PRESTOPUNDIT -- A Good Blog at a Great Price. Guaranteed.

Tyler Cowen takes a stab at making sense of the differences and commonalities between "conservatives" and "libertarians" over on the Volokh Conspiracy blog. But one of his central premises is false. Many libertarians do not "share the conservative emphasis on just deserts", take a look, for example at chapter 6 "Equality, Value and Merit" from Friedrich Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty. Classic liberals and "libertarians" see the world as a place where luck or happenstance plays a ineliminable role in life's circumstance, and hence where much of what life takes on for an individual will be "undeserved" or "unmerited". And I also should think that "conservatives" like Burke or Oakeshott have taught this insight as well as anyone. So the "emphasis on just desserts" does not by necessity apply to conservatives either, contra Cowen. Where does this leave us? Well, in need of an alternative theory, of course. Mine? Well, in America, it's a matter of historical record that in contemporary times the "Religious Right" was pushed out of the Democrat party and into the Republican party by the effort of the Carter administration to tax them -- this is the background history of the founding of the "Moral Majority". There is more to the story than that I'm well aware ...

Of course, the labels "conservative" and "libertarian" are problematic in there own right, and a better question to explore is the relationship between religion and classical liberalism -- especially the dynamic interaction between historical events and ideas.

Cowen was commenting on a conversation found here.