Bingo. Most people (and of course there are exceptions, and the exceptions seem to be the loudest and most visible) aren’t totally liberal or totally conservative. Heck - my dad was life-time Air Force, buzz cut, as conservative as you could get. But it is surprising on how many issues he had what could be labeled a completely liberal point of view. People are just a lot more complex than we want to admit - it’s much more convenient and requires a lot less thought to simply stamp people with a label and assume we now understand them.
You’re think you’re wrong on one part, right on the other Jeff: Liberalism isn’t about love of government; it’s about not being satisfied with the outcome of markets. Markets can be broken, markets can violate standards of fairness, and so on. They’re right a lot of the time, but they’re completely fucked up in others.
Whether the government can fix the market failures is non-trivial, of course, but conservatives assume by default it can’t and work backwards form there, while liberals do the opposite.
That’s on economics, at any rate; on social/crime issues it’s strictly authoritarian/libertarian.
You’re think you’re wrong on one part, right on the other Jeff: Liberalism isn’t about love of government; it’s about not being satisfied with the outcome of markets. Markets can be broken, markets can violate standards of fairness, and so on. They’re right a lot of the time, but they’re completely fucked up in others.
Look, people who are willing to break laws for personal gain are going to do it, no matter what the economic model. The whole thing, the real issue is that any system will be broken, there will be corruption, there will be people working the system, there will be unfairness, you can’t eliminate this, no matter how much you want to. We are an imperfect species and therefore no perfect solution exists. I think the conservative position is fundementally that assuming that is the case, why would you want to make the entire population completely dependent on a government so easily broken? Markets are more agile, self correcting, beholden to the law and order as defined by a seperate government. Enron completely failed, billions down the toilet, pensions lost, lots and lots of bad, but can you imagine the feferal government experiencing such a melt down if you were dependent on it for your healthcare, employment and food? I’m not willing to risk a soviet collapse style failure of American society. Frankly, I think government bureaucracies are more fragile and private industry more robust…
Beyond that, it’s your basic judgement call on whether the priveleged “owe” the less priveleged anything. I think it’s in everyone’s interest to offer some assistance, but I don’t think poor people have any “right” to someone else’s money. That’s a sticking point for a lot of people on both sides. A lot of people think a person has all sorts of rights that I simply don’t agree with. There’s also a lot of talk about creating a level playing field, but so often these efforts seem to entail making some people stand in a hole while others are given a box to stand on. I don’t think systems to promote equality that are by deffenition inequitable are generally a good idea. The Law should be blind, but equality is a myth. People aren’t equal and you can’t make them that way.
I don’t think the real issue is optimism vs pessimism. In my mind a lot of the conflict in the country is related to individual liberties and personal responcibility. I think the framers of the Constitution knew that granting broad individual freedom demanded the acceptance of personal freedom. These days people want to have it both ways, they want as much freedom to do as they wish, but when something bad happens to them or someone else it must be someone else fault. Whenever confronted with the results of their behaviour that point to some institutional scapegoat in their defense. but this can’t last, it doesn’t work. You either run your own life and own up to the results of your own actions, or you can sign your life away and let someone else run it for you so it never is your fault. Guess which one I favor… It’s kind of an all or nothing proposition, I don’t feel that I should pay for my own mistakes AND bear the burden of someone else’s in the form of increased insurance premiums or higher prices or whatever companies have to do to defray the costs of frivolous lawsuits. Bring on the tort reform.
Maybe that’s true, but the critical part is that you have to have a “law and order as defined by a separate government.” Conservatives who want to, say, abolish the FDA forget why the FDA was established. The same with labor unions. Markets just aren’t perfect, and pretending they are is silly.
I’ve really heard some conservatives argue that we don’t need minimum wage laws or unions because in a free market, people just wouldn’t work for a company that didn’t treat them decently. And I’m not just talking about wacko libertarians.
Gav
Not what I meant at all. For example, with no minimum wage it’s perfectly legal to pay someone $1/hour. Doesn’t mean we should allow it.
For example, with no minimum wage it’s perfectly legal to pay someone $1/hour. Doesn’t mean we should allow it.
Here’s my definition of a liberal(see above)
Conservatives believe in prohibiting certain things that infringe on others’ freedom.
Liberals believe in allowing certain things to happen, rationing out freedom as they see fit.
Because of course, thats why conservatives are for the criminalization of homosexual sex.
Every broad statement has an exception – and its not the fucking exception that proves the goddamn rule.
XPav- The real problem is that there are entirely different groups of conservatives, and the sort that talks about repealing the minimum wage is generally from the libertarian wing of the nebulously defined “right” and certainly not in favor of criminalizing sodomy.
The real problem is that conservatives and liberals can be the same people. The original liberals are farther to the right than just about anybody outside of bAyn mulligan here. Add in the fact that we’ve got Swedes running around, and who knows what any of the words mean.
There really aren’t very many Burke-style conservatives in America anymore. The far right of the Republican party can be further segregated into two groups that disagree about nearly everything, libertarians and the Christian right.
It absolutely cannot be a single line, and the 2 axis Economic and Social freedom graph doesn’t really grasp enough of the relevant issues, even if one pretends there are no people that might, say, be in favor of both stricter sentencing for most crimes and decriminalizing marijuana.