Submitted for your approval: My epic takedown of liberals and progressives.
Oh, sure, *some *liberal and progressive ideas were good ones, or at least, based on good values, back as early as 1780, progressives were trying to abolish the practice of slavery. Liberal and progressive Massachusetts put it in their state constitution, and sought to abolish slavery using their evil, progressive lawyers.
It was a horrendous blow to the property rights of those who had sincerely-held beliefs and traditions that said it was perfectly okay to own people and beat them without mercy. So, in a way, liberals and progressives were already trying to take away the property of others. It was good for some, and bad for others. Those small business owners were simply taking advantage of the fair, free market value of a person, who was being treated like cattle. Legally! It was all legal! Might I remind you snarky progressives, no laws were being broken!
So some lawyers and politicians and social engineers got together and decided there was Something Wrong With America, and decided they needed to stick it to those jobs creators. Is slavery a job? I mean, you get free food and housing, sounds like a pretty sweet deal to me. But those blame-America-Firsters and their activist judges got their grubby hands on the investments made by hard-working Americans. No, no, the slave owners, not the slaves. I hear they were all lazy anyway, true story.
Obviously this movement failed to persuade most of the Southern states, whose economy just couldn’t possibly succeed without it, except after the war, where they somehow managed to recover and go on living without slavery, almost making it seem like that whole war was unnecessary, but we know better. It was about States’ Rights! And the liberals stomped all over the Rights of real America!
But that’s fine. Legal freedoms stolen from Peter to pay Paul, just like liberals always do. So now plantation owners actually had to pay Paul if they wanted him to work in the field. The establishment of the very first minimum wage* Any wage whatsoever.
*a wholly evil idea which harms the working class the most of all
Then the social engineering crowd decided once again to spit in the face of tradition and family values, and insist that women, those persons that look after the menfolk’s children and wash dishes or something, and get pregnant, those people had some kind of right to vote? Pish-tosh, I say. Frankly, I long for those Good Ole Days when women knew their place, and didn’t get their pretty little heads involved in politics. It’s a men’s game, you know. Of course. Everyone who is anyone knows that. You let women vote, and soon, they’ll be asking to have jobs, and the right to divorce, and the right to not be beaten by their husbands. Tsk tsk, those liberals, always trying to get people to stop beating and owning other people.
But here’s where we all know liberals definitely got it wrong: the temperance movement. The silly, silly idea that we should be concerned with how much we drink! The hilarity of this idea, the idea that people should self-regulate, and moderate themselves, no conservative could get behind such an idea. Oh wait.
But then they definitely went too far and made alcohol illegal, and just like drugs, people went and got their illegal substances anyway, and contributed to a giant illegal marketplace which saw a rise in crime. Therefore, making the substance legal was the right thing to do!
Except when it’s marijuana or any other kind of drug. Because conservative principles. If Prohibition taught us anything, it’s that we need to fight a war on drugs, because we’ll definitely win that war. America always wins wars on concepts, like terror. We defeated terror a long time ago.
So the bastard child of liberalism and progressivism, prohibition, was a complete failure. I mean, we have laws against public intoxication and drunk driving, which infringe on our FREEDOMS, but I guess those liberals “mean well”.
More people have been killed not drinking, and doing other activities, than by drinking. Ipso facto, drinking is completely safe, it’s you teetotalers who are dangerous. I guess people shouldn’t drink while driving, unless they go really fast and get to their destination before the buzz kicks in.
And around that time, liberals and progressives began the war on Social Darwinism. It was the one thing Darwin got right. (Darwin knew about or endorsed the idea of social Darwinism right? I have no cite, but I’m absolutely certain in my gut that this is correct.)
Rather than just accept that society and the free market had winners and losers, these social engineers decided to take on such issues as poverty, urban slums, dangerous factory conditions, and monopolies on our economy which prevented choice by consumers and workers alike.
You don’t get to have a choice! The market has decided! Freedom means having only one option and not having any choice in the matter! You can starve if you don’t like it, there,* that’s *two choices! Stupid progressives, always trying to engineer a better society and FAILING.
So I guess they got some unions together to do like, collective bargaining or something (A TOTALLY UNFAIR METHOD OF EXTORTING JOBS CREATORS). Legalized extortion! The gall of it all. Back when the ownership class decided the prices of everything without resistance, that was a fair and balanced market, and all the value of productivity went directly to the hard-working real American jobs creators, just as it should. I mean, what would a factory worker know about having money or knowing how to spend it? It’s like the progressives were trying to create a third class of people, between the rich and the worker, some kind of enhanced worker, like, like a middle class or something, which had some sort of dignity.
Then, trust-busting and regulations later, the progressives once again spit on the face of America, with laws regulating food and drugs, forcing American jobs creators to once again have to stop lying to people about the purported health benefits of their miracle elixirs and tonics which were scientifically* proven to cure all that ails you, make sure your tooth was sparkly yellow, regrow all your hair, and totally prevent bone-itis and the boogy-woogy flu.
If I’m a jobs creator and miracle elixir manufacturer, forcing me to not lie on my label is a violation of my freedom of speech.
So they put the miracle tonic industry almost completely out of business for a good long time, until someone got wise and decided to call the miracle tonics “vitamins” and now we finally have an almost completely unregulated vitamin industry, where 99% of the products sold do nothing, don’t even contain the purported ingredients, or whose health benefits are nil, or whose real value is in the benefit found in food, and consuming more than the body can absorb is just making your pee more expensive, and nothing more. Just the way God intended. Ah, vitamins, the last bastion of American freedom. Keep your government out of my miracle vitamins that can totally prevent cancer due to, like, sharks or something. True story.
Then progressives got their grubby mitts on our democratic process. Figures, them being mostly Democrats.
They instituted reforms such as the direct primary process, made ballots secret to supposedly protect the worker from having their votes known to their employer to keep them from suffering reprisals for voting in a way that displeased him, and they reformed the initiative, referendum, and recall process, so they could get some kind of direct democracy going, bypassing the bought and paid for legislators, tricksy hobbits. Recalling corrupt elected officials, seriously. Why elect someone if they aren’t corrupt? How else are you going to get political favors in exchange for money? Seriously, it’s like these liberals have no idea how the system works.
Then they went and nationalized the railroads, timber industry, mining, and power generation, citing mismanagement and corruption and monopolization and price gouging and lack of competition, and of course, the nation immediately crumbled afterward. There is no America today, because liberals ruined Christmas once again. Now, no one can take a train across America, because for some reason, people are wealthy enough to own private vehicles. It’s like liberals don’t even care about railroad barons.
Then they made child labor illegal, preventing children from being able to drop out of school and become a textile worker and die at the age of 12.
:rolleyes: Come on, it’s good fer them! Weeds out the weak. Only those with gumption will succeed, and that’s what we need, younguns with gumption, who can look forward to a good 50 years or so of poverty and slaving away in a factory, rather than an education. Liberals coddle our children too much.
Then when the stock market went through a perfectly normal correction due to perfectly acceptable and sustainable economic practices by the experts of money, before regulatory agencies got involved, there were people concerned about clusters of huddled poor people, living in parks in tents, yearning to eat food. And something about the elderly not being able to afford medicine, housing, or food. And they blamed our great president Hoover.
Those liberals, always concerned about people being able to eat food and not freeze to death. Quit your complaining, pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
Then they did what they always do, which is create another Big Government solution, and they came up with social security. A socialist idea, it even has social in the name. It’s based on the idea that society should help the poor, but not through private charity, where people get fed if the rich guy feels like donating something today. So now it’s mandatory, completely removing choice and freedom from the system. People should have the freedom to die of malnutrition or exposure in America, it is our God-given right!
Further “achievements” by progressives and liberals are things like our bloated medicare and medicaid system.
Progressives and liberals went ahead and legalized contraceptives and abortion, enacted laws against husbands raping their wives, which was perfectly legal before then and therefore totally not even rape. So now women had the right to vote, and the right to decide what goes on inside their own bodies. What utter hogwash.
Well, we showed them. We called all those feminists sluts and whores for wanting to be able to choose if a penis goes inside of them or not, and what happens afterward. Those sluts! There, that will show them for trying to create equality in the face of tradition.
And what’s all this nonsense I keep hearing about civil rights!? There were perfectly good segregated neighborhoods where we kept the volatile elements of black and white people safe and separated, separate but equal. You know, middle class whites in nice posh whites-only neighborhoods, where all the wealth was kept, and other places where blacks could legally dwell, and you know, do whatever it is those people did back then. And then some progressives came in and upset the apple cart and tried to get the police to stop beating them, setting dogs on them, hitting them with fire hoses, locking them up without any real reason. And liberals once again spat on property rights of property owners and Jobs Creators by saying that you can’t refuse to serve someone just because they’re black. Those liberals simply hate Americans who have businesses, that’s the only conclusion you can draw from that. So what if they don’t take kindly to those types around here? You can’t blame a southern business owner for being slightly racist. It’s good for 'em, toughens them up. Besides, they like it. I never *personally *met a black person that was ever offended by it, they always seemed happy to *me *before they got their rights, anecdotal evidence, Q.E.D.
And ever since then, they’ve been trying to abolish practices that prevent minorities from being denied housing, employment, and being otherwise excluded and disenfranchised by perfectly sound and sane policies which prevent massive voter fraud. As we all know, Democrats can’t get elected without every single dead person that has ever died somehow filling out a ballot and voting against their own interests in favor of wacky progressive policies. There’s no other explanation.
And all this nonsense about gay people, it’s offensive to my delicate sensibilities. My wife and I can’t make love without picturing a gay man now, and that’s why my penis can’t get hard anymore, in spite of these miracle vitamins I keep getting in the mail for only six easy payments of $49.95, plus shipping, processing, and handling. It’s genuine rhubarb root, high in vitamins, good for all that ails ya. Doctor Oz told me all about it, and he’s not in it for the money, he’s a medical doctor.
So now, gay people have a right to just be gay, and not get fired for it. I mean gall.
And they also get to do things in the bedroom. And now they want to get married like *normal *people, it’s all so crazy, that’s why I can’t stop watching the gay porn. It’s research! I’m furiously writing a paper on it. I have to explain why I can’t get hard for my wife anymore, and the only thing that works is furiously writing my feelings about gay porn. Furiously. It brings a tear to my eye, what these liberals and gays are doing to America. I need a tissue to wipe away my manly tears.
And what have liberals and progressives done for America lately? Nothing, that’s what. Something about pre-existing conditions, insurance companies denying coverage, oh, whatever. Like that helps the working class.
Seriously, I can’t think of a single reason why people vote for liberals or progressives. I’m talking a centuries-long track record of failure. Meanwhile, conservative ideas continue to work, just as they always have.
Can you name traditional, conservative policies that have worked? I’m thinking of just… *so *many right now, that I can’t write them all down. It would just take too long, and people would probably just go “TL;DR” anyway. So I have better things to do. I wouldn’t want to turn this post into a rant, so I better quit while I’m ahead.
Checkmate, liberals!