And besides, I didn’t “insult” the government; I merely stated a fact. Do you deny that government is continually striving to increase its size and the scope of its authority and the amount it takes in through tax revenue?
The fact that you apparently favor those things does not automatically make it an insult to mention or oppose them.
I’m sorry, I thought the discussion was in regard to modern day conservative attitudes. I mean after all, when you guys talk about Democrats, you aren’t talking about the racist Democrats of a hundred years ago are you? Same thing. You said, in a context that clearly indicates current practices, that the U.S. uses its military to intimidate other countries into trading with us. If that’s not going on, then that can’t be a reason for conservatives to support it now, is it? (And of course that leaves out the whole argument as to whether conservatives would be in favor of that in the first place, doesn’t it? Perhaps you should start a poll on that?)
Do I deny that “government is continually striving to increase its size and the scope of its authority and the amount it takes in through tax revenue”?
Of course! Government in the USA is a community project, not some alien virus. And considering that taxes are functionally extorted from the populace through the threat of imprisonment, it’s very hard to raise them. You live in paranoia of an ever-growing tax base, but you therefore get an ever-shrinking one, & massive deficits follow.
If you were lucky, you’d only suffer hyperinflation. But you have a central bank, & it won’t let the government do that. So you have an investment market flooded with cheap Treasury bonds, which deforms the market; sure, one can invest in something productive, but a chunk of each dollar goes into T-bills for security. And T-bills are only sold in large chunks, thus, to the rich, so they in effect are a way to fund the already rich from tax dollars over the long term.
We could fix this if we stopped cutting taxes, but that’s the one thing your plutocratic masters won’t abide. So it continues. Until a socialist revolution or a sovereign debt crisis, apparently.
How’s that working out for you?
Stop being willfully obtuse. My point is that your love of the uniformed services is misplaced & bizarre. Some shooty bomby rape-all-the-gooks psychopath (which is a minority of servicemen, usually) can be a veteran & “hero” and get free medical care for the rest of his life, while those who actually serve the public–say, nurses & firefighters–are “private sector”–and “middle class” just like our “bourgeois” captains of industry?!
Somebody else might want to argue with that ridiculous nonsense, but I doubt it. As for me, I’m out.
Bullshit. Liberals do not want the government to control “our entire health care system”, they just want the government to help make sure everyone can pay their bills.
As for control by big business, they just want that rolled back. They don’t indict the whole idea of government. (Of course liberals also struggle against big religion’s influence, the conservative position being a bigger contradiction than that raised by the OP.)
Oh, and I suppose that makes you special? Unique, even, among groups of Americans?
What, those aren’t people?
Unless you can label them “intellectual,” “academic,” or “aristocratic.” I get it.
In other words, by your explanation, conservatives simply prejudiced against people with different opinions and conclusions, especially if those opinions can be said to have derived from a particular educational background.
Are people who have inherited large sums of money from their parents, whose grandparents had parents who basically got really lucky with some property acquisitions, really "harder workers"in any meaningful sense than, say, someone who works at Wal Mart? It seems, based on your statement, that if you’re “hardworking” but unfortunately not “successful,” well it sucks to be to you. You should have chosen better great-grandparents.
“Moral hazard”?? Are you serious? At this point, I just have to give and have a good, hearty laugh.
Ah, finally a statement that isn’t pure nonsense and is pertinent to the OP. Nicely done.
Precisely. As William F. himself famously said: “I’d sooner be governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than by the faculty of Harvard University.”
Doesn’t matter. For two reasons. Number one: people with inherited wealth make up a small percentange of the people from whom the government wants to take and redistribute money; and number two: it’s none of the government’s business nor yours, that their money is inherited. It was an asset created by hard-working people and as such was theirs to pass on or do as they wish, as is land, automobiles, their great-grandmother’s china, etc. Just because an asset was handed down it should not give the government free rein to take it and spend it on someone else.
Transactions between people are taxable. This is not a difficult concept.
Conservatives who are sincerely supportive of all Americans’ freedoms and see our military for what it really is probably do think it is a bit bloated. However, most Conservatives (admittedly, most Liberals as well) don’t really give a lot of thought to why they should/shouldn’t hold/not hold certain views, they just go with the flow (of their particular ideology).
The naive conservative supports our military because:
They are protecting our freedoms (without really questioning how our freedoms are protected by bombing brown people thousands of miles away).
They are patriotic (ignoring that fact that many civilians are just as patriotic or even more patriotic, dissent is REALLY frowned upon in the ranks, but sometimes dissent is the most patriotic course of action).
They are “real Americans” (for obvious and mostly valid reasons, the services stress uniformity, many people conflate uniformity with integration into society).
They are in harm’s way (getting blown up “for your country” is just so sexy, nevermind that construction workers, miners, commercial fishermen and roughnecks do a job that is much more likely to kill them. They still won’t get a 21 gun salute at their funeral).
It just seem “right” to support our troops and the military as a whole. Few Americans care to examine the cynical reasons that big business, the military-industrial complex and the government have for perpetuating a view that the military deserves some special status and reverence. It’s just a job. Not the best paying job. Not the toughest job. Not the most dangerous job. Definately not the most selective employer.
I’ve been there, done that, spent the GI Bill, but all-in-all . . . I’m just not that impressed. No offense to our troops, SOME of whom are real heroes. But, we have heroes who are accountants, cops, computer programmers, waitresses and lawyers. Most people in those trades are not heroes, just as most GIs aren’t heros. Most people, military or civilian, are just doing a job.
The “Starve the beast” idea, while embraced by some, is generally not the position of most conservatives and has never been put into practice at the federal level. It’s a boogeyman more than a real thing and doesn’t at all go to answering the OP.
The way to establish Conservative credentials is by making public statements you know to be false, examples too numerous to mention. Generally helps if the statement plays to an extant conservative bias.
There are none of these ‘naive Conservatives’. ‘Small government’ rhetoric is a conscious and fully informed falsehood. Without a quota of those, you’re no Conservative.
Everyone is for small government when defined as “government should only pursue the programs I believe in.”
Unless you happen to live in some country we occupy.
When you strip off the rhetoric and talking points, most conservatives are credulous, selfish, ethnocentrists of average intelligence who become intensely uncomfortable when in an environment that challenges their world view. Such people are easily led with a shiny uniform and some feel good nationalism.
The intelligent ones are merely greedy.
I served in the USAF in the last ten years are we were taught: " We (USAF) exist to kill people and break their shit. That is a soldier’s job, never forget that. If you can’t do that without thinking about it too much then you are in the wrong field." Despite that bit of realism, coming from the base commander and echoed by most of the high ranking officers, the majority of the new airmen still adhered to jingoistic, shallowly thought notions of patriotism; which is just the way they like it. We were told the truth to our faces that we are nothing but legal thugs enforcing the power of those in command, and most just reset their brain to “patriots fighting evil”.
Why did you edit out the sentence in my post right before that in order to add it back in yourself?