Liberalism Q & A

On the Conversations That Matter podcast, here to talk about liberalism. Once again, this is part five of our series, and when I say our, I mean myself, Ben Crenshaw, and Tymon Klein. Hey, guys. Hey, John.

Thanks for being here. Hey, John. Thanks for keeping us going. This is it. Despite all the things in our personal lives, I know, Ben, you were saying you have all these construction projects and stuff, which is, it's good for your Christian nationalist, you know, you grow muscles and that kind of thing, but.

Yeah, the country scholar. That's the ideal. Yeah, exactly.

And it's hunting season here. I'm sure it's hunting season there, too, but I was in the woods earlier today, freezing my toes off. I saw nothing except squirrels everywhere. Very annoying, but anyway, we all have our different things we're doing, but this is something that we've been talking about for, what, like five weeks, maybe?

I don't even know, maybe a little longer than that. And lots of people have emailed me questions or said they're gonna be here to ask questions, so we're gonna keep it fluid tonight. Tymon and Ben are here to answer any of the questions you have, and if there's any hate or any problems with the previous things that were said, it is all Tymon's fault, and you can ask.

It's 100 correct. Let's go to Matt Baruch. Matt Baruch has been waiting. He's in the channel right now. He has a question.

Hey, Matt, can you hear me? Yeah, I can hear you, and it's boarish, by the way.

I think I knew that because Matt at the retreat, sorry about that.

No problem, no problem. One out of 1 ,000 people spell it, one out of 100 people say it, so. Boarish.

Boarish? Boarish, that's correct. I mean, boarish, okay, got it. It's East Prussian.

Okay, yeah, my question for you guys is it has to do with economics, because I've been listening to the discussion, and when I was in college, I was a big free trader, kind of a classical liberal guy.

I was really in support of NAFTA, and I was just listening to this, and my question for you guys is, in a non-classical liberal society, how does economic mobility or economic opportunity work? Because it seems like before World War II, there didn't seem to be much of a middle class in the United States, at least, or even in the European aristocratic countries, and I'm just wondering how somebody can get ahead economically in that type of a situation when there isn't free trade or a lot of entrepreneurial opportunities that, say, a classical liberal society with globalism would allow.

That's basically my question.

I mean, my basic view on this, Matt, is I'd call it economic nationalism, that the economic powerhouse of a society is subjected or it's subjugated underneath the political ends of the people as a community, so they have to be controlled and channeled by ends outside themselves.

So this is where you have something like the confusion between economic value and virtue, so that there's a subjective value evaluation of something in society, a consumer good, precisely because of supply and consumer wishes that drives the demand and supply.

It doesn't mean that it's good, so you have to start with a moral theory, a political theory that judges and evaluates, like, well, just because people wanna consume a lot of pornography doesn't mean that that should be allowed.

In terms of economic mobility, you go back to the early Whigs in the 19th century, you find basically this economic protectionism, tariffs, a specie or money that is unique to America and internal improvements, trade with other countries that is favorable to the United States and helped infancy industries in America.

All of that actually went into like creating flourishing industries and the creation eventually of a middle class and economic mobility, but it was oriented and directed nationally toward the people themselves.

It didn't mean you had to give up things like free trade per se, but, or exchange of money and goods and production and consumption. But all of that has to be kind of recalculated within a, I'd say like a nationalist ethos or teleology that's clearly anti-global, at least anti-global in the sense that it's, it's not going to put money and profits over the good of the people collectively.

So I think that you can have some of those quote unquote classical liberal elements, but they can't become the end all and be all of a society. Basically what's happened in America is that there's been a flip of who rules the roost between politics and economics.

Politics has been sublimated and like an economic way of doing life has kind of taken over. And that's changed the character of the people, their relationship to each other in the outside world and so forth.

So that's a little bit of an answer. Much more can be said. I don't know, Tymon, if you've got anything you want to add. Sure, yeah.

Yeah, I agree with Ben in terms of the, well, I guess you could, so I agree with everything Ben's saying, but that you could say there's two questions kind of involved. One is the scope of economic freedom, we might say.

So if in turn, a more illiberal view, you know, that's kind of like, there's no archetype of like what the illiberal view is, but it's something, you know, behind or prior to the way we conduct ourselves now.

And so we just look at an older American view, such as the American system, which basically made us prosperous enough to then step onto the world stage and dominate for a while. You know, it's more of a protectionist view, as Ben said.

It certainly has national interest in view with, in terms of manufacturing and trade as a country. But then, you know, Matt, you're kind of getting at also the individual level or how we conduct our domestic economy.

So you could have a more protectionist view, nationalist view in terms of delegation of big resources and direction of companies that are major, you know, that produce significant goods instead of farming out either their production or the goods themselves.

You know, we direct them towards things that are in the national interest, but at the more domestic level, sort of, I don't think there's anything wrong with having an idea of, you know, some kind of free exchange, we might say, and self-determination economically.

But it's always like, you know, it's always kind of, where do you want to draw the lines? Because of course, we've never had anything that is just total free exchange or a free economy. There's always regulation, in fact, introduced by many, you know, many Reaganites themselves.

So it's like the, you know, what are we talking about? And so that is where I think also, so Ben was talking about the ends-based direction of, you know, economy towards these higher goods. There's also the question just politically, it always needs to determine this.

What are the, what kind of limitations are we comfortable with and which ones are we not with? And that requires political process. And to pretend that it's sort of an algorithmic thing, the economy that is, I think is a liberal view and it's not actually true.

And so that would be a illiberal critique to say, the thing, the bill of goods you're selling is not actually real. There is no such thing. And so what we need to do is just be more explicit and honest about the political process as well, where we determine what are we good with?

What are we not good with? So that's, I mean, I'm just throwing some more things on top of what Ben was saying. Yeah, I'll just stop there so I don't ramble.

To add like a controversial issue, you could say like, well, should we let women work in the public sphere? So you could say an illiberal view, a pre-liberal view would return to a kind of social hierarchy which would say, depending upon your wealth or your status or your gender or something like this, you kind of can only rise so far, no further.

And I'm not, personally, I don't think that, a future America that's post-liberal or returns to a pre-liberal has to necessarily lock in some kind of feudal social hierarchy as it was in the past per se.

But I think we have to be willing to entertain why people did things in the past the way they did and maybe a return to that can be good. And so like take women serving in the military or something like that.

A woman might wanna have that kind of economic or social or career opportunity. And you could say, well, putting up barriers to entry is discrimination. It's employment discrimination or it's sexist or could be racist or something like that.

And that would be a kind of dominant liberal value that would kind of destroy every other counter-argument or consideration. So a post-liberal America would not idolize these, well, just long as we have non-discrimination and no barriers to entry, then everything will work itself out and society will be awesome.

It's like, no, actually there's a greater good. Like men should fight because fighting is physical. It's psychological. Men are created bigger, stronger, more powerful, analytical, their brains are completely different.

There's all of these reasons why we should say, we could say, no, some women should be barred from certain professions or something like that.

And here's another one, Ben, that goes maybe right to, I mean, you'll see this now applied in various forms and it's kind of a buzz, it's like a stand-in for this idea. So the famous Lochner versus New York case in 1905, basically introduces the principle that you can contract away anything.

So it's rooted in absolute sort of individual autonomy and self-determination. And so if New York wanted in that case to limit the hours that bakers could work, recognizing that there was some sort of predatory relationship involved where they could work 60, 70, 80 hours a week and be forced to, and then New York decided to limit that.

And that was overturned by the Supreme Court, right, as violating this freedom to contract that they found. In a post-liberal society, I would say, those considerations should also be front and center.

If you're running an economy subordinate to higher and political goods, you do think about conditions, some of these economic relationships, and you don't leave everything up to pure choice because actually the choices are loaded and don't work.

They're not as fulfilling for the baker as it seems like it would be. So of course the baker's gonna do it to keep their job and to make more money. But if you, I guess I would say a post-liberal economy would consider taking certain options off the table because it's detrimental to domestic life and higher goods such as good families and going to church, whatever.

So the same rationale is behind something like blue laws, which is to shut down economies on Sundays so that Christians are privileged and aren't penalized for not operating economically on the Lord's Day.

So anyway, that's

Can I boil down what you guys said into maybe one paragraph? That would be great. And then we'll let Matt determine whether we answered the question or not. No, probably not. I think what you guys are saying is the middle class would not, you're not attributing the success and the rise of the middle class necessarily to an unrestrained free market in every sense.

You would challenge that. I know you haven't gone into detail about that, but you don't think that there would be anything that would disrupt that relationship necessarily. You could still get ahead. We would still have private property.

But the difference would be is that instead of the market being an end, it becomes a means to an end. And the end then is living in the created order that God has established and trying to ensure that the traditions that we have developed over time so that we can live together peaceably aren't rattled too much and just steamrolled by free market forces that then do things like, well, in this case, you could look at the Southern border, you could look at the moral degeneracy sexually speaking.

We've applied free market principles to just about every moral question now. So that would be off the table because that would contradict the obligations that God has given us towards higher ends that he wants us to pursue.

So the libertarian will look at that and say, well, you're not free market, right? Of course, there's never really been, I guess the closest maybe would be like pre-National Bank, pre-Jackson, I guess, but people were more self-regulatory at that point.

So that fear that the middle class would just disappear if there was a post-liberal order is not necessarily a realized, it's not something that we should be afraid of. I think that's what you guys are saying.

So if no one's gonna correct me on that, Matt, I know that was a mouthful from all three of us. Does that help at all, do you have follow-up?

Yeah, that was helpful. I mean, I'm thinking that there's a couple of things that concern me is obviously rising prices and the dogma I was always taught was protectionism will actually increase prices and like the reason we can buy cheap goods at Walmart and be able to afford maybe more than we can is because of global free trades.

So what you're saying though, is if there's a moral restraint on Adam Smith's invisible hand, some of those forces will actually allow like single income homes or single income households to once again, be able to afford to live.

Whereas what you're saying is the non-moral or non-God-based reign of free market economics has caused some of these issues like inflation, bidding up of wages or barriers to entry, et cetera. So you're saying that by having moral components in a society that would check unrestrained or secular free market economics, we will get to a society like say, more like in the 50s and 60s when you can have a Levittown house and get dad to work in the market, stay home and raise the children and be able to afford to live.

Yeah, well, I mean, that's not... Some of the things you're talking about obviously are caused by the Fed. We can blame inflation on the Fed, right? And tampering into our economy from the government, I suppose.

But I guess the main point that I'm hearing from Ben and Tynan and I agree with is that it's not necessarily this unrestrained in every sense of the word market that has caused the rise of the middle class and the success that America has enjoyed post-World War II, which is really...

When you say post-World War II, we're talking about the GI Bill, really. I mean, that's what I think most histories that attribute the rise of the middle class and the American dream, they say it's the GI Bill that caused all this.

So even that's a government, originating with the government. But there's never been... Like even Adam Smith had certain things he wanted regulated. So it wasn't like... There's always been an assumption that there's a certain moral vision that has to channel the economic resources and it's inescapable.

So we're at a time now, I think, where we just don't have an option. Like it's gonna be either the pagans controlling that moral vision and channeling it into all kinds of depravity and devaluing our dollar and everything that we're seeing right now, or it's going to be a return to a more Christian understanding of where there should be some limitations placed on what people can do with their resources.

And there's gonna be a limitation either way, I guess that's what I'm saying. It's inescapable.

Would you guys agree with that? No, I think that's exactly right. And we are already, as Ben said, economic categories have taken over, almost free market economic categories have taken over almost any policy considerations.

So that's certainly true of immigration and then even conservatives ostensibly here today. You still have some Reaganites hanging around. That's like, as long as they will... Immigration is great because you're just getting more workers and they grow the economy.

So don't worry about the cultural aspects of what assimilation looks like, how much social disruption a country can handle. And so all these externalities that are non-economic, at least in the first instance, they have economic implications, are almost never considered.

And not only are they not considered, but not considering them becomes like a dogma. That if you do insert those, you're not sufficiently free market, therefore not sufficiently American or something like that.

But of course you do still have things, regulations that are still in play, as long as they can be justified under like consumer health or to reduce fraud or these sorts of things, because those are thought of as hampering the consumer's autonomy in the market.

That's why those are okay. But you will see, you're not allowed to sell certain things or certain types of goods. That is in some way, it is a moral-ish consideration, even if it's predicated on something that's kind of amoral or we're less concerned about in this discussion.

So your point, John, being that you're always gonna do some kind of limitation in this way. So you might as well try to make it limitations that are rooted in a higher vision of politics and what man is and do it that way.

You still can recognize that man is also, a rational and creative creature and a social creature. So there's certain, there's no reason to restrict freedom where you don't have to. Freedom of movement, any other kind of freedom, but being comfortable with doing that for higher ends, I think is necessary.

Matt. We would probably have a more free, if society in a post-liberal, like if it was our vision of post-liberalism, a Christian-influenced post-liberalism, there would actually be more freedom than there is now.

That's the thing.

No, I agree with you. Yeah, I agree with that, yeah.

I would just say my kind of last comment for me, Matt, is that, I mean, there is a body of literature that's very fascinating to study that does critique capitalism in and of itself as being perhaps initially a force for good, but eventually and inexorably a disintegrating force on a people's morals, their wealth, their national cohesion and self-identity and consciousness.

So you used to have someone like Adam Ferguson writing in the 18th century from the Highlands in England and Scotland, contrasting British commercial republic with say the ancient contest between Athens and Sparta, where Sparta was a closed community and their middle-class was built on the basis of a helot population, which were slaves.

And so they didn't trade internationally in Greece. Whereas Athens did. But how did Athens do that? They did that by having an empire and basically controlling all the islands around them and loving them as vassal states to tax them.

And then they had to build a massive army, a Navy, and they had to control their neighbors. And they did have kind of a commercial middle-class, but it was very, we might say secular or pagan. So there is this worry and this concern.

And the question is, can you hit that sweet spot where you have something like the protection of private property and the appropriate work of your body to produce good things and the accumulation of some capital equity and wealth without it destroying your morals and your religion and your consciousness and self-identity as a people.

You see these debates going on in the early 19th century between the Jeffersonians and the Whigs. And they were debating that the introduction of paper money would destroy the people's morals. So there's been this recurring theme, there's this question, this issue.

The thing today though, is that it's become a dogma. Capitalism can't be questioned. And what we're doing is we're questioning it. And of course we're getting excoriated for it. But questioning it is as old as American.

I mean, this is what Americans have done from the beginning is to interrogate these ideas and to say, is there something here that we should be cautious about?

Yeah, even the bailouts where, I mean, they're justified on market principles. That's the funny thing. Like even the government tampering into the market and that's what you're getting at. It's like, it's an end.

It's like everything that's done can be justified if it's good for the market. If it's not good for the market, then maybe we shouldn't do it. And I recall I was in a small Southern town earlier this year.

And a gentleman who was there told me that there was a man from Michigan who had moved down. I think, Matt, you're from Michigan, right? Yes. I thought so. I remember that, yeah. But you, and you're now, I think, what, in South Carolina?

Or Georgia, sorry. No, I'm in Northern Atlanta suburbs. Right, Georgia.

So maybe, I don't know, Atlanta's Atlanta, but maybe you've seen some of this in Georgia where this gentleman from Michigan came to Alabama, got on a town board, very conservative, right? Michigan conservative, but was always running up against the town board because he wanted what was good for the market.

That was his ideology was, hey, if we need to build a shopping center here, let's zone it for shopping. We're gonna bring more money in. And the community was like, we don't want that though. That's gonna change us.

So that's what Ben is getting at, I think, is there are these identity and character issues that must be considered as well. It can't just be whatever's good for the dollar, whatever's good for the market, because then you're living, you have the potential to live in really a terrible place with terrible morality and congestion and eye sores and all the rest.

It's just not a place you really wanna live. And people escape those places to get to like a nice place in the suburbs.

Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, Jesus talks about that in Luke 12, build bigger barns and bigger barns and your life will be required of you. Yeah, I totally get that. It's just that I was always, I mean, that's what I wanted to ask that question about, but how do you, in that context, how do you still provide for your family, even keeping those moral things?

I mean, maybe, but that's why I'm glad to listen to you guys. Yeah, go ahead.

They did an Old Testament Israel, right? I mean, that was a system that valued private property. And also there is a lot of regulations on what kinds of moral things were acceptable. So, I mean, it's not like a new thing, really.

Okay, that's great. No, that's awesome, Matt. Great question, thank you. Good to see you. Thanks, Matt. Thank you, I appreciate it, guys. SLE, I don't know who that is, but SLE is standing by, but there is no microphone.

So if you turn your microphone on SLE, I will come to you. We have a number of chat. I should probably go to the Truth Dispatch first, because he has now spent $30 on asking us questions, so. And he has, I guess

Talk about capitalism. Yeah, talk about capitalism. State capitalism. Let's get some ads in here. I appreciate that, the Truth Dispatch. So here's number one. I have two questions for y 'all. Number one, can y 'all address Christians who think they do political theology because they believe in modern application of God's law, but don't know what they're talking about?

That's a little bit of a loaded question. Hey, can you address people who don't know what they're talking about?

I think you're talking about theonomists there, so. Theonomists? Well, he said modern application of God's law. Yeah. Well, that's the first question. So the second one looks different.

So maybe we should start there. Sure, address it. I mean, I've written some critiques of theonomists. I mean, most of the theonomists I know are good guys and co-belligerents in many ways in our present moment.

So I don't dislike them as people, but there is a, my fundamental beef with theonomy is their, as I've written before, miscategorization of law. So they miscategorize what the Mosaic civil law is, which is really human positive law, but God acts as the legislator.

And so it's the perfect application of the natural law, which of course is inscripturated in the Decalogue, but we're talking about all the other regulations. And so it's a perfect application of natural law to a particular context and a particular people that's fitting for them.

And so what the benefit of the Mosaic code is to show you how to do that with higher ends in view as well. I mean, exceedingly higher ends in view at that point, but it's a model legislation. It doesn't mean that if something is fitting for a polity now that you couldn't use it, there's obviously nothing wrong with those laws insofar as they could possibly apply to our condition now, but that polity has expired and therefore have the, so have those civil laws as the Westminster Confession says.

So I think it's, I think their problem is the miscategorization of what the Mosaic code is in terms of the Thomistic taxonomy that I'm using, that everybody kind of uses. And so I think it's instructed, the Old Testament law is instructive.

We, you can apply it, you know, insofar as it reflects the natural law and you would adjust for your own conditions and time in that application of natural law, but it doesn't mean that it's the only possible ceiling and floor, which is how theonomists treat it, right?

Ceiling and floor, a way to govern a polity legally. There could be many more styles of governance and legal codes that would be equally agreeable to the natural law, but be different because people are different and cultures are different.

And so I think theonomists don't respect not only the right categorization of that law, but the human element of law in society. And so it makes it confusing. The good thing about them is they love the scripture.

They love, you know, do think about political things and that's, I appreciate that. And then there's, you know, culturally with a lot of theonomists, there's sometimes more is owed to their libertarianism than it is to the theory of theonomy itself that they're getting, you know, even Rush Dooney's leans that way.

And so anyway, that's like a side discussion, but I would just say that those people that do that, that are like hardcore theonomists are not sufficiently in touch with the Protestant tradition and should just do more reading.

These questions have been answered centuries ago. I always say Franciscus Junius' Mosaic Polity is what everyone should read. He doesn't know what theonomy is, but he obliterates it. It's the same question.

Magistrates have asked him, what do we do with the Old Testament law? And so he explains these things. And I just think they should read that and realize that their political and moral concerns that they have, which is they want a God-honoring just polity can and have been answered in different ways that don't require such a formulaic transportation of this code that was made for one people at one time to everybody.

And so, and they get really goofy, of course, right? If that's the ceiling and the floor, you can't have like traffic laws because there's no scriptural referent. And I'm like, that's, I'm sorry, I just don't want 16-year-olds driving tons of metal down the road to not be regulated in the way they do that because it's harmful.

The other thing would be their theonomist general aversion to laws that are preventative in nature. They only want things to be punished after the fact. So that gets very kind of sticky. So there's lots of more practical problems like that, but the principle, I wanna treat them on principle and not just like the quirks.

And so I've already laid that out. That's my beef with them. I don't think they, sometimes they know what they're talking about. Maybe other times they don't.

Well, you know, one of the laws that this, because I was definitely at one time very influenced by especially Greg Bonson's version of theonomy. One of the scriptures though that challenged me was when Jesus talks about Moses because of the hardness of their heart implementing laws about divorce.

And then of course, the allowance of polygamy obviously Kings weren't supposed to multiply wives, but it wasn't a, for the general person, like the main concern was intermarrying with other nations, not multiple wives.

And we've developed in Western societies a monogamy that, or at least I should say a legal tradition that values monogamy to such an extent that you will be in trouble. You will be a bigamist if you marry someone and then you go marry someone else, that kind of thing.

So is that a positive development? That's what I would want to ask someone who's just living and dying on the Mosaic law. Like, don't you think that's a good thing that that's been a, not that that means God's law is less than perfect because it is perfect.

But as you were saying, Timon, it's for a specific application in a specific context, which is exactly what Jesus says. That because of the hardness of their hearts, they had to, the law had to be crafted in such a way.

And so I think that just shows you kind of how this is supposed to be used and Totally.

I mean, I've talked to theonomists, self-professing ones that will tell you you can't even, I think the hypothetical I've used is even publicly. So even like public pornography, you can't regulate it.

Are you serious? I've never heard that. I've talked to people that way. But yeah, I should assume that they're Christian brothers.

They're not being like funny about it. I don't think that's most people who would say they're theonomists.

No, but it's, yeah. I mean, Bonson doesn't say that, right? Bonson also has, I mean, one problem too, is that Bonson, Rush Dooney, Gary North were very smart guys also. And their progeny performs a little under par compared to them, I would say, most of the time.

So those were very smart guys. There's some profit in reading them, especially what is it, North's Polypiety is an interesting book. But they also have historical problems. Bonson has historical problems that are replicated by today, by like Joe Boot in his use of the tradition, especially Puritanism.

In that sense, to truth dispatch this question, they have no idea what they're talking about. But that doesn't mean everything about their theory is like just way left field. And Bonson and those guys do real work and you can wrestle with it.

But I think the root idea is problematic. And then that is sometimes, not to commit a logical fallacy, but sometimes demonstrated by crazy conclusions that people can come to following those principles.

Well, we've been going over half an hour. We've gotten to a whopping two questions. So we gotta move it on a little. Ben, if you could just be, if you could answer this one, I'm gonna just go through the three from truth dispatch.

Second question, can you all interrogate the liberal's universal and global view of law? Christians who believe in modern application of God's law have adopted this by conflating Christ's rule.

I'm trying to understand the question. Well, I'll say something like this, kind of a universalist perspective on law. I mean, you could say in one sense, the modern application of that comes out of Kant's work where he wants to have a moral ethic in which anything that you do, and this gets translated into law, anything that you do has to be able to be universalized so that everybody can do it and it doesn't create harm or conflict, kind of pie in the sky.

And this is done on the basis of just pure reason, pure rational analysis. You can't take any kind of material conditions or self-interest or utility into view whatsoever. And so this idea of having this perfectly universal moral ethic or principle, these moral precepts that can then get translated into moral law, in some ways, this is the foundation of international law today.

And of course, Kant wanted an international federation of states. So it is this Kantian driven, Kantian dream of a perfect moral universe in which we can have, everyone can agree on these things. And then if we just can implement them and get people to go along with it, we can have world peace.

And this is the title of one of Kant's works, perpetual peace. This is what he wants, complete and total perpetual peace. We're going to overcome human conflict and war and death. And we're gonna do it by the power of human reason.

We're not gonna do it by God's grace or God's kingdom or the gospel or anything like that. So I do think that that's a huge kind of driving factor. It's also a massive motivation. I think Christians don't know this.

When they come to reason about morality and law and society and that they've completely lost the element or the possibility of prudence, which always takes into consideration definitely basic precepts of the natural law and the conclusions, basic natural conclusions from those precepts, but then they have to be applied and they're always applied variously depending upon one circumstance such that you could have a statesman on one day apply the same principle and conclusion exactly the opposite on the next day because the situation changed.

This seems messy. It brings up the problem of inconsistency and being hypocritical and so forth. And sometimes like these decisions are the privy of a president who needs secrecy and dispatch. And of course, that's why you need a great man in the presidency who is virtuous and trustworthy and a Christian.

And I think this is exactly the view of the founders. So there's the loss of prudence is a misunderstanding of the natural law as being just kind of these timeless and eternal kind of set of just rules of rights and wrongs.

And this is what, if you read any kind of Christian ethics texts from the past like 30 years, this is just how it goes. Like they set forth kind of the basic biblical principles of ethics and then they go down the issues like abortion and stem cell research and marriage and euthanasia.

And they try to come to like the perfect biblical Christian evangelical principle and ethic for this thing for all times and all people in all places. That's a really anemic, very shallow and very kind of crippling way of doing ethics and law.

Yeah, no, good. One more question from Truth Dispatch. Ben engaged Brian Mattson on American Reformer. Brian, along with Boot and Sandlin, so there's Ezra Institute guys, are some Christians who have generally adopted that liberal view of law and political theology.

Why are they wrong? These are very direct questions. I love the directness here. That's for you, Ben.

Why are they wrong? Let me tell you, they're very, very wrong. The most wrong they've ever been. I mean, okay, like the critique here could go on forever. But I mean, one of my major critiques is they do essentially adopt a quote unquote liberal conception of politics, which says that government bad, okay, big government really bad.

And so we need limited government, we need small government. Now, the view of the founders was not just limited government. It was that the national government should have certain limited ends, but unlimited scope to achieve those limited ends.

And then the domestic sphere, the states had other limited ends and unlimited scope to achieve those ends. That's the kind of limited government that the founders were talking about. And then what like Sandlin and Matson will do, again, Sandlin will go back and say like, we've got rules, we can't break these rules.

The left is breaking the rules. And if the right breaks the rules, then all hell is gonna break loose. I'm like, the whole tectonic plate has shifted, like an entire continent from the 1770s and 80s. And they are rearranging the deck chairs and they're worried about rules.

And then something like what Matson will do is he'll say that if you limit government, then you increase the private sphere, this culture. So you have free culture. This is how you get freedom, this is how you get free markets, this is how you have sound families and so forth and so on.