after years of seeing this debate done over and over again… i still have no idea what either side believes. the political system in this country is a ridiculous agglomeration of ideology. it’s a farce.
I think this is a certain breed of Republican that you might see in certain areas of the country more than others. I certainly know a lot of Republicans in Texas who seem more concerned with “preserving their pile” than anything else. I think this comes out of fear, nurtured by Republican party rhetoric over many years, that Democrats are irresponsible, tax-and-spend nutjobs who are itching badly to get into office and raise taxes to ridiculous new levels to fund all kinds of new welfare programs.
I have heard self-proclaimed conservatives froth about this issue many times, and they seem to be fixated on the welfare bugaboo. Welfare, they reason, is where all their money is going and it needs to stop. It is the cause of all our problems and is symbolic of Democrats’ arrogance and bleeding heart weakness.
We know from the modern presidential record that the spending doesn’t really change that much under the leadership of either party, so it’s really a matter of whether you’d like a balanced budget (Clinton) or a high deficit coupled with inconsequential tax cuts.
The vast majority of church soup kitchens, crisis pregnancy centers, homeless shelters and inner city mission are staffed by God-believing conservatives who tend to lean Republican. I think they would take great offense at the notion that they are just self-serving ignoramuses who only want to preserve their ways of life.
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.
Funny, seems like most of the soup kitchens up this way are staffed by flaming, godless liberals who insist on not evangelizing or having any other agenda but to help people.
The vast majority of church soup kitchens are staffed by “God-believing” people? Shocking!
As for your other claims, I am certain you’ll be able to provide a cite.
My mom used to volunteer at a soup kitchen. They were all conservatives.
And they didn’t preach any, either. They also had an agenda of just helping people.
Well for the sake of argument, let’s grant your claim, Loopydude. You still have the problem that the majority of conservative churches DO support such efforts. In addition, they tend to support humanitarian efforts such as overseas literacy programs, well-building and irrigation in Third World countries, and large-scale charitable programs such as Compassion International and Operation Christmas Child.
Now, a cynical liberal might say, “Well, they’re still doing it out of selfishness! They just want to be noticed for their good deeds!” or words to that effect. Indeed, I’ve personally heard such claims on several occasions. Ultimately, there is precious little that one can do to reason with such individuals, as this stance amounts to interprets any good deeds from conservatives as having some sinister, ulterior motive.
The only ulterior motive I suspect is evangelism. Perhaps carriers of the meme don’t recognize themselves as vectors in those circumstances, I suppose.
And if evangelism is a factor, those churches seldom make a secret of it.
Moreover, this would still demonstrate that they are motivated by something other than selfishness and a desire to preserve their way of life. Heck, these efforts are often quite disruptive to one’s personal affairs. Just ask anyone who’s gone overseas on a missions trip, or who has chosen to teach a Bible study in an inner city mission. That hardly amounts to “preserving one’s way of life” in any realistic sense.
Well, yeah, it does very much amount to that, since one’s way of life might be to grow up in a predominantly religious society, and they wanted to keep it that way for whatever reason.
Not to mention, if they really believe that they must perform good deeds to enter Heaven, then wouldn’t such acts be self-serving in improving their chances of doing so?
Oh good grief. Is it beyond the realm of possibilty that some people do good things just because they want to do them? Because it makes them feel good? Or is the fact that it makes them feel good considered selfish as well?
And on the other hand, do the “godless liberals” only do good deeds for the noblest of reasons? Is it beyond the possiblity that they have their own agenda to push, or that they are doing good deeds merely because it makes them feel good as well? And if so, why not discount their efforts as well?
What agenda? We godless liberals got nothing to offer beyond the soup. Hell, I wouldn’t push my world view on a homeless person. It’s too bleak.
Superb post, Sam. 
[quote]
JThunder: You still have the problem that the majority of conservative churches DO support such efforts.
So do the majority of liberal churches.
There is nothing surprising about churches supporting humanitarian efforts of any kind. I just prefer the ones that do it without strings attached.
What about a non-cynical liberal?
I’m not saying that Republicans don’t do charitable work. But to make claims about “the vast majority” of people who work in soup kitchens, in pregnancy crisis counselling, etc. – without the stats to back it up – doesn’t get very far in this forum.
Also, you might want to stick with attacking “cynical liberals” here for what we’ve actually said instead of saying what you think we might say and then attacking us for that. Just suggestions.
I disagree with the OP. But I am rather amazed by what I learned in another thread about how so many Bush supporters think that Bush holds the positions that Kerry actually holds and Bush doesn’t! (What is wrong with this picture?)
Earlier, I said,
Loopydude’s responses are a perfect example of what I was talking about. If a conservative does good, then by gum, he must have some sinister, ulterior motive! No, it’s simply not possible that he would be acting out of a desire to do good! Nosiree!
yosemite was right to point out the inherent prejudice in such an attack. If you assume that the conservatives are only motivated by selfish, self-serving desires, then you can prove that they are indeed selfish, self-serving bastards. It’s called circular reasoning.
Moreover, the arguments presented to support that view simply do not hold up. For example, rjung says that religious conservatives must be doing these good deeds to get into heaven. Never mind that the evangelical churches (who comprise a huge portion of this group) quite clearly teach that good works do NOT get one into heaven (Ephesians 2:7-8). So that argument proceeds from a mistaken and fallacious assumption.
Ditto for the claim that these churches send missionaries into foreign lands because they want “to grow up in a predominantly religious society.” If that were true, then they wouldn’t be going overseas to live in poverty, in pagan lands where the gospel is virtually unheard of! Unless of course, one thinks that these individuals expect to convert the entire world within their lifetimes–a claim that no reasonable individual would put forth, and which is contradicted by church teachings.
Ah, but it’s much easier to assume that these evil conservatives can only act out of selfish desire. That way, there is simply no room for argument, eh?
US military spending fits into this small government, expanded-as-a-last-resort model exactly where? Let’s not adopt the popular euphemism of ‘defense’.
Nor does anyone else. It is just a popular caricature employed by the right.
This is where I get completely baffled.
People like my parents succeeded despite their crushing poverty, so the Republican party says, “Look! This is the rule! They were poor and now they aren’t and all poor people can do the same thing!”
People like you succeeded despite your crushing poverty, so the Republican party says, “Look! This is an exception! They were poor and now they aren’t but it’s all luck because they were trapped in the web of welfare and the rest of the poor people can’t do the same thing!”
If succeeding is something all poor people can do, then poor people on welfare are no more trapped than poor people not on welfare. If succeeding is something not all poor people can do, then acting like poor people just need to suck it up and succeed is really silly.
You’re assuming I suspect the evangelist is always acting as a conscious agent, which is not the case. Memes and vectors. Memes and vectors.