Being a Canadian I’m not a Republican, but I would be voting that way this year if I were American.
I grew up poor. Surrounded by welfare families. I saw what welfare did to people. I also grew up in an area surrounded by native reservations, and I saw what their perpetual welfare did to them.
My family was too proud to take welfare. My mom raised two boys by herself, working late hours. I had a job from the moment I was old enough to stuff flyers or deliver papers. By age 14 I was working 20 hours a week in a grocery store.
My mom had friends on welfare, and they thought she was crazy. They sat home all day and watched their ‘stories’ and drank. And they had more money than we did, and access to more services.
But you know what? My family rose out of that neighborhood. And most of them stayed there. I had friends I grew up with there who are STILL living in that neighborhood - second generation welfare families. They are constantly angry, convinced that they have been given a raw deal, and convinced that it is impossible to succeed.
I also grew up during the cold war, and I studied communism extensively. I wondered why so many countries that started with glorious plans for the worker wound up as despotic hellholes. They couldn’t all have had the bad luck to have megalomaniac assholes for leaders. That led me into economics, and the works of people like F.A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ludwig Von Mises, and others. I learned that central planning doesn’t work, can never work, and invevitably leads to oppression. There are solid reasons for this, having to do with the inability of central government to collect and use the vast amount of information required to control a modern economy. It simply cannot work. It is a fairy tale.
I also learned that Capitalism is far from being anarchy - that the mechanism of the market is actually a complex structure for regulating behaviour and tranferring information between producers and consumers in a highly optimized manner. It is an evolved mechanism that works very well on average.
Thus my world view: Be skeptical of government. Always, always look for the hidden costs and unintended consequences of the latest government plan to fix things. Understand that there are no free lunches, and that the larger the government program, the more likely it is that it will turn out to be an oppressive, inefficient system that is impossible to kill.
There is also something fundamentally noble about capitalism. Socialism divides people into groups - taxpayers and recipients. Oppressors and the oppressed. Rich and poor. You are either rich, in which case you owe someone part of your wealth, or you are poor, in which case someone owes you. But I believe that humans have a right to live for themselves. The poor do not have a moral claim on the rich, and the rich do not have a moral duty to serve the poor.
As I’ve gotten older and a little less idealistic, I can see the shades of gray around the edges. I recognize that there are times when capitalism fails. I also recognize that it is in all our interests to help the desperately poor, the infirm, and other strongly disadvantaged people.
The conclusion for me is that the right amount of government is a government that protects us from internal and external violence; a government that regulates the market enough to prevent it from breaking down into market failures; a government that regulates our behaviour enough to prevent 3rd party harm from pollution, maintains access to public parks and other common assets, and taxes enough to pay for these functions.
I wholeheartedly reject the notion of government as nanny. Freedom means not just freedom to succeed, but freedom to fail. Freedom to make bad choices, and the freedom to suffer the consequences of those choices. Freedom to choose to be lazy instead of hardworking, but the freedom to suffer the ecnomic consequences of that choice.
I believe in equality of opportunity. I do NOT believe in equality of outcome. I believe it is wrong to tell people where they can work and for how much, who they can trade with, what they can put in their bodies, what kinds of businesses they can run, whether people can smoke in their restaraunts, what safety gear they need to ride their bicycles or drive their cars, and all the other trappings of the nanny state.
Finally, I believe that government is the most dangerous institution on the planet. It may be necessary, but it is dangerous. Therefore, its scope should be kept as small as possible, and expansions of government power should only take place as a last resort, and not just because someone has a ‘plan’ to ‘improve’ things. Thus my opposition to socialized medicine, socialized day care, industrial policy, tax-the-rich schemes, and the creeping regulatory fascism of the modern state.
I believe my belief in these principles is firmly grounded in solid economics and science. There is nothing at all close-minded, bigoted, or hypocritical about it. My beliefs are shared by a large collection of nobel prize winners in economics and some of our greatest leaders.
Now, I’m not a social conservative. I’m more of a Libertarian. But I understand the social conservative argument, and they have good points that at least deserve to be considered without sneers and derision. Their basic point is that society is an evolved structure. Institutions like marriage and the family unit serve important functions, some of which we may not even fully understand. The conequences of meddling with them are unclear, but potentially dangerous. So they tend to act as a resistive force against the tendency of some to constantly push for change to ‘improve’ things.
I don’t look down at Liberals. I understand their motivations, which I think are honorable. I just happen to think they are wrong, and that many (not all) of the things they work for will do more harm than good in the long run. I think they tend to think of only the most rosy outcomes of their policies, and refuse to see things like the disincentive effects of welfare, the damaging effect of disrupting the information flow of the markets with constant regulatory meddling, and the sheer folly of thinking that you can be smart enough to manipulate the market into ‘better’ outcomes.