Week Three Journal Entry

I can see where much of our civilization derives from the Classical Greek period. I also see how much we have removed our own society from the ideal concept of the Greek polis state, as well as from our own American foundation beginning with the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. We would be wise as a nation to re-establish some of these principles from which our nation was founded – specifically matters concerning our justice system. It is disconcerting to frequently hear a judge sentence a criminal to a certain amount of time, but that time will realistically translate into a lesser sentence; i.e., “The defendant received 10 years in prison, but this will come out to be 5 - 6 years.” My question, then is why not simply sentence him or her to 5 – 6 years, and if there is bad behavior (as opposed to reducing the sentence because of good behavior) add on additional time for the defendant. We also see matters of the law being greatly favored for the extremely wealthy and the extremely poor. This means that the rule of law is relative or subjective to the individual. This is unjust.


I discovered something interesting to think about while reading Michael Walzer’s The Idea of Civil Society. In his essay, he states that a civil society cannot exist without the state, and therefore, a whole and complete free market society is impossible. A free market society without government inclusion leads to anarchy. What I came to realize is that there are many intense activist groups within the U.S. that support the idea of no government intervention or at least less government intervention. But, interestingly, they seem to miss recognizing that without the government these activist groups would not be able to establish any base or generate any sort of organization for their cause. If the government never took any action on behalf of the activist groups there wouldn’t be any organization of these, because ultimately, they would have recognized from the continued failure in the past of all activist organization that the government would not listen or act.
So, despite what they routinely believe to be inaction favorable to their cause by the government, the government does actually listen to their message, and often will take some sort of action. We have seen that even small groups can get the government to put pressure on the “other side” when necessary.

Walzer’s essay was the most interesting, primarily because I disregard many writings of liberally biased authors (mainly those in the newspaper), and yet I found his writing to be full of substantial points that I agreed with. I can see now why a absolute free society might become chaotic and exploitive – there still needs to be some state intervention to protect, preserve, and govern its citizens. Without state intervention what would be determined as “fair wages” for the working class. If this was an arbitrary arrangement left to be determined by free market enterprise there might be a greater exploitation of employees. Certainly, this is the worst case scenario; the best case scenario would establish higher wages based on the success of the organization. But I think it would be best to err on the side of preventing the worst case scenario.