If Concordian economics is that good, if it is indeed a discipline rooted in morality, it ought to help us solve some of the most delicate moral conundrums of our age. Let us explore whether this is true. Let us explore whether Concordian economics can truly help us solve moral dilemmas.
Some Implications of "Socially Enforced" Love
First, let us recognize that a deep reason for the deep divisions that exist in the political world today is an explicit form of what our Founding Fathers feared most, the control of the majority over the minority. This control is more easily enforced if it is shrouded in the cloak of morality (or moralism), but this condition rubs salt in the wounds of the minority. Let us give it its proper name, if we want to discuss it. This is a form of enforced love.
Laws to force minorities to pay for abortions is one such case. But so is the Court enforced compulsion of shopkeepers to serve the LGBTQ community, a practice that stands against some shopkeepers' moral grounds.
This is not the way to build social and political concord, an achievement that can be reached only out of spontaneous mutual respect and mutual love.
These are clearly cases of conflicting forms of love. At present, the majority clearly is attempting to have the minority respect their love for people who want an abortion and LGBTQ people. This is a form of enforced love.
This type of enforced love runs against the moral standards of what presently is the minority of people who find their moral standards against abortion and against the acts of LGBTQ people fully squashed. The majority clearly has no love for the minority.
My task here is not to express my own judgments. My task is to find ways whereby the moral standards of both groups are respected.
Some Proposed Solutions
One of the hidden promises of Concordian economics is that the gradual implementation of its policies will lead us to economic freedom for all. The freedom to do anything we want to do with ourselves that does not physically or morally injure others.
Let us start with abortion. We should respect the man or woman who cannot tolerate paying for other people's abortions, who cannot tolerate being forced to serve "immoral" people's needs. It certainly requires much educational work from moral authorities to ascertain the truth, the moral truth of opposing claims, but why should anyone be forced to love The Other? The effort only produces widespread, repressed, uncontrollable hate.
This is a play of moralism/immoralism of the highest kind.
If people become so wealthy as to be able to pay for their own abortions, much of today's horrible legal and political muddle will be resolved. Above all, abortion will then be openly talked about as a moral issue. This condition ought to turn out to the benefit of everybody, even the person who requests an abortion today because, if all the moral implications are dealt with at the moment, future remorse is unlikely to occur. Remorse is life-long torment.
Some will say that this is a very long term utopian solution. Some people will never be able to accumulate enough savings to pay for such expensive procedures. Well, within the confines of Concordian economics a workable solution can indeed be found. An institution like Planned Parenthood, no longer funded by the State, might rather easily be turned into a private social insurance program.
If the finances so require at least for the near future, let Planned Parenthood run appropriate fundraising campaigns. Being taken out of the control of the State is a condition that Planned Parenthood might eventually find very consonant with its principles.
Another case. With the Courts staying out of it, because the refusal to serve the LGBTQ community is perhaps a supreme expression of moral conscience, with economic independence well assured through Concordian economics policies, shopkeepers should be able to withstand the backlash of pronounced boycotts of their stores. The majority of the people will in time come to their rescue.
"With the Courts staying out of it" is, of course, a big IF that cannot even be discussed today, but it ought to be openly and squarely discussed tomorrow because it is an unmitigated attempt to force a minority through the will of the majority. This is a major political sin that is universally paid with deep divisions in the social fabric.
Another case. The case of the use of bathroom and shower stalls by transgender students. Well, the solution, the economic solution is easily indicated. Let the schools build stalls that are reserved specifically for GBTQ people. Spend the money; build as many stalls as needed: you can clearly label them M/F and F/M.
And then we come to what perhaps is the most complex case of all, the case of same-sex unions. Speaking personally in order to make a complicated case more easily treated, I fully accept the wisdom of public recognition of same-sex unions. If people love each other, they ought to be free to shout their love to the four winds. The closeted treatment of homosexuality and especially homosexual unions in the past certainly led to many untenable economic practices, from discrimination in the job market to danger of exposure to pecuniary blackmail to public shame to denial of hospital visitation rights.
All the rights that are available to traditional married couples ought to be available to same-sex couples.
There is one right that I will personally forever withdraw from such couples. The right to call themselves husband and wife. This is a dangerous corruption of the language that does not bode well for long term harmonious relations among all people of the earth.
My "cry" is this:
Same-sex couples are certainly among the brightest people on earth. Can't they come up with their own name to specify their relationship? I bet, when they find such a name, they will no longer be treated to a potential reversal of the privilege they have obtained today.
One More "Social" Problem: Immigration
Immigration is undoubtedly one of the most complex social/economic issues to resolve in a modern society. It is full of zero sum operations, at least in the short term. Allowing more immigrants in, certainly eases the pain suffered by people who, for one reason or another, are displaced from their own countries. Even though it is a highly disputed territory, it seems to me that with immigrants ready to take a low paying job there is a negative effect on local wage earners. Local nationals might lose a job or they might be offered a lower paying job.
Only gods can perform such balancing acts as to offer just solutions to all members of the local and the immigrant population. Whether true or not, whether there are cases of positive sum games, politicians are not able to cross the bridge on a tight rope without a safety net. They often fall; and they carry down entire generations with them.
What is the solution that Concordian economics offers? The solution to the delicate social and economic problems tied to immigration is a radical one, radical literally in the sense of going to the root of the problem. The US Government should do all it has in its power to do to encourage foreign nations to solve their own emigration problems.
Fostering the creation of an international currency such as the Bancor and encouraging foreign nations to create and distribute their own (Bancor)-currencies along the lines suggested by Concordian monetary policy for the United States would go a long way toward the creation of a just and peaceful international order.
Conclusion
Can we imagine the lower temperature with which such hot issues will be discussed, if they are indeed discussed within the real economic freedom afforded by Concordian economic policies to everyone living on earth?
That is the only way we are going to obtain a world of concord in politics as well as economics. A world of Concord as distinguished from a world dominated by bullies. See The Redemption of the bully, a book now translated in eight foreign languages.
To mix money with politics and morality does a disservice to us all. The real damage? We will talk about solutions ad infinitum, but none will be available if we divorce economic freedom from political freedom from moral freedom.
Oh, let us even stop worrying about "money." That is to remain slave to Mammon. Let us spend our lives focusing on art, and science, and philosophy, and religion, and mysticism instead.
These are open recommendations for the Biden-Harris' Transition Team. Do not squander the opportunity offered us by COVID-19 to create a "new world." Above all, make good use of Albert Einstein's deep, wise realization:
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."
Be bold. Be innovative. Be comprehensive. Encourage all nations of the world to be bold, innovative, and comprehensive.
COVID-19 seems to be doing just that all over the world: bold, innovative, and comprehensive. And it does operate indiscriminately everywhere. Are our huge brains going to be defeated by such a tiny entity as a virus?
Carmine Gorga – see Wikipedia, Google Scholar, and Gravatar (a Globally Recognized Avatar). He is a Fulbright Scholar, president of The Somist Institute. In 1965, after a summer of intense intellectual struggle with the General Theory, Dr. Gorga changed one equation in Keynes’ model of the economic system and found himself in a completely new intellectual world; this is the world of economic justice (not social justice) that existed before John Locke and Adam Smith. The transition to Concordian economics, greatly assisted by Professors Modigliani and Burstein, can be found in The Economic Process (2002), a book whose third edition has been annotated—again—by JEL in December 2017 (p. 1642). For the fullness of economic justice, the core of Concordian economics, see here and here. For a full understanding of Concordian economics, Gorga has gradually realized, we need to go beyond Individualism and Collectivism, toward Somism (men and women in the social context); from Capitalism and Socialism/Communism we need to go to Concordianism; then we need to pass from Rationalism to Relationalism. See The Relational University of Gloucester, MA.
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