A Parochial Authoritarian DreamHouse!Please read the original post and Will Wilkinson comment. Two notes. Will should be happy to know that my girlfriend sent me an instant message from her work saying "dude, that guy hammered you."  Secondly everyone should remember that I wrote a piece about men's fashion for Brainwash this week - so don't be surprised if I come up short in this one. Expectations lowered?  Fantastic.

I did wrong when I said that recent American prosperity had nothing to do with the tech boom. I should have said that it seems plainly obvious that cheap consumer products and a much talked about housing bubble account for much recent prosperity.

I reject the label anti-cosmopolitain. As was pointed out to me in an e-mail from Daniel Larison, it is usually the universalists who dislike other countries - especially those that aren't paved and full of McDonalds.  Traditionalists love countries rooted in history - often study the classics (don't ask me how my Greek lessons went), and generally appreciate places  as they are and have been.

Will says

You seem to take it as a kind of axiom that people who happen to be citizens of the United States have very many, very deep special obligations to one another on the basis of that largely morally arbitrary fact. (It is not entirely arbitrary. I was born here, which is arbitrary. Consuela chose to immigrate partly for moral reasons, which is not. She does not, however, owe me or any other citizen anything in particular due to co-citizenship except compliance with the *just* laws in our common jurisdiction.)

Yes, I do.  There is nothing more arbitrary about the country in which I happened to be born then there is about the family into which I was born. Of course my obligations to my family outweigh my obligations to my nation. There is something in this comment that leaves a bad taste in my mouth. How does one conceive of a Republic in which citizenship allows one to participate in common government, to elect representatives in order to make laws, to perhaps become a legislator - but citizenship implies nothing else except following the rules.

Will is correct to find something unmotivated in my commitment to the nation state.  Like most sensible people I think the nation state and the liberalism that accompanies it have been destructive of Western Christian society. However the nation state is a preferable alternative to any kind of global governance - whether by statist institutions or private ones (NGOs, corporations).

Will also notes his willingness to wage war against a government that forbids him from making "mutually beneficial exchanges."  Well, when you put it that way. Now I'm in no way implying that trade is bad in itself, that trade between nations is bad in itself, that the division of labor was the worst mistake in human history - or anything like that.  But what do we mean by mutually beneficial exchanges? I spoke about pornography before and will bring in prostitution on top of it. Surely the logic of the free market, which doesn't allow religious scruples to intrude upon it as religious scruples (but only as consumer preference), says that prostitution is mutually beneficial exchange. The prostitute gets money. The pervert acquires a desired service. Same with pornography. In the free market there isn't exploitation and degradation - it's the consensual, Invisible Handjob.

 And trade is strongly negatively correlated through history with war for just this kind of reason. And yet you worry we are strengthening a potential enemy?! That's crazy. Withdrawing from the friendship of trade is an act of enmity and the surest way to create an enemy.

 Is there any reason to believe Richard Cobden and Bastiat were right - and that trade leads to peace? The largest free trade zone of the 19th century was the continental United States - and yet the Civil War happened - at great cost to many merchants in NY. Japan today is protectionist and peaceful. Its immigration policy - which is deeply antiliberal has been the impetus to incredible technological innovation. Britain repealed its Corn Laws in the 19th century, they prospered - and gradually grew dependent on foreign sources for food and manufacturing. Protectionist America came to the rescue in WWI. In the same war Germany attacked its greatest trading partner, Russia. Britain attacked its largest continental trading partner- Germany. My friend A.C. Kleinheider would phrase it this way "Britain was the free-tradingest country out there - and the most bloodthirsty in the 19th century"

I have to repeat that I do not make myself the enemy of all trade or commerce at all. My original post merely said that there are some thing more important than prosperity. Economic independence being one of them. Will may wish we lived in a world that didn't have nation states with foreign policies that intrude on the market - but we do. And politics will always interfere with a pure market system precisely because most people value some things more than unfettered trade. Why should the United States play by these idealized rules - while everyone else just laughs - as our statesman laughed at Britain. China is temporarily committed to the well being of its main trading partner Wal-Mart err, the United States.  But once we can no longer borrow billions of dollars to finance a consumer binge - China will move on to other developing markets - India perhaps. 

Will contends that economic independence does make us servile and dependent on the state. Of course - as citizens of a Republic we ought to have quite alot of say over what the state does and doesn't do through our legislators. I have no control over the Chinese state. My citizenship and geographical proximity to the events and life of my nation gives me a much greater connection to it than my duckets give me to all the other nation states of the world. You say that my economic independence chains us to the Feds in D.C.  - I say that even if it were true (it is an exaggeration) it  is better than being subject to the whims of foreign politics over which we have much less influence.

I also would ask, if Will is at all obliged to reply to this wide ranging polemic - in what ways he finds talk about national identity and common culture acceptable. He says there is a way to talk about these things that is not anti-liberal, authoritarians and all sorts of scary things. (He doesn't say fascist though I suspect he takes me for a Falangist) The implication is that talked about in a certain (acceptable way) our national identity is strong and our common culture is robust. But Ross Douthat's original response to Peter seems to imply that something of those is in jeopardy.

Oh, and even though I agree with libertarians about 90% of the time when it comes to talking about what functions of the federal government we should eliminate - I have a bad habit of emphasizing this area of disagreement with them. I have an equally bad habit of emphasizing points of agreement with the Left.