With #2 being an adjustment of #1, this rather gives a nice insight.
I think reaction #1 of those people you call ‘Liberals’ would be : How would I feel if it happened to me.
I know this is the theory but I find it just doesn’t translate into the reality of my world. I have often wondered if this is just a sort of “same planet, different world” thing between conservatives and liberals. Maybe it depends on your situation and values…For example, I have often wondered if conservatives are more likely to be average size (so that stores don’t often make the decision not to stock things for them) and have the sort of standard tastes and buy into the standard general materialistic ideals that are prevalent in our culture and reinforced (to put it mildly) by business. This is the only explanation that I can come up with as to why you guys feel that buying stuff is such an exercise in freedom and why you can get so bothered by paying taxes.
At any rate, I would point out that:
(1) Corporate domination of our culture is at a very all-encompassing level. It in large part determines our wants and needs.
(2) Even seeing market as democracy, “one dollar, one vote” is a very different concept than “one person, one vote”.
Shucks. 
As to your revised distinction on “good government” vs. “less government” … Yeah, it is probably closer to the truth, at least if the distinction is between liberals and libertarian-type conservatives. It would of course not apply to government-in-your-bedroom type conservatives like Scalia, Rehnquist, Lott, DeLay, …
Yeah ok Sam, so things were better before government programs to insure peoples welfare. So where do you come down on the FDIC ? Huge government safety net for people with money. I’d bet my bottom dollar you are all for insuruing the people who already have money.
That is simply not true Sam. More people are saving for retirement now than ever before and feel much safer about it because the money is insured by the federal government. Again, this is a benefit created for people who already have money. What to do about those who can’t afford those investments and savings?
While entitlements are sometimes abused it is also important to think about the little head start (you know food, shelter, etc.) it has provided for alot of people who have gone on to become productive members of society. And yes public money can crowd out private investment. Wouldn’t want to deprive any of those people with money from being able to invest so they don’t actually have to work for a living. And investing money is not what most call work.
The money spent on education has gone to educate our kids. It gives kids a chance to gain things like computer skills where they don’t have a computer in the home. It also goes to attract more qualified teachers by making the teaching a more attractive career.
I agree the REA example is a terrible thing. However, the solution is to find a way to end such non productive beauracracies rather than just decide not to have them at all. The REA did serve a good purpose in its time.
What do you think got us out of the depression?
Yes people would rather spend the money on boats and private jets than help support the poor and just because you get no benefit from the programs does not mean others don’t. To imply that there is little to no benefit is plain ignorant. Many people have food and shelter thanks to these programs. Includung the kids who I hope will lead us into the future despite the gross head start your kids probably have on them.
jshore - when was the last time you heard of someone getting sent to prison for not buying the products of a large corporation?
I don’t understand what this is supposed to mean. I should become a liberal because people have to shop at the House of Large Sizes?
Or is this just another unsubstantiated sneer that all conservatives are crudely materialistic and/or mindless consumers?
Plus the whole concept is wrong. Liberals are the advocates of one-size-fits-all social programs. Look at HilaryCare - she was the one who was going to make the private practice of medicine illegal. Conservatives are the ones pushing school vouchers - liberals hemmorhage at the thought of parents actually being able to opt out of what the NEA wants for their children. Liberals like affirmative action. If your skin is black, you get a break, even if your parents are the Huxtables and you are competing against some white kid clawing his way up out of the trailer park.
Liberals are the ones with the cookie cutter approach. One government with one solution to one problem. Conservatives are the ones worried about individual rights, and pretty much the only game in town when you are talking personal responsibility.
I think it is absolutely accurate to say that most homeless substance abusers are the group least likely to be rehabilitated by government programs. Skid Row is usually a dead end. There are some exceptions, but if you drink yourself into homelessness, your chances of getting sober are almost nil.
And, until you produce a reasonably unbiased cite (by which I do not include any of Mitch Snyder’s fantasies) I will assume that your figure of a million chemical-free homeless is a wild exaggeration.
Regards,
Shodan
by John Mace:
Well, it was a question that I asked; it was clear I wasn’t making an implication. This is what wrote in context.
I asked you a genuine question. You said that most homeless people were addicts. Okay. Whatever. But homelessness is only one feature of poverty. There are a lot of people who, while not homeless, are only a paycheck away from that blessed state. So while it may be easy to blithely categorize homeless people as bums, it isn’t as easy to do the same thing with people barely keeping a roof over their heads. I was wonder what you thought about those people.
I have no idea. Do you have two particular countries in mind? Either one could have a lower rate of homelessness, which could be caused by any number of problems (breakdown in family structures, for example).
Spending on social services by the gov’t in the US has increased faster than the rate of inflation for years. And yet “homelessness” continues to be rampant. Why do you think that is?
Companies go out of business all the time because they can’t convince enough people to buy their products. Why is buying stuff an exercise in freedom? Because you have a choice. Is that so hard to understand? Microsoft is probably the closest thing we have to a non-government created monopoly in the US. Even then, you can go out and buy a Mac if you don’t like them. And that’s a pretty unusual situation where there is, effectively, only one alternative choice.
The conservatives in this thread by and large do not mind paying taxes for the legitimate functions of gov’t, as defined in the constitution. We can all argue about what those legitimate functions are, but I’m sure liberals don’t like paying taxes for things they think the gov’t shouldn’t be doing either. Why is that any different? No one here has advocated breaking the law by not paying taxes. What is being discussed is reasons for having taxes lowered to fit into the concept of limited gov’t consistent with conservative principles (not to be confused with Republican principles, which don’t seem to lead to significantly reduced gov’t spending).
by Shodan:
Conservatives like to hone in on race when it comes to Affirmative Action (especially the black race…gee, wonder why?), when white women have benefited the most from the program. They also like to pretend that socioeconomics do not garner their own preferences. I’ve known of many a poor, white kid who would have not gotten a chance to go to college had it not been for special considerations. Conversatives don’t want to acknowledge that, though. For some reason, they prefer to focus on the undeserving blacks stealing jobs away from deserving whites.
Latinos are well on their way to outranking blacks as the largest minority group in the US. And yet when it comes to AA debates, the people who take the most flak for it are the people benefitting from it the least.
Sam: To put some numbers on the amount of charity that occurs in the US (lest people dismiss it as insignificant):
The American Association of Fundraising Counsel (AAFRC) Trust for Philanthropy, publishers of “Giving USA,” shows $241B in charitable contributions made in 2002.
Why don’t you spell it out for us?
Hmmm… as a fun aside, it’s interesting to take the test at politicalcompass.org
by Debaser:
Sure. Bad habits are hard to break.
Now why would you think that? Is your worldview so twisted that all you can see when you think of a conservative is rich vs poor? Why does conservativism have to be the philosophy of rich people? Frankly, I think libertarian/conservative ideals do more to help poor people than rich people. Do you think a young couple today paying 16% of their income into social security is better off than they would be if they could invest the money privately? If so, think again. Many regulations drive the price of goods up and keep them out of reach of poor people. Who do you think is hurt more when the price of a product goes up 10% due to new health or safety regulations? Poor people, who spend all of their income on consumption, or the rich guy who doesn’t really need to worry about prices?
The stated goal of many liberal programs is to descrease the disparity between rich and poor, to protect people who need protecting, etc. But here comes that law of unintended consequences again. Specifically, the concept of regulatory capture. If you’re not familiar with it, it works like this: People pass laws to regulate an industry, to ‘protect’ them from it. Said industry has more money than the people, and more long-term desire to stay engaged in the process that regulates it. Once it comes under the umbrella of the government, it begins to lobby for changes to the law. In the meantime, once the law has been passed, the people fighting for it stop paying attention. Over time, the law shifts and mutates, and becomes a tool that corporations and rich people use to protect themselves against the forces of the marketplace. Drug companies use the law to make it hard for new companies to enter the market. Unions use regulatory capture to change labor laws from a way to protect the worker to a way to ensure to alternative to union labor. Today, the entertainment industry is using the government to pass laws that benefit rich industry executives, at the expense of young students and struggling artists.
Or another example, which dovetails with your FDIC question. What do you think was a major factor in the size of the S&L bailout in the 80’s? It was the increase in FDIC insurance under Carter, which increased the government’s liability threefold. Did the people clamor for this change? Were the poor helped by it? No. The change happened because the industry convinced the government it was necessary. Then they fleeced the government dry.
None of these things help poor people. Minimum wage laws don’t hurt rich people very much, if at all. Mandated minimum wages may cause competitive disadvantages in some industries, but create competitive advantages in others. No, the people that are hurt are the poor people who can’t find work. Do you know who the biggest supporters of vouchers are? Poor inner city parents. Do you know who’s against them? The powerful teacher’s lobby.
Then there’s the biggest form of regulatory capture: Capture by the largest demographic groups. The largest lobbies manage to twist regulations to their benefit. The teacher’s unions are a good example. Subsidies to large lobbies like tobacco farmers are another. As boomers age, we are now seeing pressures to give more benefits to aged people.
This is not about rich/poor, although that’s the only language the left has, so the debate always gets spun that way. This is about the intrusion of the public sphere into private life, and the reduction of freedom of choice that goes along with it. Sometimes these programs help poor people, and sometimes they hurt them.
For the record, I grew up as poor as you can be in Canada. I had a single mother, spent several years living in a house with no running water or indoor plumbing. Later, we lived in an apartment in a welfare neighborhood - one of the only families there NOT on welfare (my mother worked shifts to avoid it). I have no interest in helping out the ‘rich’, and my philosophy has never been about how much swag I could get from the government. When the government offered grants to pay off student loans, I refused to take them even though I was buried under debt. I paid back my loans, with interest, because I didn’t believe in the principle of giving graduates a handout at the expense of society, when those same graduates rated to be among the highest income earners in the next decade. Conservatives can be as principled as liberals.
John Mace Said:
And that’s a gross under-statement, because it only includes financial charitable giving to licensed charity. A far larger amount can be derived if you include things like care for the elderly within the family, broke children moving back in with their parents, community help centers, volunteer labor (think food drives, habitat for humanity, etc), etc. The amount of charity in the small communities totally falls off the radar because it is never reported. I remember one year when we lived on the farm, a farmer down the road had some sort of family crisis. His wife was sick, or something (I don’t remember the exact details - I was young at the time). What I do remember is riding on the tractor down the road as we went to his aid. A number of farmers brought heavy equipment that he couldn’t afford, and we pulled in his harvest for him, which was in danger of being lost. This aid was worth thousands of dollars, and went directly from more well-off farmers to the poor one.
And you know what? The next time that happened somewhere else, you were guaranteed that that guy would be among those helping someone else. Pay it forward.
Of course, nowadays he’d just apply for hardship relief from the government. So he’s ‘protected’. And everyone else knows it, so no one is likely to go to his aid any more if he needs help. Public charity displacing private charity. And so, the community is a little weaker, and the moral structure of the community (the compulsion to help your neighbors, and the example that set for young people especially) has been destroyed.
Now, through all this I’m not saying that there would necessarily be enough private charity if there were no public charity. I honestly don’t mind a safety net. But liberals almost NEVER acknowledge that along with whatever benefits their policies create, there is also damage. This failure to acknowledge the bad side of regulation leaves them with a strong tendency to over-regulate, to see government programs as the solution to all of society’s ills. After all, if there’s only good effects (other than taxes, which largely get paid by rich people), then why not? Got a problem? Pass a law! Throw money at it! Set up a new bureaucracy!
Claiming that “the US Constitution” doesn’t allow the government to pass a piece of legislation establishing “rights” that a majority agrees upon and which is not in violation of the Constitution, seems to me as a bit odd.
Essentially it’s the same as saying that a document created a long ago (1776, 1848, or whenever it was) does not only establish fundamental liberties and the political system, but also forbids future governments to act upon issues that are not addressed or “given permission to” in the document.
How can legislators counter with the problems of our time, if they are forbidden to do sweeping changes by the Constitution? Shouldn’t an elected majority have the ability to address problems of todays world, and not be limited by how the world looked 200 years ago?
I remember a discussion a few years ago with a news editor about Free Speech, which is established in our Constitution. He basically said that the Constitutional principle of free speech was the fundamental principle, then there were a number of imitations later passed by legislators to balance the Constitutional right to free speech against other Constitutional rights. For instance, ban on racial statements, ban on revealing medical records sealed, ban on revealing company secrets, etc.
Note that these “bans” can also be read as “rights”. The right not to be subject to racial slurs, the right to privacy, the right to protect your own business, etc.
Anyone care to tell how this works?
Actually, even the constitution recognizes that there are rights not listed in it:
But as some have very eloquently pointed out, one cannot have a “right” to something that must be provided by someone else. You cannot have a right to a job or a right to a house. You have the right of free speech, but not the right to a have that speech published for free.
That’s how it works.
This is a bit of an oversimplification, but a lot of what you are seeing in this thread reflects two different philosophies:
Ph #1: The gov’t is only allowed to exercise authority over those areas that the people have explicitly allowed it to do so (via the constiution).
Ph #2: The gov’t is allowed to exercise authority over any area that the people have not explicitly forbidden it to.
A few words on the concept of minimum “rights”. As John Mace said: “It was neighbors getting together to help the guy down the block who lost his job” - then we forget the fact that some people has no neighbours, or neighbours who they are not on friendly terms with, or has neighbours not in the position to help.
Minimum rights is based on the concept that there is a certain line that shall not be crossed, to protect those that have nothing or has noone who can help them. Sure, private aid is wonderful, but someone with no family and no friends, living in an area where people barely can manage to take care of their own ones, where there is no private aid, is pretty much screwed without a safety net of some sort.
Social care is not to grow food, then transport this food down to Homeless Street and shove it down their throats. Food welfare is to decide that once a day we give away some food at point x, and you have to be there before 6 pm to get some, - and we don’t care who you know or what you look like. Social care is a bare minimum, not something a normal person would want to live off.
I too grew up in a house with both my parents and grandparents. And my grandparents told me that back in the old days homeless people used to move around from farm to farm, staying for a few days at each place.
The key point is that our modern society is very different today from what it was in the past. Children don’t live with their grandparents anymore because their parents moved away to work at a factory. My government heavily subsidizes day-care centers not because they feel parents have a right to put their children in such centers, but because if they do, mothers will have the possibility to go to work.
We put our parents in nursing homes and our children in day-care centers not because these places offer better care than we could have done ourselves, in fact usually they do not. We put them there because our developed society has evolved to a point where we cannot use our resources to individually take care of our parents and our children and still achieve further economic growth. It’s simply cheaper to put grandparents and children, respectively, together in one place and care for them as a group, - while we “adults” go to work and contributes to the economy on a scale that we could never have done if we had to take care of our elders ourselves. Of course, we could all go back being famers and fishermen again.
Safety nets are established to counter specific problems, it’s not something government officials occasionally comes up with out of thin air because they are bored.
Surely you cannot mean this is the absolute answer? In the latest issue of the Economist, an conservative publication strongly aligned with Reagan/Thatcher’s politics, there is a huge feature about the Scandinavian countries. The Economist concludes that these countries are a “the dream of a mid-summer night”, and describe their way of life is “tolerant, rich and a happy dream”. The UN Human Index regards the Scandinavian countries as the best place on earth to live, with a high GDP, low unemployment, high-quality public services available to everyone, very low crime rate, etc
These countries are built upon the concept of a mix of free markets and a tight safety net. A politician said about this: “If we are good at sharing, we will also be good at creating values. As long as everyone believes they will get a fair share of our social assets, they will themselves contribute to multiply those asset and make them stronger”.
Something completely different: Far too often these debates gets overshadowed by the Conservative - Liberal polarization, something which in my opinion has much to do with the two-party system in the US.
On the liberal side there are a number of “camps”, most importantly:
- social democrats liberals: Believes firmly in free markets & the concept of minimum rights & politcal influence over important infrastructure
- progressive socialists: Believes big companies have to be watched after & the concept of minimum rights & government-owned infrastructure
There is as much difference between liberals as there are between conservatives.
Correction, John Mace didn’t say what I said he said in previous post, it was Sam Stone (ashamed)
There is no federal law against racial slurs. Look at the Klan. Look at Aryan Nation. There are various state laws that touch on speech, however most of these laws cover crimes that are committed on victims solely on the basis of race, sexual orientation or religious belief. These are the so-called “hate-speech” laws that you may be referring to. There is great debate on expanding these state, not federal laws. If I mug someone hurling a racial slur at them, should I get a different sentence than if I mugged the same person commenting negatively on their intelligence?
There are ban by various organizations on what their members can say, while still remaining members of the organization. As well as ban on what can be said on the property of various organizations. However, neither the state laws nor the organizations bans can in any way be considered a right not to called racial, ethnic, religious, sexual or any other kind of slur.
No, I didn’t say it, but I agree with it 100%.
JM replied to me: I am saying exactly what I said. That many if not most of the “homeless” would not know what to do with health insurance if they had it. Why do you extrapolate that to conclude that I don’t recognize there is suffering?
Well, you were the one who responded to SentientMeat’s question “does a rich nation with a high rate of homelessness have a lower degree of suffering than a less wealthy nation in which the state provides food, shelter and healthcare to all?” by saying "You’ve set up a strawman. The majority of ‘homeless people’ [? why the quotes? are they not really homeless?] are ‘homeless’ because of drug and/or alcohol addiction and wouldn’t know what to do with health insurance if you you forced it on them."
If you were not in fact trying to argue that the suffering of the (addicted) homeless is irrelevant to government intervention—which is precisely one of the possibilities I asked about in my reply to you—then I don’t understand why you consider SM’s question a “strawman”.
I also think it’s pretty absurd to say that “many if not most of the ‘homeless’ [again, why the quotes?] would not know what to do with health insurance if they had it”. Duh—they’d get medical care with it, just like the rest of us. They might not in fact seek treatment for their addiction, but that’s not the only kind of treatment they need.
For the gov’t to do something about this would mean coercing these same people into treatment, would it not? Would you support that?
For the government to do something about their addiction would indeed required coerced treatment, and no, I don’t believe that there’s good reason to think that would be either desirable or effective. For the government to do something about their homelessness, however, wouldn’t.
Assuming that we’re talking about physical suffering (and not something like being hearbroken because your boyfriend dumped you), can you list a few examples of suffering that you want the gov’t to do nothing about?
“Physical suffering”? What exactly do you mean? Only actual physical pain? Would that category include illness? Starvation? Financial hardship? Tell me what it is you’re talking about and I’ll tell you whether I think the government should be trying to alleviate it.