Posted on 03/10/2011 4:11:01 PM PST by arderkrag
Liberals of this day and age, by and large, enjoy labeling themselves as "progressives", implying that anyone who does not agree with their socialist, statist world views is a "regressive" by extension. The liberal party here in the United Sates, the Democrats, describe themselves as a "big tent" party, supposedly able to encompass all views as long as their goal of defeating conservatism is not compromised. The flaws in this design are numerous, though one glaring one stands out - if Democrats are the "big tent" party, why are they also the party that has to have permission from the party leadership to do so much, while so many other parties allow their members to do and say pretty much as they wish? I may touch on that one later, but right now, I want to discuss this "big tent' philosophy.
Liberals live in a big tent, by their own words - and to a degree, I guess you could say that they are right - they all want socialism. They may want it to varying degrees, but liberals are defined by wanting to spend from the public funds to channel money where they perceive a need. They want to help the poor. They want to help the ethnic groups that have supposedly been wronged. They want abortion on demand. They want "green" energy. And they want it all via government funding. As long as you want government to spend money to "help" people, the Democratic Party is for you. The problem with this philosophy, as Europe and Australia are finding out, is that liberal financial practices via socialist policies in government are simply not sustainable in the long run when added to the load already in most economic systems. Indeed, many aren't even sustainable in the short run.
Conservatives do not exist in a big tent. We exist in a continuum. A perpetual forward march, looking to the future, to what our children and grandchildren will one day have to endure. We want the blessings of liberty - free enterprise, unalienable rights as outlined in the Bill of Rights, and a government so sensibly sized and arranged that anyone can understand it - preserved for future generations, and to ensure that, we must have fiscally viable programs in place in government, and chief among those must be military programs. The world will never be at a place where one country is not the dominant military and economic force, and those two sectors of reality will always be intertwined. A country simpy cannot be at the top of the world's economy without being at the top militarily - at least, not for long. We are the ones who are actually progressive, because we want economic, military, and legislative progress. We want to move to the top.
We are in a great, so-far bloodless battle now, one that would have sent chills down Andrew Jackson's spine. A battle over fiscal responsibility, over whether to spend from the public account on programs supposedly designed to help people, or to let people decide that course for themselves.
Here's the problem with trying to regulate the economy via those programs - for free enterprise to work, it must, absolutely, include the freedom to fail. "Command and control" systems are completely incompatible with capitalism, which will always exist, regardless of how many safety nets you put in place. Indeed, the tendency throughout the history of the world in general is for command and control systems to self destruct. Anyone with a passing knowledge of the history of Rome can tell you that. It wasn't military spending that brought down the Empire - it was attempting to feed the poor, and a subclass of poor (and those who lied about being poor) who decided that the free daily bread dole was their right. Rome spent itself to extinction.
You have no rights to another man's wages, regardless of economic circumstance. You have no right to another man's time or service, also regardless of economic circumstance. Healthcare is a service. Schools are a service. Retirement saving is for those who are smart enough to carve out a place for themselves in our economic system and set some money aside for that purpose. The lessons of history are very clear in all of this. Those of us who exist in this continuum called Conservatism have learned the lessons of history. Those on the left seem to ignore them, wrongly believing we are wiser now than all the generations that have gone before, that the failed ideas of socialism would work if the only had “the right people” involved. Humility is lacking in the big tent, and everyone inside believes they should be ringmaster.
Bfltr
The sad irony is that the "progressives" are truly the reactionaries, responding to whatever immediate shallow action over shallow people gives them power. As opposed to, as you say, looking to the deeper future from historical lessons, they really really are reactionaries.
Pray that the American People wake up; Wachet Auf.
Johnny Suntrade
Good read. Thanks.
While we watch the International Socialists do their thing in the ME (for now), we should not take our eyes off of the threat here. We always have heard ‘it couldn’t happen here’.
(Currently reading about Mao’s ‘Cultural Revolution’ and stumbled across the book “Kruschev Lied” which tries to rewrite history.)
Here’s an example of a post from a ‘revolutionary’ web site....
“Do you think, for example, after a successful revolution in the U.S. that it is not possible that there could be one, two, or three million relatively consciously counter-revolutionary people actively engaged in tryingt to restore the old system? Will we merely scold them with harsh language? Is it not possible that we might have to send lots of them to prison? Is it that unlikely that, in an individual year, there might have to be 680,000 executions? Yes, that is not therepreferred method. But wouldn’t that be better, if needed, than the possibility that these assholes would succeed, reimpose the imperialist system, and again impose the nightmare of domination by U.S. imperialism on the world?
As Mao wrote: “A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”
Some things never change! -griswold3
I believe there is a wave of conservatism moving across the whole country and rightfully so.
The disastrous US economy brought out the new Tea Party in conjunction with the unchecked government spending and running up the national debt by the Obama administration.
These things along with the ramming through of Obamacare without debate and with absolutely no transparency caused even a greater rift between Reid Pelosi and Obama and his administration and that is why we had the midterm results that we did.
Now the states are trying to rein in their bloated budgets and once again the left is crying foul and yet they have nobody to blame but themselves.
The left has been exposed as the commie thugs and zombie sheep that they are.
My dad once explained to me, “The left is the only group that when told to form a firing squad forms a circle.” The more leftist infighting I see the more I agree with him.
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