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Wealth & Poverty Review Should Libertarians Be Conservatives?

Over the last few weeks, Public Discourse has been running a terrific series on libertarianism and conservatism. The connection between moral and social issues and economic issues is a running thread in Indivisible, so I’ve been following the series closely.
My own contribution to the series ran last week. I argue that the strong philosophical distinction between conservatism and libertarianism is largely confined to wonks and intellectuals, whereas ordinary conservative legislators and voters tend not to see any contradiction between, say, free trade and the pro-life cause. But what should conservatives say to the “everyman libertarian” who thinks that the pro-life and pro-marriage causes violate the conservative commitment to limited government and individual rights?

I argue that we can make the case for protecting unborn life and conjugal marriage on the basis of limited government and individual rights, without recourse to any narrowly religious assumptions. Read the whole thing here.

Jay W. Richards

Senior Fellow at Discovery, Senior Research Fellow at Heritage Foundation
Jay W. Richards, Ph.D., is the Director of the DeVos Center and William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute, and Editor-at-Large of The Stream. Richards is author or editor of more than a dozen books, including the New York Times bestsellers Infiltrated (2013) and Indivisible (2012); The Human Advantage; Money, Greed, and God, winner of a 2010 Templeton Enterprise Award; The Hobbit Party with Jonathan Witt; The Privileged Planet with Guillermo Gonzalez, coming out in a second edition in 2024; The Price of Panic: How the Tyranny of Experts Turned a Pandemic Into a Catastrophe with Douglas Axe and William Briggs; and Eat, Fast, Feast. His most recent book, with James Robison, is Fight the Good Fight: How an Alliance of Faith and Reason Can Win the Culture War.