Hey Zach, thanks for the recommendation. I responded to the Sowell arguments I'd heard the most in this post so, to my knowledge, these were the ones most people latched onto. I went ahead and listened to A Conflict of Visions since it was in my library's free audiobook app. I have to admit that this was one of the more frustrating Sowell text to read and I think it demonstrates to me the intellectual bad habits his work encourages in people. If you want a more detailed analysis than what I can offer in a quick response, I largely agree with this review by Bryan Caplan (a fact that surprised me, because I am not an admirer of his, but when someone's right, they're right). https://medium.com/@danielbier/bryan-caplans-review-of-a-conflict-of-visions-e2babd86e610
The upshot of Caplan's review, and where I was nodding along, is that 1) the unconstrained and constrained visions are not internally consistent as Sowell insists, 2) the examples he chooses are at best arguable and at worst inexplicable given his operational definition of the two visions (though I disagree with Caplan that Paine was a libertarian; this is a rather tedious 21st century reading of Paine), and 3) his categorization is wildly inconsistent due to switching between his operational definitions and his informal descriptions. I think Caplan's concluding proposal to just categorize people by whether they're "laissez-faire" or "statist" is rather flat-footed, but I think he's right that "each of the polar views has supporters with a wide range of underlying assumptions."
Ultimately (and this is where you get the Christian socialist perspective) this is why I get very tired with this sort of analysis: it seems to me, at least, to be an easy win. People are socialists or liberals or whatever because they all hold this shared delusion about human nature and social possibilities, whereas conservatives are the wise ones who can see that human beings are flawed by nature, whose programs are "constrained" and thus reasonable in comparison to utopian leftists. But there just isn't any such secret key to political differences. I'm deeply ambivalent about human beings' ability to improve, and I honestly think that position leans me toward socialism rather than capitalism. If human beings tend to abuse concentrated power, it would make sense that you would not want an economy that leads to—and almost requires—extreme concentrations of economic power into a few hands. I'm sure optimists about human nature can give an account for socialism as well, but I think that just underscores the point that there is not One Consistent Ideological Divide underpinning political differences.
I hope this was a helpful response—let me know if there was anything else specifically you wanted to hear my response on from this book and I can give it a try.
