Ben Shapiro: evaluation

Transcript context

…Ben, what do you think it means to be a conservative? What’s the philosophy that underlies your political view? So first of all, I’m glad that Destiny, you’re already coming out as a Republican. That’s exciting. I mean, we hold a lot in common in terms of the basic idea that people ought to have as much opportunity as possible and also insofar as the government should do the minimum amount necessary to interfere in people’s lives in order to pursue certain functions, particularly at the local level. So a lot of governmental discussions on a pragmatic level end up being discussions about where government ought to be involved, but also at what level government ought to be involved. And I have an incredibly subsidiary view of government. I think that local governments, because you have higher levels of homogeneity and consent are capable of doing more things. And as you abstract up the chain, it becomes more and more impractical and more and more divisive to do more things. In my view, government is basically there to preserve certain key liberties. Those key liberties pre-exist the government insofar as they’re more important than what priorities the government has. The job of government is to maintain, for example, national defense, protection of property rights, protection of religious freedom. These are the key focuses of government as generally expressed in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. And I agree with the general philosophy of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. Now, that doesn’t mean by the way, that you can’t do more on a governmental level again as you get closer to the ground, which by the way is also embedded in the Constitution. People forget the Constitution was originally applied to the federal government, not to local and state government. But if I were going to define conservatism, it would actually be a little broader than that because I think to understand how people interact with government, you have to go to core values. And so for me, there are a couple of premises. One, human beings have a nature. That nature is neither good nor bad. We have aspects of goodness and we have aspects of badness. Human beings are sinful. We have temptations. What that means is that we have to be careful not to incentivize the bad and that we should incentivize the good. Human beings do have agency and are capable of making decisions in the vast majority of circumstances. And it’s better for society if we act as though they do. Second, the basic idea of human nature. There is an idea in my view that all human beings have equal value before the law. I’m a religious person, so I’d say equal value before God. But I think that’s also sort of a key tenet of Western civilization being non-religious or religious, that every individual has equivalent value in sort of cosmic terms. ’d say equal value before God. But I think that’s also sort of a key tenet of Western civilization being non-religious or religious, that every individual has equivalent value in sort of cosmic terms. But that does not necessarily mean that every person is equally equipped to do everything equally well. And so it is not the job of government to rectify every imbalance of life. The quest for cosmic justice, as Thomas Sowell suggests, is something that government is generally incapable of doing, and more often than not, botches and makes things worse. So those are a few key tenets and that tends to materialize in a variety of ways. The easiest way to sum that up would the traditional kind of three legs of the conservative stool, although now obviously there’s a very fragmented conservative movement in the United States would be a socially conservative view in which family is the chief institution of society, like the little platoons of society as Edmund Burke suggested, in which free markets and property rights are extraordinarily valuable and necessary because every individual has the ability to be creative with their property and to freely alienate that property. Finally, I tend toward a hawkish foreign policy that suggests that the world is not filled with wonderful people who all agree with us and think like us. And those people will pursue adversarial interests if we do not protect our own interests.…

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