Posted on 02/22/2014 4:05:49 AM PST by Kaslin
1) I'm a pragmatist: At its heart, isn't politics supposed to be about making life better for people? If an education program sounds good, but doesn't help kids learn, what good is it? No matter how good an economic policy sounds today, if it turns your city into Detroit over the long-term, what good is it? If your stimulus program just adds to the deficit and doesn't actually "stimulate" the economy, what good is it? Unfortunately, a lot of liberals seem to choose what policies to support based on whether they make them feel nice or mean, instead of whether they work. That's a short-sighted, destructive way to govern and as a conservative, it's not something I could ever support.
2) I believe every human being has great potential: Not everybody can be Einstein, Steve Jobs, or Babe Ruth, but everybody can be good at something. A person can be a good parent, a good volunteer, the best cashier in the store -- people can do something they can take pride in. This matters a great deal because as Abraham Maslow said, "If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life." Encouraging other human beings to be their best matters not just on the human level, but as a society. Conservatives believe that everyone, no matter what his race, gender, sex or religion, has that potential to be something special.
On the other hand, the essence of liberalism is encouraging people to fail, both because failures are more likely to vote Democratic and because it makes liberals feel better to tell other people how to live their lives. So much of modern liberalism is oriented around teaching people to see themselves as victims, to be dependent on government and to nurse a sense of grievance against the rest of society. You don't become a champion on welfare. If you're waiting for the government to solve your problems, you're going to be waiting a long time. Happy, successful people don't ramble on about imaginary "micro aggressions," "white privilege," and "being held down by the patriarchy." Independence, self-reliance and seeing the government as an obstacle, not a sugar daddy are the first steps towards being all you can be in America.
3) I lack faith in government: Whether you view government as a "necessary evil" or a "good" will make all the difference in the world in what policies you support. Our government doesn't do anything as well as the private sector. It spends more, takes longer, is dumber, is less compassionate, provides terrible customer service, is difficult to deal with and incessantly congratulates bureaucrats for their mediocre performances. The more government you have in your life, the worse off you will be. The more government we have in our country, the worse off we'll all be. Despite all of that, liberals love government for a simple reason: it gives them a way to control people who would never freely choose liberalism.
4) I'm a Christian: As imperfect of a Christian as I may be, my priorities are still God, family, friends, country and conservatism. On the other hand, you can't really be a liberal and a Christian because both liberalism and Jesus Christ demand to be put first in a person's life. If you're a Christian, you're against killing babies and against gay marriage and you support Christianity. To be a liberal in good standing, you have to support killing babies, support gay marriage and at a minimum, you have to turn a blind eye to people smearing Christians on a regular basis. Calling yourself a "liberal Christian" is almost as much of an oxymoron as a "Satanist Christian."
5) I'm a student of human nature: I have a degree in psychology and have always loved figuring out what makes people tick. However, it doesn't take Sigmund Freud to conclude that people will work harder for themselves than someone across the country, that people respond to economic incentives, that morals matter, and that self-reliance is better than dependency. Liberals are forever trying to rewrite human nature from scratch in order to try to fit into some utopian vision of how the world should be. Communism wouldn't have worked if different people were in charge of it. Rewarding illegal aliens for breaking the law encourages more illegal aliens to come to this country. Paying mothers who have children out of wedlock with welfare and food stamps increases the number of single mothers. Where liberals do understand of human nature, they use it in an insidious fashion to hurt people and benefit themselves. Encouraging people to become dependent on the government so that they're more likely to vote for you is an evil act that no decent human being would condone.
) I'm a student of history: If you crack open a history book once in a while, it's amazing how much you'll learn. If you do, it'll quickly become apparent that capitalism far outstrips every other economic system known to man. You'll also find that as a general rule, the more power that's concentrated in the hands of the government, the worse off the people inevitably seem to be. You'll see that corruption and degeneracy rots societies from within, war will be ever present and most importantly, that freedom, democracy, and prosperity are rare in human history and that wise people should never take those things for granted. The wheels of history turn very slowly, but they do grind civilizations that don't pay attention to their lessons into a very bloody pulp.
7) I believe in the collective wisdom of the people who came before me: Thomas Sowell also spoke for me when he said, "Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for those are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history."
Liberals are heedless, careless and foolish with the past. They call for the overturning of traditions and doctrine that have served us well for hundreds of years based on nothing more than feelings and just shrug off the almost incalculable damage their policies cause. Like an alcoholic who thinks about nothing but where his next drink is coming from, liberals think about nothing other than their feelings in the moment without considering the consequences of their actions.
I am not a liberal, because I am not into Communism.
Man, that is good. I've been trying to put that thought into words for some time. He said it so much better than I.
10., 11., & 12. - 
As soon as I started working for a living I became a rocked ribbed conservative.
> As soon as I started working for a living I became a rocked ribbed conservative.
Seems to be one of the major differences between liberals and conservatives. Working hard for a living makes you deal with hard realities like if you don’t work, you don’t eat, if you don’t perform your work in a satisfactory way you lose your job, being responsible, respect for others, empathy, owning up to your own mistakes when you make them, etc...in other words qualities tha liberals don’t seem to possess and even when they do it appears faux.
This one is good too and applies to just anout everything except technology (written by the wisest man on Earth, King Solomon)
Ecclesiastes 1:9 (NIV)
History merely repeats itself. It has all been done before. Nothing under the sun is truly new.
(KJV)
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
https://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Classical_liberalism.html
"Modern Liberals" hijacked the word, probably because focus groups thought it sounded better than "Bolshevik".
Modern Liberals aren't actually liberal about anything except for about 18% of the human body -- the skin and genitalia.
bump
I liked the statement “I believe in the collective wisdom of the people that came before me...”
That is a good cleavage point in separating liberals from conservatives, as is the attitude towards personal responsibility (liberals believe collective responsibility is best, conservatives believe responsibility springs from the individual)
Notice that when conservatives enter office, there is not an attitude of “We are going to completely stop doing things the way our predecessor did them, and we are going to do them our way from now on.” It is usually a very measured approach, letting things go the way they did for a period of time before making changes, and those changes are usually incremental, not radical.
This is because conservatives understand that you do not need to re-invent the wheel. The problem with reinventing wheels, policies or anything else is that you often make the same mistakes the first inventor did, unless you take extra care to see why those mistakes occurred.
Liberals do not have the humility to understand this. It is why liberals are all socialists to a greater or lesser degree and believe in big, centralized government.
I use the analogy of a jumbo jet flying through the sky on auto-pilot, with no flight crew present, and a passenger opens the cockpit door and enters.
Conservatives would enter the cockpit, look around and take stock of the situation. They might look at the fuel gauge, look at the attitude and get a general feel of the situation. They probably wouldn’t touch anything right away, realizing that there are circumstances where doing something for the sake of doing something can be far more harmful. They might decide to put the headphones on, see if they can communicate with anyone, see if they can hear anything, and so on. They would probably try to find someone who could talk them down, and failing that, might try to figure out if there was anyone onboard with piloting experience.
Liberals would enter the cockpit, look around and scream out “Nobody is flying the plane!” They would jump in the pilot seat, grab the control stick and shout “We have to get this plane on the ground or we’re all going to die!” They might dive the plane towards the earth before realizing they don’t know how to turn the plane, how to apply rudder or lower the flaps and landing gear (probably wouldn’t even realize those were needed) and would simultaneously realize they had no idea how to stabilize the plane in level flight or re-engage the autopilot. The passengers, feeling the gyrations of the aircraft and knowing something was wrong, would begin to panic, and before you know it, there would be a huge flaming hole in the ground.
It is the same thing with a military campaign, an economic crisis, an environmental issue, solving an education or social problem, or just about anything else you can think of.
Liberals see the levers, dials and controls of something powerful and complicated, and instead of figuring out how they work or even if they work, they make the assumption that no matter what, they can control this better than anyone or anything that controlled it before. They don’t even think that sometimes putting your hands on the levers of something powerful is much, much more damaging than keeping your bloody damned hands OFF of them.
If it is a military campaign, they get in their armchairs and begin looking at the maps, targets and forces involved, pick up the phones and begin issuing orders and edicts to generals. You end up with the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, Desert One and Mogadishu.
On environmental issues you end up with some kind of foreign species of fish that you brought in from South America to control some other kind of issue, and it ends up destroying the native ecosystem, or on a global scale, you destroy the ability to obtain energy for an energy dependent world because you need to save the existence of the Alaskan Spotted Lugwort. They determined through their “science” that DDT made the egg shells of predatory birds thin causing their populations to decrease, and viewing it as a canary in a coal mine, outlawed DDT, thereby condemning tens of millions of people (or over the years, perhaps even hundreds of millions) to misery and death from insect borne diseases such as malaria. Even worse, you end up with liberals trying to deliberately destroy industry and economies, an attempt to plunge the entire western world into a depression, and they base their desire to do this on “Global Warming”. To sum up this particular angle and encapsulate the liberal mindset on all these issues, but most importantly environmental ones, remember this quote from a feminist wall mural I see in Cambridge, MA: “INDICATION OF HARM, NOT PROOF OF HARM IS OUR CALL TO ACTION”. Look well upon that quote...it sums up liberalism in one compact line.
If it is a economic or social issue, they begin to make policy and throw money at it without even considering for a single damned second if what they are doing is really going to produce the expected result. If it doesn’t help or makes things worse, they simply throw more money and legislation at the issue, without bothering to dismantle the agencies or defund what they did before that failed miserably. In this, you end up with Rent Control (a liberal invention which destroys the availability of affordable housing), Social Security (a liberal invention, a Ponzi scheme on a grand scale that gave people the false security they didn’t have to save for themselves) the Great Society, Welfare, School Busing, declining ability of students and failing schools, disintegration of the family and soon, socialism and Third World Squalor.
And folks, Obastard is steeped up to his oversized jug-handled ears in the arrogance and ignorance of Liberalism. He is a racist, socialist and marxist. He believes it to the core, and he is the most powerful man in the world.
We have a problem.
“socialism and Third World Squalor.”
That is not just the result of liberal policy making, it is the goal. These “liberals” running the show are not as stoopid as the conservative thinker seems to observe, they are purely EVIL. When they achieve their goal of turning the world’s greatest country EVER into “Third World Squalor”, they can crap in solid gold toilets while the peasant looks for enough meat on a dead chickens’s foot for his next meal.
I have a few issues with this.
1) “I’m a pragmatist: At its heart, isn’t politics supposed to be about making life better for people?”
No, it isn’t. Representative democracy is about efficiency in doing two things: protecting the nation from foreign enemies; and creating codified rules that at the national level protect us from government and each other; and protect us as well from abusive states.
The betterment of my life is my responsibility, as an individual and in cooperation and competition with my fellow citizens.
2) “I believe every human being has great potential.”
I agree with this statement, except it is up to the individual to determine what their potential is, and how best to achieve it, or not. An alcoholic bum in a gutter may have achieved his potential; but he has also made a multitude of decisions which lead to or away from his potential. But it is still his to have or not. He may not be happy to be an alcoholic bum in a gutter, but that is how he pursued *his* happiness. It is not up to me or the government to say otherwise.
3) “I lack faith in government.”
Liking government is a sliding scale. Most people have some degree of faith in their local government, because it is close, and they can see whether it is working or not. But the further away government rests, the harder it is to see what it is doing, or why, and it becomes less trustworthy. Importantly, this is why it is critical to keep it on a leash.
4) “I’m a Christian.”
Though they are not distinguished too much in the dictionary, Americans distinguish between the words “ethics” and “morality”. They see ethics as obeying the written laws of men, and they generally appreciate it in their leaders. Morality is far more nebulous, because it is more subjective, varying even among sects of the same religion. And most certainly in the person.
When a politician says they are ethical, they either are or they aren’t. But when they say they are moral, most people are somewhat suspicious. Do they mean the morality of their particular sect, whatever it is; or their own interpretation of their morality.
Bill Clinton would be first to say he is both ethical and moral. Everybody here would laugh at the ethical part, and likely be able to cite a multitude of times when he was unethical. But while everybody here would also insist that he was and is immoral, in his mind he might very well be a moral person. And there are likely some weird churches that would agree that he is moral.
I think this is the core flaw to liberalism. Liberals are intellectual dishonest and seem to have a complete lack of retrospection.
I am not a pragmatist; I make decisions from a position of conscience not merely efficacy. If something will produce the results I want but the process will violate my conscience, I will not ake that approach. The left thinks confiscatory taxation is okay bu I see it as theft.
Not really. It's about the enablement of certain functions that can better be accomplished in the collective than by individuals. But every function delegated to government means the loss of some individual freedom -- that's the nature of social contract.
A government that does everything for you owns you.
Conservatives do just what the name implies: they CONSERVE. They respect the validity of the past and acknowledge that the values and traditions that emerge from it have withstood the test of time. They are the accumulated experience of generations, not the whims of a few self-impressed social engineers.
Conservatives stand on the shoulders of giants. Liberals stand on the shoulders of midgets. Or the bodies of their mistakes.
And you're right. Dr. Sowell said it brilliantly!
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