Mr. South is a principled libertarian, which is an intellectually consistent position.  Like most modern libertarians, he advocates allocation of resources by the private free market, with minimal resources committed to or controlled by public agencies.  

Such a program is predicated on an optimistic view of human nature.  Maximize people's capacity to make their own choices in pursuit of their own utility, and we maximize the total  good, public and private.  Free market liberals presume that average people possess the wisdom to make the best choices, and that the maximal public utility is congruent with the maximum private utility.

Traditional, conservative critiques of democracy, however, question the notion that the maximum good stems from the accumulation of maximized private utility.  Put a different way, for free market liberalism to be correct, the concerns about the long term viability of democracy of historical conservatives like for example James Madison, George Washington, George Mason, Fisher Ames, and Alexis de Tocqueville; or of modern conservatives like Judge Bork, George Will, or Christopher Lasch, must be false.  

Small R republicanism has, among other things, focused on the vulnerability of societies premised on popular sovereignty to corruption and decline.  Republics can die; small R republicans worry about the conditions necessary to sustain and maintain them.  Because governments premised on popular sovereignty derive their legitimacy from the people, small R republicans worry about the moral character of the people, and suggest that when the people themselves become corrupt (in various ways, and by various agencies) republican polities are in real danger of dying.

Until the 1980s, Virginia was dominated by conservatives who acknowledged the necessity of moral leadership by public figures.  Civic education was a central component of their understanding of responsible leadership.  In the 1980s, however, this kind of conservatism in Virginia was replaced by a much more impoverished understanding of the connection between public life and civic education.  For conservatives, historic sites, like perhaps Fortress Monroe, merit public funding and public protection because they contribute to the development of the public character necessary to sustain a republican polity.  

The free market, which benefits from the existence of republican public goods like the rule of law, has little direct incentive to attend to sustaining those goods.  It takes far sighted and unusually wise businessmen to recognize that in the long run, it is better for business to operate in a republican society than in an oligarchic or despotic one.  But this is a classic prisoner's dilemma--and in the ruthless logic of the pursuit of short term profit, responsible business leaders *must* attend to their short term private utility, even if by doing so they undermine republican (public) institutions and commitments.

Libertarianism fails, republican conservatives of the kind I am describing here will argue, precisely because it can not attend properly to the conditions necessary for the long term survival of the free market itself.  Judge Bork makes this argument well--take a look at his book SLOUCHING TOWARDS GOMORRAH.  Free market libertarianism and conservatism ultimately are not the same thing.  The market is ultimately amoral.  The insight that conservatives like Harry Jaffa articulate about the political leadership of Abraham Lincoln--that Lincoln rescued republicanism from the moral sterility of procedural democracy--applies with equal power to theories that derive the public good from the operation of markets and the maximization of private utility.  

All best,
Kevin

---- Original message ----
>Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2008 15:45:40 EDT
>From: [log in to unmask]  
>Subject: Re: Ft Monroe & public funds  
>To: [log in to unmask]
>
>Sell it to the private sector and let them run with it.  Public money  will 
>just be wasted.
> 
>J South
Kevin R. Hardwick, Ph.D.
Department of History
James Madison University

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