Liberals more intelligent?

Great Debates
61

:rolleyes:
My wife is a professor at a state medical school, where she works her buns off. However, if she were doing a lousy job, there’s little the school could do, since she has tenure. Some of her collegues do minimal work. The system barely rewards industry or punishes laziness.

Most government workers have little economic incentive to do a great job (although many do so.) In particular, the administrators have little economic incentive to produce the greatest amount of productivity at the least cost. Their selfish goal is to look good in the eyes of those in power who are doling out the money (doling out OUR money.)

Anyone who advocates more government regulation is hoping that the regulators will do an effective job for the public, although they have little economic incentive to do so. Setting up government regulatory schemes ignores the selfishness of government workers. Unfortunately, it’s easy to find examples of government regulators who use their power for political purposes, such as Mary Frances Berry, chairwoman of the US Commission on Civil Rights. Other regulators are rouotinely corrupt, like Chicago’s housing inspectors. A larger number appear to basically not give a damn.

Anyone who opposes school vouchers is advocating a system that ignores selfishness. Many inner city school teachers and administrators have given up (and who can blame them?) They fight like crazy against vouchers, for fear that a parochial or private school might do a better job. Imagine a world where they had to teach more effectively than others to keep their job, just as my company has to beat the competiton to stay in business.

62

What is the deal with the conservative flip-flop on the existence of the Department of Education and the DOE anyway ? Are these departments not still the evil empires we had been told they were ? How did it happen that conservatives now embrace the existence of these bureaucracies ? Surely there is some more flattering explanation than that they finally got a clue as to how such large federal bureaucracies might actually be useful for handling real world problems ?

63

Look guys, both Democrats and Republicans have been responsible for some tremendous blunders, and both still have horrible blind spots. Opposition to free trade has been led by Liberals for a long time, even though that position is completely irrational, ignorant, and even stupid. The benefits of free trade are one of the few economic principles that is almost universally agreed upon by economists.

There are a lot of economic issues on which Democrats show amazing ignorance. The effects of minimum wage laws, price controls, and other government interventions in the marketplace are well known by economists, yet virtually ignored by modern liberals.

Liberals have also proven to be extremely simplistic in their views on such things as overpopulation, availability of resources, etc. Liberals in the 70’s were the ‘gloom and doom’ crowd, constantly harping about the disasters just around the corner. Many of us who actually studied these issues and understood them absolutely knew that they didn’t have a clue what they were talking about.

Conservative Julian Simon won a famous bet with liberal Paul Erlich (author of, “The Population Bomb”), in which he told Erlich to pick any ten commodities he wished, and Simon would bet him $500 that in ten years the average price of that group would drop. Erlich laughed at him, and took the bet. A couple of years ago, he paid up.

Liberals generally tend to have a poor understanding of economics, in my opinion. Or, they have disdain for it, and feel that the laws of the market can be overriden if the cause is good enough. Thus we had the great liberal plan of government job creation, which thankfully seems to have faded away. But in the 80’s, you couldn’t turn around without some liberal telling you about his latest scheme to use tax money to provide jobs for people. Conservatives generally knew better, although plenty of them joined the bandwagon, because it made a great justification for pork-barrel spending.

Liberals will often spout homilies like, “You can’t put a price on a human life”, even though we can and do put prices on human lives every day. So when the FDA mandated a new food additive law that would cost over a TRILLION dollars for each life saved, conservatives almost unanimously saw that as ridiculous, while liberals couldn’t see past the blinders of, “regulation is a good thing” to notice that in this case perhaps regulation was counterproductive.

Liberals have proven to be remarkably ignorant on matters of environmental science, especially when it comes to nuclear power, pesticides, and many other modern technologies. The current flap over arsenic in the water is a classic example of this. I keep hearing Liberals exclaim that Bush is going to increase the levels of arsenic in water. This shows either a profound ignorance of the issue, or a disturbing tendency to lie when politically expedient to do so.

Liberals tend to ignore secondary effects - in the example of job creation above, they tended to completely ignore the jobs that are lost when taxes are increased to pay for creating jobs. They also tended to ignore actual studies that showed that it was so expensive for the government to create a job that it would be cheaper to just give that person a lifetime pension and let him stay home and watch TV. It was Liberals who fought to ban Alar, completely ignoring the economic effects of such a ban, which would force poor people to eat fewer apples, which would cause secondary health effects including an increase in stomach cancer. But a good Liberal never let those icky facts get in the way of a great crusade.

In fact, I would question the whole notion that liberals are ‘forward-thinking’, while conservatives are resistant to change. The “Precautionary Principle”, embraced by liberals all over the world, is a pretty good statement of Luddite philosophy. And Liberals are leading the charge to ban genetic research, genetically altered foods, cloning, etc. This is harder to see today than it was 15 years ago, but Liberals have tended towards a dystopian view of the future that makes them distrust new technologies.

As for Civil Liberties, both Republicans and Democrats have a mixed record. Both parties have been actively engaging the ‘War on Drugs’. However, I believe that most of the arguments for drug legalization are now coming from the right, and not the left. William F. Buckley and George Schultz, for example, are two prominent conservatives that have been actively campaigning for an end to the war on drugs and full legalization of not just medical marijuana, but all recreational drugs.

And let’s not forget that it was liberals that called for massive expansions in regulation by the FDA. Liberals have also led the fight to ban public tobacco use, ban food additives, etc. How can you justify the legalization of Marijuana and Hashish when you won’t allow someone to smoke a cigarette?

Liberals were also pretty good at turning their backs on human rights abuses in Communist and Socialist countries, because they saw those governments as ‘progressive’. Again, most of you are probably too young to remember this, but I had to sit through plenty of justifications for the actions of the Soviet Union. “You have to break some eggs to make an Omelette”, said one of my professors in referring to 40 MILLION dead Soviet citizens. Afghanistan? That was just the Soviets protecting their borders. The 1968 crackdown in Czechoslovakia? Hey, those damned hooligans there are getting in the way of some real progressive principles! Sure, we didn’t really want to see tanks rolling in the streets, but you can hardly blame the Soviets, you know?

I can recall massive demonstrations against human rights abuses in El Salvador, while those same Liberals were having their picture taken with Fidel Castro and Daniel Ortega, who are both responsible for the torture and murder of as many people as any of the right-wing despots were. My university campus was actually holding support rallies for the Sandinistas, completely ignoring the human rights violations there. Our Liberal Prime Minister Trudeau was ‘proud’ of his friendship with Fidel Castro, and visited him regularly, despite their being plenty of reports from Amnesty International of horrific human rights violations in Cuba. And recently I’ve heard plenty of Liberals on this very board speak in glowing terms of China’s brutal oppression of reproductive rights.

But the worst thing about the Democrats is their hypocrisy. Clinton sat on the arsenic rule for 8 years of his presidency and did nothing, then wrote the law as one of his last acts in office after he could no longer be held accountable for it. Al Gore wrote “Earth in the Balance”, in which he said that the price of gasoline should be artificially raised to $3.00/gallon to stimulate conservation. But when the price of gasoline began to rise all on its own, what did he do? Did he call for conservation? No, he claimed that it was wrong for consumers to have to pay more for gasoline, and the Clinton administration opened up the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to try and hold prices artificially low.

Man, I could go on all night. But let me just say that liberals are no more ‘open to new ideas’ than are conservatives. They are just more open to new government programs. When it comes to market-oriented new ideas, Liberals just aren’t interested.

And here’s an interesting test of the ‘stupid conservative’ idea - Why don’t all of you think of who the ten smartest people on the SDMB are, and then think of whether they are Conservative or Liberal. If you count Libertarians on the conservative side, I’ll bet your top-10 list has conservatives in the majority. I know mine does.

64

Hey all, making my first post here (first-time poster, long-time reader?).

Though I realize the thread has taken something of a different direction from its original subject, I just wanted to make a couple points, in addition to what’s already been said.

First, universities tend to be in more urban communities than the rest of society. That’s not to say they’re all urban, but in general, it’s probably true. Urban voters tend to be more liberal, as liberal issues are more relevant to them (gun control, tolerance for diversity, cooperation in general). Universities are communities, and their participants are bound together by living and working side-by-side.

Also, I think the relevance of the “liberals attract liberals” argument has to be explained. Many of the first university professors were educated in Europe. Europe in general does tend to be more liberal, at least economically (while I realize there’s some issue over this, I’m using “liberal” to mean a belief in government intervention to protect the economically disadvantaged, while encouraging a laissez-faire policy on social issues). Those attitudes were ingrained in the first batch of academics in the United States. Whether they were then passed down to new academics or they attracted academics who were already liberal, is an issue for debate.

65

It sounds to me like you’re describing modern political “Liberal” thought.

A lot’s been happening on the political front and the conservatives around us have had to get used to having atheists amongst 'em. And that’s happening.

Sure, we’ve got our Pats and you’ve got your Als; so the nutcases are pretty evenly distributed.

Liberal ideology of late has seemed, to me, much more given to stereotyping and classifying people. That is, after all, the essence of affirmitive action - how could that work if you don’t insist on categorizing people? Can we generate a governmental standard for race?

If we do, it’ll come from a liberal before it comes from a conservative.

66

Sam Stone:

Ouch . . . please don’t! :smiley:

december, it’s a little disingenuous to post a one liner about the Federal role in education, read my refutation, then claim you don’t want to “hijack” the thread with “evidence.” You posted the one-liner as evidence that liberals aren’t as smart as conservatives (insinuating, with the Einstein quote, that liberals are in fact “insane”). If you aren’t going to support your point, why offer it unless just to cater to the sound-bite mentality? (For a perfect example, see the guy who posted a few posts below you about lazy people not working, etc. All too representative of the typical conservative.)

In fact, I posted what I felt were pretty solid refutations of a few of your one-line sound bites, and you didn’t respond to any of them. Are you conceding the points, or just not interested in defending your position?

67

Not quite, pl. Yes, you did dispute some of some of my supporting arguments. However, my point was

Your counter-arguments still left “some evidence [of harm]” standing.

More importantly, you made no effort to disprove the main part of my thesis,

In order to dispute this quote, one would need to provide a lot of evidence that federal involvement has helped.

68

I feel that you’re dissembling now, december. You’re original statement, in its entirety, was:

You’re implying that there is a connection between the two, but refuse to offer any evidence. I posted several points of refutation.

If you’d like me to start another thread so that you don’t have to defend the argument you made in this thread in the first place, I’ll be happy to.

I’m also curious as to your other one-liners. You threw them out there as evidence that conservatives are smarter than liberals. It would appear from my refutations that your one-liners are, in fact, not representative of the facts. Are you conceding the points, or are you going to refute them?

69

Sure, go for it. A new thread might help, because it seems that we’re may not be arguing the same point.

70

The Recap: december had suggested that liberals are none too smart b/c they perpetuate “economic systems” that “ignore selfishness.” I asked him to “name such a liberal” or to provide a link explaining such an economic system. december replied with that old bankrupt-argument standby, the eye-rolling smilie, and said…

“My wife is a professor at a state medical school, where she works her buns off. However, if she were doing a lousy job, there’s little the school could do, since she has tenure. Some of her collegues do minimal work. The system barely rewards industry or punishes laziness.”

Now it would probably be impolite of me to ask how precisely this provides an example of liberals’ belief in economic systems that ignore selfishness. But I am ready to be generous here. I’m going to put aside the fact that universities do not constitute an “economic system” unto themselves, and I’m to forget the fact that the tenure system, which derives from age-old precedents and was instituted in the 19th century, is hardly a mainstay of liberalism (I know plenty of conservative academics who’d give up their limbs to defend it).

Rather, I’ll asnwer the question on its face value.

Well, as a matter of fact december, my husband is a history professor at a state university and he works his buns off too. And you know what? The fact that your wife and my husband both have sleek and well-worked buns is, perhaps, no accident. Where my husband collects his extremely modest and well-earned paycheck there is a post-tenure review and merit system in place to ensure that he must work very hard to earn his keep. There are various causes listed in the faculty code that could result in his loss of tenure; and prior to his getting tenure he first had to prove that he was capable of well-nigh miraculous feats of teaching, scholarship and service. Every year or two he’s subject to a full merit review and the end of which, if he’s deemed non-meritorious, he will get zip. the purpose of his tenure is to allow him to write as freely in his field as you do on this message board b/c of your anonymity. Academic writers and researchers would otherwise be more beholden to bureaucratic, political and corporate interests than they already are.

If some of your wife’s colleagues aren’t working as hard as they should be, the administration, faculty and regents of her university can set up a similar system of merit review. Most public and private universities have them. Moreover, to prove to me that the largest number of tenured and tenure-track faculty in the public universities in the United States are not earning their paychecks, you’re going to have to do better than share your impression of how hard your wife’s colleagues are working.

Conclusion: not only is your support, thus far, for your own assertion about liberals and unselfish economic systems tangential to the point of irrelevance, your specific arguments about tenure and efficiency are misleading and vacuous.

Next…

"Most government workers have little economic incentive to do a great job (although many do so.) In particular, the administrators have little economic incentive to produce the greatest amount of productivity at the least cost. Their selfish goal is to look good in the eyes of those in power who are doling out the money (doling out OUR money.)"

december, this is extremely weak thinking indeed. Anyone’s selfish goal is look good in the eyes of those doling out money–whether they work for a big company like IBM or Boeing or whether they work for the government. And, as you seem to realize, there are ways to give everyone an economic incentive, inside and out of government, to do a great job. The larger question is, what does this have to do with a economic system that, unlike capitalism, doesn’t take human selfishness into account? I know of no liberals who think that everyone in the country should work for the government. I also know of no conservatives who think that no one should work for the government. So your point seems to be that some government workers should be subject to greater incentives. Fair eough: start a thread about human resource management. Otherwise, move on buddy…

"Anyone who advocates more government regulation is hoping that the regulators will do an effective job for the public, although they have little economic incentive to do so.

Well, this is actually an interesting point since it is indeed hard to ensure proper regulation. But that only means that effective regulation a matter of some importance that we may wish to discuss. It doesn’t invalidate the need for regulation, on which all of us depend, nor does it point to some obvious regulatory alternative outside of government. If you and I as respective examples of conservatives and liberals were to agree that we wanted to work together to come up with the best kind of regulatory system, we could probably have a very intelligent discussion. The problem is that you seem to prefer to imply that regulation is simply a liberal’s issue, as though you genuinely believe that your quality of life would be improved if no one regulated anything and insurance companies, food producers, automobile makers, etc. were simply left to produce things with any oversight at all. Historically, prior to government’s involvement in such activities–which, at the end of the day, is always accountable to voters–a lot of people ended up defrauded, or sick or injured as a result of corporations’ inherent incentive to make as much profit as they can possibly get away with. Do you actually doubt that?
Anyone who opposes school vouchers is advocating a system that ignores selfishness. Many inner city school teachers and administrators have given up (and who can blame them?) They fight like crazy against vouchers, for fear that a parochial or private school might do a better job. Imagine a world where they had to teach more effectively than others to keep their job, just as my company has to beat the competiton to stay in business.

This is just fatuous reasoning; it reduces a complicated argument to three unproved assumptions: i.e., 1) that anyone who opposes school vouchers is doing so to protect his/her job (a ridiculous assumption since the majority of people who oppose vouchers, including myself, are not teachers or administrators); 2) that these teachers and administators in tough schools aren’t working hard enough (which may be a factor but needs to be established) and 3) that a voucher system is the answer to this. I just read an article about Edison, a for-profit education provider that got a few contracts in San Francisco to take over problem schools. Unfortunately, there is no link available. The result: to make a good impression on the district they spent more money on each student than the city system does; and their results were no better. Now they’re getting hammered by their investors who are worried about the bottom line.

Overall, I’ve gotta agree with pldennison. The underlying implication of your posts has been that you can “prove” that liberals are dumb b/c of their allegiance to defective policies that you can point to. But all you have proved is that you are a pretty weak debater, ready to leap to unfounded conclusions based on generalizations about subjects on which you appear to know very little indeed.

That said, it’s been a pleasure :wink:

71

Welcome, Fang!
----:D/
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[/hijack]

72

If liberals are smarter, how come it seemed like Gore supporters were the only ones who couldn’t figure out how to mark a ballot?

Regards,
Shodan

73

Who says “Gore supporters”=“liberal”? Maybe all the liberals voted for Nader.

74

All three of them? :wink:

75

God, not another “Who is smarter, liberals or conservatives, thread?”! I tried to to avoid wading into it, but a few of you baited me too much!

First of all, I think it is true, as others have pointed out, that the terms are ill-defined. If one is looking at social issues, then I think it is probably fair to bet that there is a strong correlation between education and conservative/liberal views. (This doesn’t mean a correlation with innate intelligence, but I would argue that it is a correlation with some sort of exposure to a broader set of ideas and cultures.)

If one is looking at economic issues, I think some sort of correlations with education exist but they are more complex. E.g., voting patterns suggest that people get more conservative with increasing education up through college but then it shifts the other way again once you go to post-college education. I also think it varies a lot with the field of education…I imagine that PHDs are generally more liberal than MBAs for example, and this probably has a lot to do with self-selection and self-interest.

Okay, let’s apply your logic to the world at large. There is a huge amount of poverty, disease, hunger, crime, and environmental degradation … despite the overwhelming dominance of market-oriented economics, globalization, and free trade, etc. “This isn’t working; let’s try something else.” Do you still love that mantra? [Of course, I am sure that in your view, everything that is good is due to the market and everything that is bad is due to failed liberal government policies. But, that is just sorta religious belief, isn’t it?]

In fact, you practically did! :wink: While I am tempted to go over the whole thing piece-by-piece, I did basically agree with your earlier posts and so I will just chalk this one up to frustration on your part with the idea that liberals are innately smarter.

I will say only this:

(1) The whole issue of “free trade” is a lot more subtle than you suggest. I think there are only a few extremists who really want to try to close off from the rest of the world [and you find them both on the extreme Right and Left]. The critiques by the Left of the way that trade policies are being implemented are really a lot more nuisanced. You might try reading up on them sometime.

(2) While I am willing to admit a certain amount of ignorance of economics by some liberals, we hardly have anything close to a monopoly on that. In fact, the lack of any coherent understanding of when the market fails (even within classical market economic theory) displayed by most of those politicians on the Right is nothing short of astounding and lead them to make nonsensical statements that border on the absurd. I have half-seriously thought having taken an economics course in college and gotten at least a B in it ought to be a requirement to be in Congress.

(3) It is great that William Buckley and George Schultz have not embraced the conservatives’ general push to reduce civil liberties. However, if you look at the appointments to the Supreme Court, the fact remains that Republicans on the whole support Justices with a much less friendly view toward civil liberties than Democrats do. (This is also reflected in Cabinet appointments. This General who was Clinton’s drug czar was bad enough…but even he thinks that Bush’s appointment is too extremist!) This often presents somewhat of a conundrum for those who have a libertarian bent. I once asked the resident rational objectivist at work which candidates he ended up voting for; he admitted the problem and said that he probably voted more often Republican than Democratic, but it was often very hard to decide. I think those libertarians who try to argue that the conservative movement in the U.S. as a whole is more aligned with their interests on civil liberties than the liberal movement are smoking dope!

(4) The regulations on cigarette smoking in public have more to do with third party effects and therefore is largely irrelevant to the marijuana legalization debate.

(5) Both liberals and conservatives have probably turned a blind eye toward human rights abuses of those who may lean in their general eco/political direction. However, I would say that, in this country anyway, such a blind eye has been much more governmentally institutionalized by conservatives than by liberals. E.g., how many Leftist governments can you name the U.S. supporting despite human rights abuses compared to how many Rightist governments? You had to go pretty far to the Left in order to come up with your categorization of attitudes toward the Soviet Union. You don’t have to go as far out on the Right fringe to find apologists for various repressive Right wing governments, let alone U.S. intervention in the affairs of other nations in support of these governments.

(6) If by “artificially” raising gas prices to $3.00 a gallon, you mean actually attempting to account for externalities that cause the “free market” to price it wrong then I guess I won’t quarrel with your use of the term, although it seems pretty misleading. As for Gore’s hypocrisy, you won’t find any argument on that from me.

[Okay, in the end, maybe that wasn’t “only this” :wink: ]

76

Oh yeah, one more point in response to december’s point about the lack of incentives for people in a government bureaucracy to do a good job, etc.: Your point may be true, but the fact is that it applies to any sort of bureaucracy including the bureaucracy in the corporate world. I know this first hand and you may want to drop this topic right now…Because, believe me, you don’t want to get me started on this!!!

77

When I think of the movements designed to give power to disenfranchised people i.e. labor movement, women’s movement ang gay rights conservatives strongly opposed them at the beginning and still do today. As far as intelligence goes, who can seriously give credence to creationism? Conservative are one of the largest proponents of “creation science” in the U.S. today.

78

Please, this is too easy. Liberals oppose allowing religious groups to offer programs to these same people using government funds under the banner of seperation of church and state. As far as intelligence goes, who can seriously give credence to homeopathy and the power of crystals? Proponents of “New Age Science” are, by and large, liberals.

See how easy it is to generalize and stereotype? Not very useful is it?

gEEk

79

And, it was the Republican Party that ended slavery in America, while the Democrats were responsible for Jim Crow.

But, I agree with gEEk that discussion of the past isn’t relevant to the OP. If one takes the OP as given, we know that [li]conservatives are richer than liberals, Wealth is correlated with IQ[/li]
So, conservatives are probably smarter than liberals.

80

Or, maybe it is the liberals who are smarter since they are the ones who haven’t bought into the whole materialistic culture and know that there is more to life than accumulating as much wealth as you can! Whoever dies with the most toys is still dead.