centralized institutions by smaller, decentralized networks.”
I don’t know what “national life” delimits, but I’d probably feel good about a decentralization trend. But are we witnessing a net replacement of huge institutions by networks? Has anyone attempted to quantify this?