Peter Schweizer: Conservatives more honest than liberals? (Relatively speaking, well, er, yes.)

Commentary - Peter Schweizer: Conservatives more honest than liberals? Jun 2, 2008 3:00 AM (10 days ago) by Peter Schweizer, The Examiner

The headline may seem like a trick question — even a dangerous one — to ask during an election year. And notice, please, that I didn’t ask whether certain politicians are more honest than others. (Politicians are a different species altogether.) Yet there is a striking gap between the manner in which liberals and conservatives address the issue of honesty.

Is it OK to cheat on your taxes? A total of 57 percent of those who described themselves as “very liberal” said yes in response to the World Values Survey, compared with only 20 percent of those who are “very conservative.” When Pew Research asked whether it was “morally wrong” to cheat Uncle Sam, 86 percent of conservatives agreed, compared with only 68 percent of liberals.

Ponder this scenario, offered by the National Cultural Values Survey: “You lose your job. Your friend’s company is looking for someone to do temporary work. They are willing to pay the person in cash to avoid taxes and allow the person to still collect unemployment. What would you do?”

Almost half, or 49 percent, of self-described progressives would go along with the scheme, but only 21 percent of conservatives said they would.

When the World Values Survey asked a similar question, the results were largely the same: Those who were very liberal were much more likely to say it was all right to get welfare benefits you didn’t deserve.

The World Values Survey found that those on the left were also much more likely to say it is OK to buy goods that you know are stolen. Studies have also found that those on the left were more likely to say it was OK to drink a can of soda in a store without paying for it and to avoid the truth while negotiating the price of a car.

Another survey by Barna Research found that political liberals were two and a half times more likely to say that they illegally download or trade music for free on the Internet.

A study by professors published in the American Taxation Association’s Journal of Legal Tax Research found conservative students took the issue of accounting scandals and tax evasion more seriously than their fellow liberal students. Those with a “liberal outlook” who “reject the idea of absolute truth” were more accepting of cheating at school, according to another study, involving 291 students and published in the Journal of Education for Business.

A study in the Journal of Business Ethics involving 392 college students found that stronger beliefs toward “conservatism” translated into “higher levels of ethical values.” And academics concluded in the Journal of Psychology that there was a link between “political liberalism” and “lying in your own self-interest,” based on a study involving 156 adults.

Liberals were more willing to “let others take the blame” for their own ethical lapses, “copy a published article” and pass it off as their own, and were more accepting of “cheating on an exam,” according to still another study in the Journal of Business Ethics.

Now, I’m not suggesting that all conservatives are honest and all liberals are untrustworthy. But clearly a gap exists in the data. Why? The quick answer might be that liberals are simply being more honest about their dishonesty.

However attractive this explanation might be for some, there is simply no basis for accepting this explanation. Validation studies, which attempt to figure out who misreports on academic surveys and why, has found no evidence that conservatives are less honest. Indeed, validation research indicates that Democrats tend to be less forthcoming than other groups.

The honesty gap is also not a result of “bad people” becoming liberals and “good people” becoming conservatives. In my mind, a more likely explanation is bad ideas. Modern liberalism is infused with idea that truth is relative. Surveys consistently show this. And if truth is relative, it also must follow that honesty is subjective.

Sixties organizer Saul Alinsky, who both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton say inspired and influenced them, once said the effective political advocate “doesn’t have a fixed truth; truth to him is relative and changing, everything to him is relative and changing. He is a political relativist.”

During this political season, honesty is often in short supply. But at least we can improve things by accepting the idea that truth and honesty exist. As the late scholar Sidney Hook put it, “the easiest rationalization for the refusal to seek the truth is the denial that truth exists.”

Peter Schweizer is the author of “Makers and Takers: Why Conservatives Work Harder, Feel Happier, Have Closer Families, Take Fewer Drugs, Give More Generously, Value Honesty More, Are Less Materialistic and Envious, Whine Less ... And Even Hug Their Children More Than Liberals” (Doubleday).

I guess that's why it's okay , in their minds, to raise taxes,because they never intended to pay them anyway.

You say that as a joke, however during the Clinton years, there was open discussion of just that concept in calculating tax rates.

I am sorry! I forgot my sarcasm mark ups! Here you go; as it should have read:

>sarcasm<I guess that's why it's okay , in their minds, to raise taxes, because they never intended to pay them anyway.>/sarcasm<

Never would, could I ever think of what these people are doing as a joke. They are stealing our nation's lands right from under us and are giving it to the United Nations thugs, theives, child abusers and sex slavers.

They have enslaved us with taxes that are so overbearing that American mothers must leave their own children to go to work just for a roof over their children's heads; never mind that the taxes are paying for Illegals to come in and take up the slack left by the children that American mother's could not afford to have themselves. Never mind that trillions of our hard earned tax dollars go to pay for other countries' 'poverty'; they all have America's nation of tax and property right's slaves to pay for it. Ask Obama - Obama bill: $845 billion more for global poverty Democrat sponsors act OK'd by Senate panel that would cost 0.7% of gross national product

They have written so many laws that even the Supreme Court Justices seem to have no idea that their sole purpose is to interpret the law solely according to the United States of America's Constitution.

They have stolen our property rights, in the name of 'environmentalism', which is new name for 'expertism', which is a new code word for a class system which has already been imposed. People with college degrees who are the new 'experts' believe that they have a monopoly on correct information. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Yet degrees and grades are used as a whole system to separate one class which has access to more rights than the class which does not have a certain degree. They believe in this so much, that all of 'Affirmative Action' is based on it. They gave away free 'educations', (take a look at Mrs. Obama's thesis), in order to make them equal to other successfully people. The problem is is that that the education had to be dumbed down to accommodate such stuff and with the dumbing down, the integrity of a true education has been lost. It is no longer a matter of ability, correct information, and sound reasoning, but a degree has become a matter of being 'politically correct' of appeasing the various persons of propaganda who have been put into the place of real history, literature, and arts professors.

They ignore 'voters' input with impunity. They would have us believe that someone with as anti-American capitalism and freedom as Nancy Pelosi can rule the congress with an iron fist. No, it's just that all of congress agrees with Nancy Pelosi. Otherwise they would be doing the wise and American strong thing of making us energy independent, keeping taxes low, and ensuring preferences of doing business with American business, not outsourcing our military needs to foreign countries, by disallowing other nation's government subsiding their business to under price our business on our own shores. We must not trade American jobs for other nation's government's expansion. It's a fallacy that this improves relationships. A good long term relationship is never based on the weakening of a member of that relationship. Sooner or later the one that has been made stronger at the other's expense will despise them and attempt to take everything which the now weakened party can no longer defend. Why will they despise them? Because what they now have was not earned, but given, or taken under false pretense. They have not developed the ability to earn themselves. They know they have no self worth, so despise the ones who could not see the truth of them.

McCain is really a 'new' Democrat from the Clinton political arena, he refuses to listen to to the nations outcry against his wholesale invitation to Illegals entering this country.

McCain refuses to listen to the nation's out cry against; giving the United Nations or any other organization which does not answer to American voters, any rights to tax us, no matter how they are disguised. 'Carbon credits',( a product of the Kyoto Treaty negotiations) which he masquerades as 'cap-and-trade', legislation that McCain has supported and sponsored with Joe Lieberman. McCain's support for S.2191, America's Climate Security Act of 2007, is in direct opposition to even the Bush administration, which blasted it earlier this year at a U.S. Chamber of Commerce meeting.

A Democrat like Zell Miller who has integrity and a love of this country in the face of what ever Europeans may be attempting to pressure our leaders into feeling about this country, would make a better leader than a 'Republican' McCain.

We need someone with a solid system of 'American first' values who can make even members of the opposing party want to join their leadership in support of this country and not against this country as the present majority is is insisting on doing under Pelosi's leadership.

Americans, as the nation that unanimous made the "Declaration of the thirteen United States of America When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.......", needs to go back, reevaluate our present condition in relation to that whole declaration made by our forefathers, and clearly define what direction we wish this country to go from here.

Our forefathers had the decency to let it be known what their intentions were. What we are now up against does not have any such fine sensibilities, they are achieving everything through lies, deceptions and theft. All the while denying that they are doing anything. Calling things by the name of exactly what we want but not of what it is.

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