Tax cuts. Oil deregulation. Welfare reform has already been mentioned. And a good many weapons systems, including Stealth technology, used in the Gulf War.
Regards,
Shodan
Tax cuts? Is there a single thing a politician can do that requires * less *courage than cutting taxes? Think of how much lower our taxes could be if Saint Reagan hadn’t quadrupled our national debt. That line item in the budget for interest- give Ronnie credit for that.
There wouldn’t be stealth technology if it were not for the space program, a legacy of the JFK-LBJ era.
We’ll see just how wonderful oil deregulation is when the companies all merge and you see monopolies controlling the price at the pump. Ditto for the airlines.
Which ‘free market conservatives’ would that be? Because the vast majority of ‘right-wing’ commentators thought that the federalization of baggage screeners was a really bad idea. I don’t know of any ‘free market conservatives’ who were in favor of that plan.
And in fact, there is no evidence that federalizing those workers made any difference at all, and as time goes on and bureaucracy grows, it’ll probably make it significantly worse.
Stealth technology has nothing to do with the administration, as it is a logical development of the arms race, regardless who is in power. It should be noted, however, (if one wishes to make claims for one political group or the other) that the F117 and the B2 both got rolling under Carter. (I would not attribute them to Carter, either: the military had been looking at smaller radar signatures as far back as the 1950s, but the tools to make it happen were not available until the 1970s.)
On some things, yes. However, what’s really unfair about McGovern’s claim is that it is totally framed around what government has done, as if there would have been no free-market alternative. Since conservatives favor free-market solutions, they will always come up short in the ‘how many government programs have YOU started?’ game. Let’s look at McGovern’s list point by point:
That’s a little unfair. Liberals supported the Civil Rights ACT, a specific piece of government legislation. Many conservatives opposed it, but that doesn’t mean they were against civil rights. They just didn’t think government fiat was the way to go about it.
And if there had been no social security, and people were required to save for their own retirements, you’d see some major changes in society: The savings rate would be higher, overall public debt would be lower, there would be fewer divorces (staying married is a good hedge against financial and health problems in old age), people would have had more children (one of the big factors in the collapse of the birthrate in the west is the lack of a need to have large families to support you in your old age).
Then we can add to that the poor performance of social security as compared to private pension plans, and its actuarial unsoundness, and it seems to me that Social Security is not exactly something to be proud of.
Another huge budget buster that is going to get worse as more of the population retires and the number of working people supporting the retirees shrinks. It would have been far better to simply extend medicaid benefits to the poor elderly, and let the wealthy elderly pay for their own expenses.
This is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. There was huge market pressure to electrify. It would have happened regardless of what the government did. But they jumped in, so now they get to claim that everyone would be living in the dark if the Democrats weren’t so worried about them.
If the government hadn’t have gotten involved, there would still have been electrification, but perhaps not into the areas where it didn’t make economic sense. So society would have structured itself a little differently (and more efficiently) by centralizing a little more. And who knows? THe lack of ubiquitous power lines out into the boondocks might have stimulated research into portable power like solar and wind, and we’d all be a lot better off today.
Which is a bad thing. Minimum wage laws act as barriers to entry in the marketplace, and make a country more ‘brittle’ to economic downturns, in that when worker productivity drops, you can’t lower wages to match and you are forces to fire people. So you can’t smoothly reduce the wages of the population - it’s minimum wage, or nothing. The only reason this isn’t a huge factor any more is simply because most people don’t make the minimum wage, so the law has little effect in the first place.
WTF? Democrats get to claim credit for collective bargaining? Anyone who wants to convince his co-workers to agree to stand up to management can engage in collective bargaining. The free market ensures the right of employees to choose who they will work for, which implicitly gives them the right to negotiate their terms, either individually or collectively.
What the Democrats DID do was give unions special powers that individuals don’t have. ‘Closed Shop’ laws forced employers to hire only union employees. The result was an explosion in Union power that reached its peak in the 1970’s, and was rolled back by Republicans. To see what might have happened without Republicans checking the power of Unions, have a look at the economic destruction from rampant union power in Britain before Thatcher came to power. The Republicans saved Americans from that level of union power, which is a very good thing.
…has been a bad thing (Including the FDA in this). The Pure Food and Drug Act was a response to ‘snake oil’ salesmen. And yet, there’s more snake oil on the market now than there ever was before the PFDA came along. Except now it’s ‘herbal supplements’, holistic medicine, psychic healing, etc. The Pure Food and Drug Act was also driven by the temperance movement, since many of the snake-oil remedies were basically alcohol.
The FDA over-regulates health care and drug manufacture. It now takes hundreds of millions of dollars and over a decade to get a drug through the approval process. FDA delays in allowing beta blockers to be sold in the U.S. killed tens of thousands of people. Research and development into medical devices like artificial hearts is especially hard hit by the FDA. Having lengthy, multi-year approval processes in high-technology fields that change rapidly puts the U.S. behind. For example, lasers used for eye surgery in Canada are more advanced than the ones in use in the U.S., even though the best ones are made in the U.S. They just can’t get FDA approval for them.
I have seen no evidence whatsoever that federal aid to education has helped anyone. In fact, Republicans before Bush 43 generally were in favor of disbanding the Department of Education because there was no evidence that it was doing any good, and was just a rat hole to pour money down.
Which led to the S&L crisis in the 80’s, which cost the United States a huge amount of money. Specifically, Carter raised the insurance limit for S&Ls, which quadrupled the amount of damage they were able to do with their shenanigans.
I wasn’t aware that these were Democratic programs. Most conservatives would agree to a need for some regulations in these areas. The differences between Republicans and Democrats no doubt came down to specific policy proposals, and not the general concept.
Yeah, I’m sure the whole nation would be a parking lot without the Democrats. In fact, conservatives have argued that the best way to protect resources is to make sure that people have an incentive to take care of them out of their own economic interest.
Because after all, Republicans are in favor of starving children, like they did before 1946. Conservatives would argue that this is yet another program that has had the effect of diminishing the role of parents and leading to social breakdown as the family unit degrades. Personally, I don’t have an opinion on this one, but am inclined to believe that this program is fine. Most other western nations have similar programs.
I’ll give you this one. It was a good thing. However, it was a solution to a problem that was well on its way to being solved anyway. Since the early 1900’s the courts had been building a body of case law making it more and more difficult to restrict the rights of blacks and other minorities. If the voting rights act had never passed, We’d probably have the same level of minority participation in voting today, because societal values favor it. But the 60’s and 70’s might have been more difficult.
Feel free to take credit for this one, because a flat tax would be a much better idea. Oh, and the Democrats ran the graduated tax rate up to what, 70, 80%? Next time you’re taking credit for this, you’d better ask people if they’d like to see those kinds of rates again. The Republicans can take credit for making the graduated income tax much less graduated, and the country is better off for it.
No, many of these innovations were eventually embraced by conservatives only after the grosses excesses of the programs had been trimmed away in order to get them to pass.
Many of these programs were reasonable. I’m playing devil’s advocate here, but I’m willing to concede that some were good things. However, lots of them were turkeys, and how much better would society have been had it been able to spend the money in more productive areas?
Well, somebody in Congress voted for it. Didn’t the house pass it? Was the House of Representatives under the control of socialists? GW signed it, and as I remember seemed to think it would enhance national security.
Those “‘right wing’ commentators” you speak of don’t enact laws or change the way baggage is inspected. All they do, just like “left wing” mouths, is talk.
Respectfully: what?!?. Maybe I’m missing your point, but it seems to me that banking deregulation in the Reagan years led to the S&L crisis. Deposit insurance led to the S&L bailout, but all those S&L’s going bankrupt was caused by the businesses themselves screwing up or outright fleecing investors, combined with a new lack of oversight to prevent fraud.
Hey, the free market will take care of it. If the crooks cheat people who matter, they will eventually be forced out. Of course they get to keep their millions, but then nothing’s perfect.
For what it’s worth, I basically agree that liberals have provided much of the driving force behind a lot of the social progress that has taken place over the last century (or more).
Further, I also expect (and hope) that the liberals will win in the end and spread socialism all over the world, once the West is wealthy enough to do so.
But like other posters above, I think it’s kinda biased to suggest or imply that liberals are somehow superior because they are behind so many important reforms. The reality is that liberals also have a lot of (IMHO) dumb ideas and conservatives provide a valuable check against this. I’m thinking of things like forced bussing and gun control.
Also, there are other liberal projects that, if taken too far, would be bad. For example, progressive taxation. Also, regulation of business. Both these things are fabulous in the right measure, but disastrous if pushed too far, too fast, etc. So, like squeejee suggested, balance is likely a good thing.
Stoid, you and McGovern have are assuming that conservatives want to "offer constructive new ideas of the sort that might bring about a more just and equitable society or a more peaceful and cooperative world. "
Conservatives aren’t about new ideas; they are about locking the old ideas into place and putting a barrier around them. Look at all the decent things they have worked to protect over the years: segregation, access to guns, environmental pollution, social inequality, unwanted children, soft money contributions, and tax cuts for starving millionaires. Don’t you know the liberals are a bunch of bleeding-heart idealists always trying to fix things that aren’t broken. If not for those plucky conservatives with their foot on the brake who knows where we’d be!
cainxinth, so when have you stopped beating your wife?
** cainxinth **, you think you’re kidding, but McGovern quotes no less a conservative than Mr. buckley himself who says in his book * Up From Liberalism: * “Conservatism is the tacit acknowledgement that all that is finally important in human experience isbehind us; that the crucial explorations have been undertaken, and that it is given to man to know that what are the great truths that emerged from them. Whatever is to come cannot outweigh theimportance to man of what has gone before.” McGovern goes on to say: “The business of conservatives is, in other words, to cling tightly to the past”
I wasn’t trying to imply liberalism is the only way, or even the only correct way to govern. I agree with squeejee and lucwarm that striking the right balance is the best way. My post was intended to agree with Stoid and McGovern that the liberals have a near historical monopoly on ideas intended to improve the quality of life for more people, whereas the conservatives spend most of their time trying to maintain the status quo, ostensibly because they are in power and want it to stay that way.
They both share some blame. The nature of most S&L scams was to give out bad loans to cronies, let them default, and let the government pick up the cheque through federal FDIC insurance.
A typical scam was for someone to buy a crappy piece of land somewhere, then to ‘flip’ it to a partner at an increased price. Then they’d flip it somewhere else, always increasing the price, until the worthless chunk of land had a ‘paper’ value totally out of whack with its true value. Then they’d go to the crooked S&L, and get a huge loan secured with the paper value of this worthless piece of land. The S&L would lend them money, they’d default and surrender the worthless piece of land. The S&L would liquidate it for its real value, and the feds would be stuck with the balance.
BTW, the reason the Clintons were investigated so hard about Whitewater, the ‘failed land deal’, is because it was exactly these kinds of ‘failed land deals’ that made up the majority of bogus S&L claims.
Had the insurable amount not been increased so much, there would have been no incentive to pull this scam. And if Reagan hadn’t have done a half-hearted partial de-regulation of the industry, they wouldn’t have had the means to get away with it. Plenty of blame to go around.
Let’s look at all the major policy innovations being pushed over the last ten years - privatized retirement accounts. School vouchers. Flat taxes. The Strategic Defense Initiative. Welfare Reform. Republican ideas all. All resisted by Democrats in favor of the status quo.
The idea that Republicans favor the status quo comes from a time when they were resisting LIBERAL programs. Now that the conservatives are suggesting new ideas, it’s the liberals in favor of the status quo.
It so happens that the constitution of the United States is a rather conservative document. In that sense the Republicans want the ‘status quo’, but not for its own sake. They simply want it because it best describes their values. But once the ‘status quo’ becomes a liberal structure of society, you’ll see the Democrats fight to save it, and the Republicans fight to overturn it, as is happening now.
Yes, indeedy, Sam, lets do have a look at the those forward thinking, brilliantly innovative Conservative ideas! There are some real corkers there, yessirree Bob! (Though one hesitates to seriously consider the suggestions of someone who cannot spell “check”.)
Lets start with the best, shall we? The Strategic Defense Initiative, flattered by the nick name “Star Wars”. Damn, now there is a honey of an idea. And after only a mere twenty years, we are ever so much closer, aren’t we? Those billions of bucks, what a dandy investment. Pixie dust would have been as useful, but it is so hard to let out lucrative contracts for pixie dust.
Welfare reform? Are the poor no longer with us? Has no child been left behind? The previous homeless, they are sheltered and warm? The helplessly deranged amongst them, are they monitored and medicated now? And how does this gentle compassion of our conservative brethren, how does this boon extend to the helpless, the needy. Certainly not by the means of unemployment insurance, an extension of which appears to have escaped thier attention, so anxious were they to protect the little Mom and Pop entreprenuers, like the Lilly drug company. No doubt those whose benefits run out can comfort themselves knowing that the board rooms of E.A. Lilly are cheerfully lit by Christmas bonuses. Ho ho ho.
“Flat taxes” isn’t a paricularly conservative idea, its more like a goofy idea. No offense meant, Sam, but this belongs in the attic with the “Lamar!” t-shirts. My tax philosophy follows the simplest theorem: if A has too much, B too little, take from A and give it to B. Poverty is possibly the only problem that actually can be solved by throwing money at it.
This thread is not to argue the merits of those programs. The purpose of my message was to debunk the notion that conservatives of today are defined by their desire to maintain the status quo, while Liberals are the ones proposing new ideas.
Quite right. Allow me to rephrase. The liberals are the one’s with the good new ideas. I stand corrected.
Like, say, the complete confiscation of private property and centrally planned economies.
Interesting ideas, Vic Bit radical, though. Might be a bit much. Have you talked this over with the Libertarians?
I simple pointed out two liberal ideas that never took off in the US because we’re too conservative.