Forestwalker asks: "can you articulate how what you're advocating here in regard to the political and social/spiritual sphere is different than what libertarians advocate in regard to the economic sphere?" I think the question relates more to my 2/20 Religion and Politics post more than to Subjects and Objects post where it appeared as a comment, so I'll attempt an answer here.
Libertarians believe that citizens should be given as much freedom to operate in the economic sphere as possible. In the three spheres as I talk about them, this kind of freedom is the guiding principle in the cultural sphere, not the economic sphere.
The guiding principle in the economic sphere is 'obligation'. We have an obligation to support ourselves, but we also have an obligation to the commonweal. What precisely that means can be worked out in the political sphere, where those obligations can be spelled out in detail.
This leaves room for flexibility depending on practical considerations. How much of a role should the market play? How much of a role the state play? There are no absolutes here as there seem to be in the libertarian-style market theology. It's mainly a question of people trying to figure out what works best.
One's ideas about what works best are influenced by activity in the cultural sphere where ideals and values are explored and promoted. It makes a difference if the culture is dominated by a materialistic understanding of how the world works and what motivates human action or whether religious ideals shape the soul of the culture. It makes a difference if Ayn Rand is the national prophet or Karl Marx. A culture's values profoundly influence its ideas about what is good for the commonweal economically and in turn its politics.
For me most of the persuasive work has to happen in the cultural sphere. People today feel overwhelmed by the economic complexity of the world system, and they are bankrupt of ideas about what to do or how to act in the political sphere, so the tail wags the dog, and we let it because we who know things are not right with the political and economic alignments in our society can propose no plausible or robust alternative. It's not for lack of ideas but for lack of control of the cultural institutions that determine what is plausible or not. Plausibility is in very large part shaped by what people believe is possible, which is an issue that needs to be clarified and discussed in the cultural sphere.
My own beliefs about what should happen in the economic sphere follow from some basic principles. First, each able bodied man or woman has a responsibility to himself and to the larger community to support himself and to contribute to the common good in some way. People should be rewarded for their industry, and should be allowed to accumulate wealth, but there needs to be a wall separating the wealthy from having any more political power than any other citizen. It's probably undoable, but I would be interested in exploring some formula that would create some kind of tradeoff between economic influence and political influence. The more you have of the former, the less you have of the latter. You want to be rich, fine. We'll protect your rights in that regard. But stay out of politics.
I think freedom in the economic sphere is a practical value and by no means an absolute value. Freedom in the economic sphere when promoted as an absolute leads inevitably to concentrations of wealth and power and of the domination of the weak by the strong.
I think the principle of subsidiarity should operate on the level of markets, which means that people should be able to produce, buy, and sell as they please with as little interference from governments as possible. But when things get out of balance, such as when some people are too wealthy and others too poor, a democratic state should have the power to redress the balance when it serves a democratically determined common good. What balance means needs to be debated in the cultural sphere of values and ideals.
But this isn't a radical idea. It's the basic principle justifying trustbusting, state and federal regulation, WPA- and TVA-type projects, entitlements for the disabled, etc. Such policies are Libertarian heresy.
But this is pretty much the way things worked in this country since the New Deal. No one questioned the basic principles underlying the New Deal compromise until the rise of Ronald Reagan here and Thatcher in England. I am opposed in principle to Thatcherism and Reaganism, by whose principles there is simply no such thing as a common good. That isn't to say that I wouldn't agree with their complaints that the state sometimes overstepped its bounds. But those are practical considerations, not considerations of principle.
Thatcherism and Reaganism were an extreme reaction that are unbalancing things now in the other direction, and that we allowed things to swing so far in their direction has put us in a very precarious spot. Because now the power has shifted dramatically to those with a lot of wealth, and they have expanded their influence from the economic sphere to the political sphere, and now they are using their economic and political power to dominate the cultural sphere through the mainstream media. And as a result, they determine what is plausible or not plausible; they determine what is thinkable and what not. Sure we're free to think what we want in the for now independent blogosphere, but we will be allowed to do so long as we're not a threat, and so far we're not one. We're just bloviating for the most part, me included.