There is more to life than wage considerations. I don’t believe that left wing politicians view government as anything more than a means for personal power.
I’m trying to parse this. Are you suggesting that you think right-wing politicians are more sincere or altruistic than left-wing politicians?
No, and on review, I did state it very poorly. Of course, the founders knew that some type of government was necessary. There always will be a need for government.
However, they viewed it as a necessary evil and not as a positive force for good. If you give the government enough power to be a positive force for good then at some point it will be a positive force for evil.
So, my first principles, ones that I believe wholly consistent with our founding, is that government should be as small as possible, only exercising its power where it is appropriate: defense against invaders and promoting public peace, health and morality.
I have no particular objection to government health laws for food service businesses, again so long as that power is exercised sparingly. My meat packing plant must be sanitary. Period. Don’t give me three hundred pages of regulation telling me how I need to clean an area and what cleaning products to use. Don’t screw with me by sending in inspectors. Have a law which punishes me with enough severity so that I will not operate an unclean meat packing plant.
And, yes, I said morals laws. Our founders recognized that people could not be both immoral and free. If a person lives an immoral lifestyle, those things lead to not being able to provide for himself. The ancient laws against fornication, sodomy, and working on Sundays had their place in that society. Having them in today’s society is absurd, even if the ideal is still appropriate.
So, coming from these principles, I am astounded that those on the left promote strong governments for good purposes. Stamping out racial discrimination, equal rights for women, generous stipends for the poor, national health care, etc. That very same government that you entrust to do those honorable things could later do dishonorable things when the fads and moods change, like: promoting racial discrimination, making sure that men are the superior gender, no assistance for black, gay or the fornicating poor, national health care for white people who don’t smoke, commit sodomy, or have Hillary bumper stickers.
A government that powerful can be the instrument for the death of freedom.
A powerful government is not the biggest threat to freedom. The fundamental purpose of government is to protect the weak from the powerful. National defense is the obvious example; separately, we are too weak to repel invaders; together, we can survive aggression. But it also extends to all the freedoms we hold dear. We can speak freely, practice our faith, own property; all would be threatened without a government that protects the weak from the powerful who could take anything they want through force. Without a strong government, civilization is reduced to the powerful preying on the weak, and the clever preying on the slow.
A federal government must be more powerful than any person or political entity in the country, or it is irrelevant.
Agreed. But we say that such a powerful government only has those few and defined powers that you describe and for those purposes you describe. The power to protect free speech, then, cannot be a power to suppress it.
If it goes beyond that, then we can lawfully object instead of resorting to revolution. The assumption of power of the federal government contains no limits. It says that it can ban or regulate certain firearms under the banner of interstate commerce. A government that can do that could say that no state may impose any barriers at all to firearms or chemical weapons. That’s not what we signed up for in 1789.
Why haven’t they done that? Because there are political consequences in a representative democracy. But if the voters decide they want more regulation on firearms, and elect representatives that support that legislation, that is not a heavy-handed federal government; it is the will of the people.
We seem to be crossing over into a federalism debate, and a gun control debate, but my basic idea is that the “will of the people,” by virtue of heavy-handed government needs to be constrained if a society is to remain free. A majority of people may believe that I should be required to wear my seat belt when driving on the public roads. A limited government ideal says that such a thing is not even within the purview of what government means in a free society, and means no more than if the majority of the people think that I should eat those brussel sprouts with dinner or not have that extra beer because I have already had too many.
A majority could believe those very things, and it could be the “will of the people” that I quit drinking and go to bed, but in a free society those things are not up for a vote of the people. Freedom, at its core, means the right to make incorrect decisions, subject only to the general power to regulate public health and morals, which itself is limited.
Which society would that be again? Libertopia? It is an unworkable fantasy that has never happened, and never will. Not even in the days of the Founders; one of the first things George Washington did as president was enforce a tax on whisky to pay for the Revolutionary War. See the Whiskey Rebellion for how it turned out for the freedom-loving moonshiners.
I don’t really consider myself a liberal or conservative, but IMHO, I do feel like there is more of a willful ignorance and generally, well, “meanness” on the right. Maybe it’s due to a stricter adherence to their conservative orthodoxy.
Take minimum wage for example. I have an MBA and work in finance, so I get the basic Econ 101 concept of price floors in a simple supply and demand model for a perfectly competitive market. But actual labor markets are much more complex and all literature I’ve read about minimum wage increases indicate that their long term results are inconclusive, possibly beneficial.
Now whether raising minimum wage is beneficial or not is not the point of this discussion. The point is, the attitude of conservatives usually comes across as especially mean and hostile. From their obvious disgust and lack of empathy for people who actually are poor, their righteous indignation to “Liberal policies” to the glee with which they share anecdotal stories of minimum wage workers getting replaced by robots (which was probably in the works long before any policies were enacted).
I notice a collective style of “jackass” that seems to follow a shared ideology.
One differing assumption that I’ve noticed in some recent debates over the new transgender laws is that a number of conservatives feel that if a group is small enough, it’s OK to marginalize them, and that sticking up for them to be treated with dignity makes no sense. I’m not talking about an attitude of “it’s a tiny group, we shouldn’t bother changing the law to fit them”, which is an arguable position, I’m talking specifically about support of laws targeting said group with attitude that no one should stand up for such a small minority.
is one outright declaration of it from this board, but I’ve seen other people with conservative viewpoints pop into threads here and on other sites to express the same attitude or ask ‘just how many people are we talking about’.
This is complete nonsense (though I believe it’s promoted in some jive floating around the internet).
Medicaid/CHIP alone are about 9%-10% of the federal budget, and other “safety net programs” are another 10% or so. Cite
In other words, the poor are poor because of their moral inferiority. Thanks for verifying one of my observations.
I think this is a good place to point out the flaws of the free market and why it might be in society’s best interest to recognize that there are some goods and services that should not be distributed purely based on ability to pay.
Recognizing that we will not let people die on the hospital steps for lack of ability to pay, we should look for the most cost effective way to achieve the result e are going to pay for anyway.
We have long recognized that education should not be distributed based on ability to pay. Why do we stop at high school? Why shouldn’t public college be free? Why should we erect another barrier beyond academic ability? Sure, this mean that there would be more demand for those limited seats at state colleges but I don’t see how society is hurt by that competition.
If we can make state colleges free by reducing federal subsidy of private colleges, I don’t even see the harm to taxpayers. The government spends more money on the average private college student than we do on the average state college student. If we equalized this spending, state colleges would be free and a lot of the shitter private colleges (particularly the for profit colleges) would be out of business.
[/QUOTE]
Calvin: This is you: AGGLE AGGLE AGGLE!
Hobbes: This is you: AA-AAUUAUU-AUAA!
Calvin: Oh, yeah? This is you: GAKKA WAKKA WAKKA!
Hobbes: Well, you go like THIS: DUHH DAHH DAHH DUHH!
Its a Republic if we can keep it.
And if the status ante was slavery, segregation, persecution of gays, then I think government is a good thing even if government can eventually lead to reversion to the status ante.
You know we have a bill of rights that was borne directly out of these sort of concerns right?
The power of the federal government to restrict firearms is limited by the constitution but I would argue that the power of the federal government to eliminate all regulation of firearms is absolute (as is the states’). I would argue that the states have plenary power under the second amendment to remove all restrictions on firearms. I would further argue that the federal government has the power to remove all restrictions on firearms under Section 8 of the constitution regarding militias.
Philosophically, what is the difference between taxpayers paying for free K-12 education and taxpayers paying for free college?
Can a person be free if their livelihood is dependent on the whim of their employer? Or if corporate interests can endanger people’s health and safety with no repercussions? Or if a person can be financially ruined due to inconsistent health care coverage?
What I don’t understand is why conservatives are so worried about big government interfering with their “rights” and yet they don’t care about the abuses and excesses of corporate power.
Why stop there. Free medical school and law school would be nice as well. I also wouldn’t mind a free house.
Freedom doesn’t guarantee a particular outcome.
When I don’t like the way UPS treats my package I can use FedEx. When the VA keeps secret sets of books and provides inferior care what’s the alternative? And about abuse of power? When Coca Cola Inc sends millions to the gas chambers than we can talk about corporate abuse of power.
I’d like to think Coca Cola Inc sending even a dozen to the gas chambers would be cause for concern.
That’s not an answer. We obviously don’t have free everything because it is cost prohibitive and no one would clean shit for a living. That still doesn’t explain what there is a philosophical difference between free college and free high school.
Again, this is a position of people who enjoy an entitled position of relative freedom. The strong and powerful dominating the weak is not “freedom” by any acceptable definition.
Which party is the one advocating the forced deportation of millions of undesirables?
And that still doesn’t explain why you are more afraid of some bizarre hypothetical Nazi Holocaust than very real issues of corporate fraud, environmental damage, poor or unsafe working conditions (maybe not by the standards of the third world countries we outsource to), invasion of privacy, unsafe or dangerous products and other shady business practices that actually do harm people, whether they do business with a particular company or not.