In this pre-recorded episode, Oren talks about the cult of small government and why sometimes it s actually important to pass laws that make government smaller. He also discusses the new movie, "The Story of Possum Trot," based on the true story of a group of foster care families that adopted hundreds of children in need of a home.
00:06:43.080But ultimately, the problem with it is that it doesn't allow virtuous people to go ahead
00:06:47.540and, again, exercise that ordered liberty.
00:06:50.760Now, the ordered liberty requires you, of course, to have certain things about your community.
00:06:55.780The people in the community must be oriented towards a specific moral vision.
00:07:02.780They must have a shared understanding of what type of life they should be pursuing.
00:07:08.140Now, they have liberty inside their own decisions about how to best pursue it.
00:07:13.100But if you don't have a community that shares those values, you won't have a community for long.
00:07:18.080That's what makes a people a people, is that they have a shared history, a shared set of traditions and folkways,
00:07:24.980a shared religion, a shared understanding of who they should be.
00:07:28.960And if you have that and you have the robust organic institutions that come along with that,
00:07:35.200then the government doesn't really need to do a whole lot because the people already have this shared moral vision.
00:07:42.400When you have a people who have organically created a culture,
00:07:46.980when they've grown together through many centuries of shared experience and shared moral goals and religion, language, these things,
00:07:56.380then you don't need to do a lot of top-down manipulation to properly order your society.
00:08:03.320Alexis de Tocqueville recognized this in Democracy in America.
00:08:07.120He said the things that made America run was the voluntary institutions it created, the voluntary associations.
00:08:15.000So many Americans were rigorous in their involvement in civic life.
00:08:20.160They were constantly creating fraternities, fraternal organizations, churches, community organizations, merchant guilds,
00:08:28.080you know, all these different things that allowed for this creation of social fabric,
00:08:33.900this, you know, shared help if you ended up in trouble through all these different organizations.
00:08:39.400There was a social safety net, but the government didn't have to create it because society had already created it.
00:08:45.120And there were lots of ways that you had to behave and should behave, but they were enforced at a communal level.
00:08:51.800There didn't have to be somebody running around, you know, arresting everybody who made a mistake
00:08:57.620because ultimately the constant pressure of the community, the moral force of the community,
00:09:02.980the folkways and the traditions of the community, all bound people in a specific way.
00:09:08.280And so all these different organizations and all these different beliefs and all this history
00:09:13.060all went ahead and bound people into a particular way of life.
00:09:17.720And so if you have a small government in this way, then you're allowing people to exercise their ordered liberty inside of this social fabric.
00:09:29.360And the thing is to understand that these things are necessary for each other.
00:09:33.960You cannot have this ordered liberty, or rather you cannot have the small government if you do not have this ordered liberty.
00:09:42.060Small government is something that is facilitated by a virtuous people, a people who share an understanding of who they are,
00:09:50.320how they're going, how they should conduct themselves, how to bring about the social good.
00:09:54.960These people who already have these ideas deeply ingrained, it's already very organic,
00:10:00.500they don't need a lot of formal institutions to go ahead and impose that on society because they impose it on themselves.
00:10:08.740They are self-governed. Not in the sense that each person does whatever they want.
00:10:14.020That's not what that means. And this is a problem that a lot of conservatives and libertarians have.
00:10:18.740They just think that means freedom. I just do whatever I want, whenever I want.
00:10:22.540That's what freedom is about. I just do anything and everything I please without worrying about anyone else
00:10:28.260and the government doesn't stop me. That is not what we're talking about here.
00:10:32.360We're not talking about just this wild, unattached freedom, no duties, no responsibilities, no restrictions,
00:10:39.380no care for the community, no care for your impact on yourselves or the other.
00:10:43.460That is not what we're talking about here.
00:10:45.880An ordered liberty is one in which you are exercising your ability, your choice inside this framework,
00:10:54.540but it is the framework that is created. It is the virtue that allows for that.
00:10:59.900The small government can only exist because you are already limiting what you do.
00:11:04.420If you create a free society where everyone just gets hooked on heroin because they're free to do whatever they want,
00:11:12.000we're going to have a really crappy society.
00:11:14.140That's not a society that's going to be free for very long.
00:11:17.760You see, freedom in and of itself is not actually the good.
00:11:23.180It is the pursuit of the good that enables a liberty that you can practice inside that community.
00:16:54.520The words on paper do not limit government.
00:16:57.220What limits government are opposing social forces.
00:17:01.580The government can only ask so much of people if people have to devote themselves to other forces in society.
00:17:08.600When you had to take care of your extended family, when you had a lot of kids because you didn't really have a choice because birth control wasn't really a thing, when you had to take care of your ailing parents because there wasn't really another option for that.
00:17:21.140It's not like you could just hand them off to some state nursing home.
00:17:24.000When you had to go ahead and take care of your deadbeat niece because there wasn't some welfare program that stepped in and take care of her and her kid.
00:17:32.840When you had all of these things, you had to be involved in a church because it was a key aspect of social life.
00:17:39.060It's how you found a husband or a wife.
00:17:41.440It's how you shared and taking care of the poor and other people in the community.
00:17:45.880When you had to be involved in all of these different organizations, that was very much a drain on all of your other resources.
00:17:54.320Now, all that sounds pretty exhausting to the average person, but this was just part of life through most of history.
00:18:00.660And because of this, government could not really make certain demands because government couldn't fill in all those responsibilities.
00:18:07.880You can only ask so much of somebody who has to support like seven children and take care of his ailing mother and educate his children and go to church to make sure and fund that church and volunteer in that church to make sure that the poor and everybody else were taken care of.
00:18:24.260And he has to go to the Merchant Guild to make sure that their prices are going to be set properly or that whatever.
00:18:36.060He's all of his time is involved in these things.
00:18:39.720He cannot give everything to the state.
00:18:42.280The state can't make these vast demands on him because the state can't fill in all of those duties.
00:18:47.560But what has happened is we've handed over so much power to the state and we have given up so many of those duties that once exhausted us.
00:18:57.140You know, we feel free, not because the state is any smaller.
00:19:00.640The state is actually much bigger and can make much bigger demands.
00:19:03.140But we feel free because we have lost all of those social obligations.
00:19:07.880But when we lost all those social obligations, we also destroyed all those opposing social spheres, spheres of community, spheres of family, spheres of the tribe, spheres of the church, spheres of the guilds, spheres of the fraternity.
00:19:37.780But it's not just not good because the government is large.
00:19:40.820It's not good because it leaves people without any of those critical connections.
00:19:45.280By handing all those duties over to the state, we might feel free in the moment.
00:19:49.180But we've lost our organic connection to meaning or organic connection to purpose.
00:19:53.920We no longer have that deeply woven social fabric that holds us in place, that creates those identities, that gives us meaning and purpose, that gives us a reason, that points us in a direction, connects us to our ancestors, connects us to those that will come after us.
00:20:11.660We are no longer in that great chain of being.
00:20:13.940We can no longer practice the ordered liberty that we talked about because we have stripped the virtue out of our communities by handing everything over to the state.
00:20:27.680We can no longer have limited government because we no longer have the virtuous communities that enabled it.
00:20:34.040So it's not that the, again, it's not that the small government was the goal.
00:20:38.400It's not that the small government is the thing that we are pursuing.
00:20:42.660It's that small government was something that came after we created these virtuous communities.
00:20:48.600It's something that is enabled because we had to create communities that could take care of themselves.
00:20:52.620There simply wasn't a vast, massive, bureaucratic government that existed during colonial America.
00:20:59.480They had to go ahead and create these communities that could more or less take care of themselves.
00:21:03.880And that enabled small government because once the government did get formalized, there was already this organic set of community institutions, already this idea of who we are and where we're going and what kind of life we should achieve that meant that we could keep government small.
00:21:27.560What's another way to look at this to understand how social spheres can be kept intact?
00:21:32.940I want to talk to you today about blue laws.
00:21:35.300That's why I've got the closed on Sunday sign here.
00:21:38.000I want to talk to you about the utility of blue laws, why they existed, what they do for a community, and how the exercise of government power in the case of blue laws can actually protect alternative social spheres that push back against the power of the government.
00:21:55.500Before I do that, guys, let me tell you a little bit about ISI.
00:21:59.480Universities today aren't just neglecting real education.
00:22:02.240They're actively undermining it, and we can't let them get away with it.
00:22:05.260America was made for an educated and engaged citizenry.
00:22:08.960The Intercollegiate Studies Institute is here to help.
00:22:11.760ISI offers programs and opportunities for conservative students across the country.
00:22:16.940ISI understands that conservatives and right-of-center students feel isolated on college campuses and that you're often fighting for your own reputation, dignity, and future.
00:22:26.460Through ISI, you can learn about what Russell Kirk called the permanent things,
00:22:30.720the philosophical and political teachings that shaped and made Western civilization great.
00:22:36.060ISI offers many opportunities to jumpstart your career.
00:22:39.160They have fellowships at some of the nation's top conservative publications like National Review, the American Conservative, and the College Thinker.
00:22:46.240If you're a graduate student, ISI offers funding opportunities to sponsor the next great generation of college professors.
00:22:52.240Through ISI, you can work with conservative thinkers who are making a difference.
00:22:55.840Thinkers like Chris Ruffo, who currently has an ISI researcher helping him with his book.
00:23:01.180But perhaps most importantly, ISI offers college students a community of people that can help them grow.
00:23:06.600If you're a college student, ISI can help you start a student organization or student newspaper or meet other like-minded students at their various conferences and events.
00:23:16.100ISI is here to educate the next generation of great Americans.
00:23:24.300What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue?
00:23:29.380A well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door.
00:23:36.080A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool.
00:23:40.540Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered.
00:23:44.700Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders.
00:23:49.560Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply.
00:23:51.740Instacart, groceries that over-deliver.
00:23:54.760All right, so small government, right?
00:23:59.420Again, the point is we don't want to just worship small government.
00:24:03.800We want to understand why it's valuable, what goods it enables, right?
00:24:09.420We're looking for the good of our community.
00:24:11.620And if small government brings about the good of our community, then that's great.
00:24:14.680But if it doesn't, then we need to think about why.
00:24:17.660And we need to understand what we're actually looking for in our community.
00:24:21.100We're orienting ourselves towards a good life for the people who live in our community, not just for some abstract ideological value of small government.
00:24:30.780Now, again, I am generally pro a small government.
00:24:34.880I think that ultimately having a massive, totalitarian, overbearing, bureaucratic state is not good for people.
00:24:42.640However, I think it's bad for people because it keeps them from developing this ordered liberty in these virtuous communities.
00:24:50.740Not because I have some kind of ideological purity test when it comes to small government.
00:24:56.120So when people say, Oren, are you for small government?
00:24:58.880The answer is kind of, sometimes, right?
00:25:02.820So, for instance, why don't I just declare myself a champion of small government?
00:25:06.880What's one way in which I actually think that small government is a problem, not a solution?
00:25:12.320So one thing that I think is very valuable are blue laws.
00:25:15.900Now, for those who are not familiar, there's still a few places where this is hanging around, but most of the remnants have kind of been destroyed over time.
00:25:23.820Blue laws were laws on the books that restricted what could happen on Sunday, usually, because Sunday is, of course, the most common day of worship for Christians.
00:25:35.340There are some that do it on Saturday, but Sunday is generally thought of as the primary day of worship for Christians.
00:25:59.040There are some blue laws that allow for specific critical things to be open, things like gas stations or grocery stores, things where if you didn't do the shopping the day before, then you might be stuck without something vital.
00:26:13.960Now, to be clear, a lot of blue laws didn't allow this at all.
00:26:39.200Or, for instance, they would close movie theaters specifically on Sundays to keep people from going out, going to distractions, instead making sure that they're going to church, spending time with their families, these kind of things.
00:26:52.540So, a blue law, if you're a strict small government guy, a blue law is terrible, right?
00:27:39.080Since I'm not a small government guy and I think that there is a value in the government setting a norm, what is the value of the blue law?
00:27:47.020So, the blue law protects a sphere of society.
00:27:51.060It says, we understand that the vast majority of people here are Christian.
00:27:56.700And because the vast majority of people here are Christian, Sunday is their holy day, their Sabbath.
00:28:02.560And that means that most people who are Christian are going to want to not be working.
00:28:07.600So, they need the day off because they're not supposed to be working on Sunday.
00:28:11.900Also, they're going to want to be going to church.
00:28:15.360And if they have to work, then they can't go to church.
00:28:17.720So, not just the violation of the working on Sunday, but the inability to go to church because they have to work.
00:28:24.400And if we leave all these things open, this will create a distraction.
00:28:28.180That means more people will want to go to the movie or there's an extra day to get errands done.
00:28:33.120Or, you know, there's something else to do besides church and spending time with your family.
00:28:37.560And so, all of this will destroy the general understanding that we should be spending Sabbath with our families, you know, going to church and not working.
00:28:48.960Like, the fact that all these things are open and available will distract people, will keep them from doing what they're supposed to be doing.
00:28:55.260So, we're just going to pass a law that says all this stuff should be closed.
00:29:44.380Well, first, a blue law is formalizing, hopefully, what is already a normal thing inside your community.
00:29:53.460So, to be clear, as so often is the case, if there is not an organic support for a way of being, the law in and of itself can have a difficult time enforcing it.
00:30:04.880Now, this is not to say that laws cannot change minds.
00:30:07.960I'm a strong believer that the law can be a teacher and that so many of the cultural changes that we have had in the United States are a result of law happening first and then the culture following the law.
00:30:21.600Things like gay marriage, things like abortion, all these things are coming from the fact that the law changed first and then everything followed it, not the other way around.
00:30:32.180These things were not popular and then we got a law in enshrining them.
00:30:35.880They were law and then people followed them.
00:30:38.420With the blue law, however, you would hope that if you are a Christian society and this is how people are living, then all the blue law is doing is formalizing what people already know.
00:30:47.620Now, in an ideal society, again, with the proper amount of small government, because you already have a virtuous community, blue laws are unnecessary.
00:30:56.200Somebody who opened their store on Sunday would be reviled.
00:31:00.780Somebody who's operating some kind of merchant business at this time would be considered terrible for violating the Sabbath.
00:31:13.000People would expect you to be at church and if you didn't come to church, people would notice because your community would be one that's closely knit and people would say, hey, why isn't this person attending?
00:31:24.940All of these things would be self-enforcing.
00:31:27.640Now, again, that might sound terrifying to modern people.
00:31:30.440They might say to themselves, well, this sounds horrible.
00:31:35.180But I want you to understand this is what keeps you from having a larger government.
00:31:39.560When you have this level of social accountability, when you have these organic structures and expectations inside your society, this is what keeps people from needing a large state, a total state to take over and dictate these things to them.
00:32:14.340Once you start letting people take one step towards removing a norm, they will take the next step and the next step and the next step.
00:32:22.100Once you go ahead and start pulling away some of those restrictions, once you go ahead and chip away at this shared idea, over time, people will move more and more towards the complete abolition of that restriction of that idea.
00:32:37.920And they'll forget why they even practiced it in the first place.
00:32:41.000So the Sabbath is important for a lot of reasons.
00:32:54.300Everybody knows you're going to be home.
00:32:55.960Everybody can involve themselves in these communal activities because there's always a day where everybody won't be at work, which is critical.
00:33:05.180It also creates a limitation on the marketplace.
00:33:10.700When you have a day that is set aside where no one can trade, no one can buy and sell, you're making a statement about the priorities of your community.
00:33:20.580Priorities of my community are not commodification.
00:33:23.640The priorities of my community are not making money.
00:33:26.920Priorities of my community are not avarice at all costs.
00:33:30.960There is a day we set aside to make sure that people can be with their families, they can take care of themselves, they can worship God.
00:33:39.160We are setting aside a part of our week, a weekly rhythm, a rhythm, a cycle of life that goes ahead and protects people from this constant grind of the market.
00:33:52.760And that's really critical because if you don't have that, then there's always an opportunity to make a little more.
00:33:59.740And we can see what has happened here, right?
00:35:11.820You have social resources that allow you to do that.
00:35:14.860But once you open up yourself to the idea that every individual should be able to solve this problem inside a market transaction, that they should need friends, they should need families, they should need community, they should need a church.
00:35:29.880Well, you create the scenario where the market is there to solve everything, but also where the reliance on all those other social spheres goes down.
00:35:38.180So when there's a reliance on the church or a reliance on the family, a reliance on your neighbor, then the government is not the be-all, end-all.
00:35:47.280The market is not the be-all, end-all.
00:35:49.320But when you no longer have to rely on those things, when there's always a market option or there's always a government option, then those spheres start to lose their power.
00:35:59.620And that means they also lose the ability to restrict the government.
00:36:02.260Because if you are not reliant on those spheres, you will be reliant somewhere else.
00:37:09.360Why do all these things have to be closed, too?
00:37:12.740And all of a sudden, we have this slippery slope where one thing opens and the next thing opens and the next thing opens.
00:37:18.400And now, to stay competitive, everybody needs to open.
00:37:20.860And so now, everybody has to be open on Sundays.
00:37:23.740Now, all of these people who used to be able to go to church have to go to work because they have to fill these spots.
00:37:30.720You have to generate business because, remember, it's not enough to just be open, especially in the mass production, mass consumption economy.
00:37:40.780You have to constantly schedule the amount of consumption that's going to happen.
00:37:49.300You have to drive people to the store so you can justify being open on Sunday all the time.
00:37:53.840You have to demand people's presence there.
00:37:55.760All of a sudden, this sphere of sovereignty, this social sphere that was the church, that was faith, that was family, that was all set aside inside that Sunday is gone.
00:38:08.580And so, yeah, we got rid of a government restriction.
00:38:12.660We created smaller government by going ahead and getting rid of blue laws.
00:38:17.340The government's not restricting my purchases.
00:38:19.380They're not telling me when my business can be open.
00:38:22.100The government is no longer putting their thumb on the scale.
00:38:25.880They're no longer reaching to my life in that aspect.
00:38:28.160But because there is no formal ban on this action, all of the social mores suddenly wear away.
00:38:36.520And all of a sudden, you have this scenario where these social spheres that used to wield a large amount of power because there were certain areas of life where people were dependent on them, where they mediated the problems of society.
00:38:51.400Instead, all of that current gets turned over to the market.
00:38:54.280And any time the market fails, and this is a really important thing to grasp, okay, any time the market fails, the government steps in.
00:39:03.460This is, again, really important for conservatives, people who call themselves conservative or right-wing, to understand.
00:39:09.960Any time the market fails, the government steps in.
00:39:12.780And if you don't think that's the case, just look at, I don't know, the banks getting bailed out, right?
00:39:17.680Like, any time there's a loser in the market, you can't just leave people losing in the market forever.
00:39:24.440So what we end up doing is covering over all of those gaps in the market with the government.
00:39:30.020The government backstops all of these interactions.
00:39:32.620So instead of the church, instead of the family, instead of the community, the fraternal organization, the guild, all of these things covering that mutual aid that is necessary there,
00:39:45.300instead it all gets moved over to the government.
00:39:46.980And so by destroying that sphere of sovereignty, by going ahead and shutting down that one day of rest where the market was not in charge and you had to rely on people and you had to go to church and you had to spend time with your family because there's nothing else to do.
00:40:08.740However, the only thing there is to do is spend time with God and spend time with your family and that's everyone's going to be available and you don't have to worry about scheduling.
00:40:17.280You don't have to figure out, you know, who's working what shifts or anything because everyone is off simultaneously because you no longer have that government does not get smaller.
00:40:32.620Yeah, you got rid of a restriction on the books.
00:40:34.280You got small government in one sense, but your small government enabled the explosion of government on the other end.
00:40:42.660And that's what I want us to think about.
00:40:45.040Blue laws are just one example, but I think it's a good example to show us moments when actually building in some protection of the other social spheres.
00:40:55.780Going ahead and formalizing protection of our way of life helps to prevent the eventual growth of government by recognizing what actually restricts government, which is not laws on paper, but is the the opposing social sphere.
00:41:13.680We can recognize that maybe some laws on paper might actually help us to preserve the social spheres that keep government small, because once we lost the sacredness of Sunday, once we lost the Sabbath.
00:41:25.780Once we lost the day that made people dependent on the church and the family and the community.
00:41:30.920Once we lost the day that made that or made that holy and made that something that we all respected and shared.
00:41:37.400Whether you were Christian or not, you still understood that this is how your society was going to function.
00:41:42.460And this is how you were going to live the rhythm of your life.
00:41:45.460Once we lost that government explodes because government covers all of these things that used to be colored covered by the social spheres.
00:41:53.240And also we lose our shared identity as people because we no longer have those rituals.
00:41:59.200Again, whether you were a personal believer or not, you know, there are all these stories of people who didn't believe in God, but moved to this area where there's a small church.
00:42:09.680And that's the only place where they can have community.
00:42:12.500And so they start going to small church and lo and behold, they become Christians because once they have been in it, once they have acted inside of it, they recognize the truth of it.
00:42:22.120Once they have involved themselves in this day-to-day life of believers, they observe it in a way that they never would have intellectually.
00:42:29.520But that can only happen when you have certain things that are dependent on that.
00:42:33.220Those people don't just go to church because they feel like it.
00:42:35.500They were atheists that go to church because that was the only place where they could find the community.
00:42:40.960And if you don't create that space, if you don't carve out that sacred space for families and churches and other communal organizations, if you don't set that outside of the market, then the government does not shrink.
00:42:55.000You didn't create small government by knocking down the regulation.
00:42:59.980So that's what I want us thinking more about, again, is just this idea of how we can protect these social spheres, how we can understand ourselves as being oriented towards the good of our community and understanding the good of our community may involve small government.
00:43:14.340But small government is not the goal of our community.
00:43:16.960If small government facilitates a better community, then we should do that.
00:43:20.660And if there are things that we can do, laws we can pass, ways that we can restrict things that will empower those social spheres that keep government small, then we should do that.
00:43:30.360Even if it feels like an oxymoron at the moment, even if it's like, oh, granting the government the power to regulate this business, how can that be small government?
00:44:02.880I'm sure there are a lot of hilarious moments because, of course, Donald Trump and Joe Biden are on stage.
00:44:08.280If this is your first time on the channel, please go ahead and subscribe and turn on the notifications and the bell so you can go ahead and watch the streams when I'm live and not prerecorded.
00:44:19.040If you'd like to go ahead and get this broadcast as a podcast, make sure you go ahead and subscribe to The Ora McIntyre Show on your favorite podcast platform.
00:44:27.440And, of course, if you'd like to pick up my book, The Total State, you can do that on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books A Million, or order it at your favorite local bookstore.