Conservatives vs Liberals

Conservatives divide the world in terms of good and evil while liberals do it in terms of the rich and poor.
- Dennis Prager

Last night I chanced into a conversation about Conservatives. Someone had written, "Conservatives support the King and are opposed to freedom".  Huh, I replied? I was told this was part of a college paper about France just before the revolution. OK, that made more sense but I then tried to explain that Conservatives are not anti-freedom. Instead they are anti-change (usually) and particularly anti-anarchy.

Conservatives believe their world is good and things can only change for the worse.
Liberals believe the world is in bad shape and that things can only change for the better.

Both are half-right, half-wrong. Not everything is good, there is suffering and misery, but not all change is for the better. Conservatives need to do a better job of explaining why certain liberal ideas are dangerous (based upon history and experience) and do a better job addressing problems instead of living in the status quo.

This morning I came across a blog with a different comparison of Conservatives vs Liberals. It comes on the tail of the story about popular Democrat Anthony Weiner who was accused of sending a picture of his crotch (in shorts) to a girl via Tweet. At first he denied it and said he was hacked. Some left-leaning media blamed the right-leaning Andrew Breitbart for framing him or making it up. But then under mounting evidence and the account of several women, Weiner admitted it and apologized to Breitbart. So what was the Liberal media response to being wrong? Apologies? No. Instead they counter attack with "At least Weiner is not a hypocrite".

What does this mean, asks a blogger named Zombie.



How can this be? Why are conservatives hypocrites when they err but not liberals? Zombie expands his diagram to show the unspoken assumptions behind the argument.

"Remember, that’s not my characterization of liberalism — that’s liberals’ own characterization of themselves when they use this argument", says Zombie. In the extreme liberal world everything is tolerated and allowed, there is no "wrong", so there is no sin. The hypocrite defense claims that only people who believe in sin can be held accountable for sinning.

Bottom Line

Zombie comes to a close with a nice analogy:

Consider these two statements from two different potential husbands:

“I know I promised to stop drinking forever, honey, but I fell off the wagon again; please forgive me, and I’ll really really try to stay sober from now on, but no guarantees.”

vs.

“I’m a tertiary alcoholic, a stone-cold drunk; always have been, always will be. You’re not likely to ever see me sober. Take it or leave it.”

If you had to choose, which would you marry?

National Indolence

"A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have." – US President Gerald Ford

"Left-wing politicians take away your liberty in the name of children and of fighting poverty, while right-wing politicians do it in the name of family values and fighting drugs. Either way, government gets bigger and you become less free."- Harry Browne

While I’m a big fan of the Tea Party movement, one thing that it lacks is a clear vision and purpose. What are they opposed to and why? A simple answer is an opposition to a huge government debt (Obama has added more to the national debt than all prior presidents combined!) and the long-term effects this debt will have. But a better answer can be found in a lecture given by Canadian author/journalist Mark Steyn to Hillsdale College in New Hampshire in March 2009. It is titled “Live Free or Die”.

"The President [Obama] wants Europeanized health care, Europeanized daycare, Europeanized education, and, as the Europeans have discovered, even with Europeanized tax rates you can't make that math add up. In Sweden, state spending accounts for 54% of GDP. In America, it was 34%—ten years ago. Today, it's about 40%. In four years' time, that number will be trending very Swede-like."

European-style Big Government is not cheap and or even mathematically possible in the long run. It consists of “unsustainable entitlements that turns the entire nation into a giant Ponzi scheme.” But Mark goes beyond the rhetoric of the Tea Parties to show that the real problem is NOT cost but rather the very nature of the entitlements:

They're wrong because they deform the relationship between the citizen and the state. Even if there were no financial consequences, the moral and even spiritual consequences would still be fatal. … When governments annex a huge chunk of the economy, they also annex a huge chunk of individual liberty. You fundamentally change the relationship between the citizen and the state into something closer to that of junkie and pusher—and you make it very difficult ever to change back.

Mark Steyn describes five stages on the path to Indolence and loss of liberty.

Stage 1: "The benign paternalist state promises to make all those worries about mortgages, debt, and health care disappear."
This is the fun and easy stage. Everybody wins!

Stage 2: "The state as guarantor of all your basic needs becomes increasingly comfortable with regulating your behavior."
As AIG, Chrysler, and bank TARP recipients have learned, government handouts come with strings.

“If you're a business, when government gives you 2% of your income, it has a veto on 100% of what you do. If you're an individual, the impact is even starker. … Under Britain's [free] National Health Service, for example, smokers in Manchester have been denied treatment for heart disease, and the obese in Suffolk are refused hip and knee replacements.”

But instead of fearing the new rules, citizens of every Western nation are eagerly dumping freedom for government ‘security.’ Sacrificing “the freedom to make your own decisions about health care, education, property rights, and a ton of other stuff.”

It's ridiculous for grown men and women to say: I want to be able to choose from hundreds of cereals at the supermarket, thousands of movies from Netflix, millions of songs to play on my iPod—but I want the government to choose for me when it comes to my health care.

Stage 3: "When the populace has agreed to become wards of the state, it's a mere difference of degree to start regulating their thoughts."

[Today] too many of the institutions healthy societies traditionally look to as outposts of independent thought—churches, private schools, literature, the arts, the media—either have an ambiguous relationship with government or are downright dependent on it.

Stage 4: "dissenting ideas and even words are labeled as ‘hatred.’ In effect, the language itself becomes a means of control."
In American the rights of Free Speech are being eroded as anything controversial is labeled as ‘hate speech.’ Consider the furor over Miss California for publicly saying she is opposed Gay Marriage.

Stage 5: Stupor - "Give people plenty and security, and they will fall into spiritual torpor,"

"When life becomes an extended picnic, with nothing of importance to do, ideas
of greatness become an irritant. Such is the nature of the Europe syndrome." -
Charles Murray in In Our Hands.

"In most of the developed world, the state has gradually annexed all the responsibilities of adulthood—health care, child care, care of the elderly—to the point where it's effectively severed its citizens from humanity's primal instincts, not least the survival instinct." - Mark Steyn

Bottom Line

Mark Steyn summarizes the five stages of Indolence as:

1. Stimulus or bailout


2. Comes with quid pro quo strings attached


3. You’re told what to do


4. You told what you’re forbidden from doing or saying


5. Results in the infantilization of a population with no responsibilities or cares

The results can be demonstrated by a Dutchman commenting upon the accelerating Islamification of Holland,

"I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it."