So, hows that crushy, annihilatey thing working out for you?
Okay, I’ll offer a straight answer for why you need conservatives.
You need them because liberals are all about special interests. Unions, minorities, the poor, consumers, students, teachers, etc. Liberals are about finding what they consider to be injustices against definable groups, then using the power of government to correct those injustices.
They are often right about the injustice. Sometimes the world isn’t fair to people. Sometimes humans can be mean or dishonest. Some people are born with disadvantages that make them victims of others.
The problem, though, is that when you create rule after rule to ‘correct’ these injustices, it starts to affect society as a whole. Sclerosis starts to set in. You get to a point where innovators and businesspeople have to walk a minefield of special rules and requirements so burdensome that the dynamism of society starts to get choked off by the bureaucracy. Setting up a business in some cities may require dozens of permits. Each one of those permits may have been created to address a specific wrong, but collectively they form a barrier that can be hard to climb over.
In addition, the existence of rules implies the existence of rule enforcers. These people have power, and are corrupted by it. They collude with powerful interests and act against the interests of the people the rules were set up to help. So you wind up with crony capitalism and oppressive government that starts to act in its own interest instead of the interests of the people it was intended to serve. California’s government no longer provides services any better than the government in Texas, despite costing far more money. The reason is that the goverment has become its own special interest and is taking an increasing amount of the public’s money for itself in the form of increasing pay and benefits for government workers.
Left unchecked, the liberal impulse leads to societies that become choked with increasing amounts of regulation and ever-higher taxes, which destroys the dynamism of a free society.
Conservatives aren’t all people pining for the lost days of the 1950’s. They’re people trying to maintain the status quo, to provide a stable framework in which businesses and individuals can plan for their own futures. They are trying to create an environment in which people with ideas are free to form businesses and test those ideas in the marketplace with a minimal amount of friction.
Look at the internet. Look at how rapidly innovation comes to it. Now let’s consider if the internet was controlled by government the way brick and mortar businesses are. Before you could set up a web page, you’d have to get a permit from the government certifying that you have complied with the Americans with Disabilities Act. You could be subject to an audit at any time to verify that you are complying with diversty requirements. Before you could sell an ad, you might have to hire an accountant to certify your page counts. A city inspector would have to verify that your web page meets the city’s guidelines for content. You could be subject to audit at any time to verify the secure handling of customer data, or to make sure that your web site is still readable by the color blind.
Failing these audits could result in large fines, so to avoid that, you’d have to hire professionals to test your site and prepare you for the audits.
Then there’s the $500 registration fee the government would require to issue a permit for a web site. The paperwork for it might require that you hire a lawyer to draft up your description of the web site, etc. The IRS could demand that you file every year whether you make money or not. No short form allowed here - be prepared to pay a tax accountant to do that for you.
And so it goes. Imagine how lifeless the internet would be if innovation was burdened under the weight of that much regulation. But real businesses face these problems every day. In Cincinnati, just putting a sandwich-board for sale sign in front of your business requires a permit. Signage in your window can take six months to get approved. Numerous zoning regulations make it expensive and difficult to start a business. Houston Texas, on the other hand, has no zoning laws, and you can have a business up and running in a few days. The result is that new business startups are much higher in Houston.
Liberals need to step back from their focus on special interests and government regulations, and look at the systemic effects of these policies. That’s what conservatives do.
You could start here: The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities
Or here: The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress
You do need to find a balance between regulation and free markets.
China’s lax environmental and labor laws may be cancelling out their economic growth. Estimates on environmental pollution alone range from $67 to over $200 billion a year.
The world bank says air & water pollution alone may cost China 5.8% of GDP a year.
http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/COUNTRIES/EASTASIAPACIFICEXT/EXTEAPREGTOPENVIRONMENT/0,,contentMDK:21252897~pagePK:34004173~piPK:34003707~theSitePK:502886,00.html
You start a factory but do not put in place safety protections. As a result someone gets their hand ripped off.
The factory loses productivity
That laborer has thousands of dollars in medical bills
People who could be doing things to grow GDP have to become doctors & nurses to fix his problem
His family may have to become caretakers and quit their jobs
He will have lower productivity for the rest of his life
With the safety regulations you avoid all that. Productivity of the worker & factory is higher, the employee’s families productivity is higher (since they aren’t caretakers), he doesn’t have medical bills and the doctors/nurses can do more productive things instead.
So it is give & take. Stronger regulations on BP would’ve put up roadblocks, but it would have saved hundreds of billions of dollars in lost GDP growth. But I’ve also read if regulation of nuclear power was streamlined, it would be cheaper than coal.
The part about powerful interests serving themselves is true. I remember in the run up to health reform there was a labor union (maybe the machinists) who were afraid they may eventually pay taxes on high end health care (the tax was meant to stop overconsumption of health care). So they tried to kill the bill, not caring about the millions whose lives would be better under the bill.
But conservatives are all about special interests too. If liberals are acting for unions, conservatives are acting for managment. If liberals are acting for the poor, conservatives are acting for the rich. If liberals are acting for consumers, conservatives are acting for producers. If liberals are acting for gays, conservatives are acting for anti-gays. If liberals are acting for enviromentalists, conservatives are acting for industrialists.
So liberals and conservatives are just the opposite sides of the same coin. Neither can claim to be more principled than the other. Both claim that the special interests they support are also the interests of society in general.
You speak of “the military.” **Oakminster **speaks of “warriors.” There, I really think, is one clear split between the liberal and the conservative mentalities.
The liberal may, usually does, admit that a national defense is essential to preserve our way of life. However, his military is focused on the idea of the citizen-volunteer - a peaceful sort who sees his duty and does it when the country’s interests are in clear danger, then puts down not only his arms but his soldierly character when the danger is past, resuming his role in a peace-loving nation.
For the conservative, this simply is not good enough. The idea that the world is a dangerous place must be more than a grim resolution made in dire times: it must be near the heart of our national character at all times. This demands the warrior - the one whose life is dedicated to force. Even if he doesn’t make up all our military, conservatives insist, he must be its training, its command, and its ethos - and he must also be given a special privilege in influencing civil society.
And the warrior ideal is not a traditional one in American culture. Which makes it all the more surprising that conservatives have embraced it.
The ideal at America’s founding and for most of our history has been the citizen militia - the common people would band together to fight during wartime and then disband and return to their civilian lives during peacetime. Having a professional standing army as the mainstay of our defense policy only arose within the last sixty years or so.
But safety regulations impose a cost on everyone, including the people who don’t cut the hands off workers. So you have to balance safety against cost. Liberals rarely take that into consideration, because they are biased towards thinking that government regulations are an unmitigated good.
But safety regulations are the last thing I would worry about, and they aren’t the kinds of regulations conservatives are most incensed about. It’s more about the regulations that seek to effect social change, or push someone’s idea of a just society on someone else.
Take the Americans with Disabilities Act. I understand the motivation for it - if you make everyone put in wheelchair ramps, then you remove the disincentive towards hiring people in wheelchairs. If you make everyone put in accommodations for the blind, then when blind people need work, there will be no excuse to refuse to hire them.
But this imposes huge burdens on small businesses. Many of these businesses are operating on a shoestring, and may be in industries where blind people or the wheelchair-bound would never be able to work anyway. You can see the resentment this builds when a federal government imposes this mandate on a small town somewhere in middle America, and puts a real strain on the finances of a small business family. And you can see how this can kill jobs - to prevent destruction of the smallest businesses, the ADA was set up to only to apply to businesses with X number of employees. But that means it acts like a marginal tax rate increase on business growth. Once you get to X-1 employees, the next one you hire might bring hundreds of thousands of dollars in facility upgrade costs. So that job never gets created - or all the other jobs that might have been created had that business continued to grow.
The ADA has other sociological side-effects that the social engineers never considered - once you impose costs on people in the name of the wheelchair-bound, resentment starts to build towards people in wheelchairs. You’ve divided society yet again. And once you accommodate wheelchairs, you remove the incentive for technological fixes to the problem - stair climbing chairs, etc.
I could go on. Even the best-intentioned regulations have downsides, and for many of them, the downsides may greatly outweigh the benefits, but they aren’t discovered until after the law is in place.
There were strong regulations on BP. They were given a safety waiver by the MMS. The government was complicit in that little fiasco as well. Which brings me to the next point - you liberals tend to think that regulations will always work as intended and will fix all the problems. But often they just result in a false sense of security. It’s easier to bribe an inspector than to fool a market. Or the regulation may cause people to assume a level of safety that isn’t there, or people might just determine their own level of safety by cutting corners elsewhere. For example, there is good evidence that airbags and ABS brakes in cars cause people to drive faster because they feel safer.
By the way, the ADA was signed by George HW Bush, so this isn’t just Democrats vs Republicans.
Sure. And large companies that already have good health care programs lobbied for it not out of magnanimity, but because it gave them a competitive edge against small businesses. And the ‘luxury coverage’ tax was removed at the behest of the unions. And I’m sure if you dig through the other 2000 pages of that monstrosity, you’ll find dozens or hundreds of rules put in place to appease one special interest or another. Regulatory capture is a constant feature of big government.
And each one of those special exemptions and rules carries a cost. Administrative overhead, calcification of the status quo, distortion of efficient markets, etc.
As a pro-gay-rights person who is at least partially conservative, you can blow that straight out your ass. There are many under both labels who have no principles and are only out for personal power. There are many under both labels who have strong principles. The same is true of any grouping ever.
I am a fiscal moderate-conservative. I am a social liberal. I do not define myself in opposition to anything, and I’d suspect most conservatives on here would agree with that. Having said that, the Tea Party and such can go eat a bag of dicks until they DO define themselves with anything other than platitudes and opposition.
[quote=“Little_Nemo, post:226, topic:548524”]
“Deep down in places they don’t talk about…” I guess they were loath to ever cede so much military authority to civilian administrations ever again.
The story of the Cold War was the story of regimented thinking - a militarization of all public life, to some degree. (Why else have 25 years of peacetime conscription?) Ike and the veterans who largely elected him were useful in helping to put all that in place; he later warned against the development of a military-industrial complex, but he probably knew it was already too late to stop it.
Sam, poorly written regulations, poorly enforced regulations…these are not arguments for less regulations so much as arguments for better regulations. Pencils have erasers, if the ADA demands a wheel-chair ramp to the escalator, that can be fixed.
As far as the fiasco over the cozy relationship between BP and its supposed “inspectors”…a disgrace to be sure. I know any number of people whose zeal for protecting our environment renders them much less susceptible to bribery, but I doubt you find them any more agreeable.
As you mention, companies themselves have an incentive (several, in fact) to prevent injuries. The obvious protections are generally in place.
The problem with regulations is that, as rules, they can be unbending. Example: I worked in a plant that used flammable liquids contained in equipment. Part of this plant was built without walls to prevent a buildup of vapors in case of leak (this only reduced the chances of an explosion). The building was a couple stories high, so there was a handrail along the perimeter. OSHA determined the handrails were too high by something around 2 inches, and it had to be remedied.
Shortening required that cutting and welding be done in the presence of solvents (precautions were obviously taken) and that a handrail be replaced temporarily with yellow tape.
Along with being a monumental waste of money, the fix was obviously more dangerous than the problem.
When people complain about regulations, it’s not about the ones that have obvious benefits, but the ones that have marginal benefit or are applied even when unnecessary.
Giving inspectors more discretion would prevent some of this but would also be an opening to graft.
You have summarized neatly the largest single obstacle to effective, efficient, minimalist regulation that will make Sam and 'luci both happy.
Too few specifications, and there’s possibility for graft and dodging of requirements.
Too many, and you get idiotically overbearing regulations that leave no room for reasonable bending and/or involve multiple (potentially contradictory) agencies.
Speaking of the ADA, my dad spent five grand or so one year having his general store’s front door widened by three inches to meet the standard–the building was originally built sometime in the 1800s, IIRC, and my dad was bound and determined that the look of the facade wouldn’t change a bit. Doesn’t sound like much, unless you have the numbers and realize that was about a month of his net take. This is a general store in a town of 200, and my dad offered to accommodate the handicapped the same way he had been since '77, with free delivery to anyone who asked. To me, that’s a reasonable compromise for Appalachia, but you can’t fight city hall.
So what exactly are you claiming? That the people who are opposed to gay rights are not generally social conservatives?
Is Obama a social conservative? What’s the difference between his position on gay marriage and George Bush’s?
Its all relative,** Sam**. Obama’s attitude is a disappointment in a man so intelligent and progressive. Bush’s attitude is something of a bright spot for an ignoramus.
Well I don’t think he’s advocated a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. He’s advocated legal unions that are not called marriage. I tend to think it’s a poltical decision rather than a personal belief but I can’t be sure.
I’m saying the ground covered by the term “conservative” is so broad that this thread is completely asinine. Most people everywhere are some mix of “liberal” and “conservative”, possibly fitting (as I do) into that spectrum differently depending on the subject matter, and trying to pretend they’re opposed to each other like some sort of perverse political Jedi vs. Sith battle is goddamn retarded.
Of course they can. Being anti-gay for example is an example of pure malice; cruelty and oppression with no positive effects whatsoever. You can certainly declare yourself morally superior if you oppose that.
Not all sides of every question are morally equivalent. And on the whole, conservatives are overwhelmingly on the evil side; the side that is motivated by greed, hatred or irrationality. So yes, liberals as a group are morally superior to conservatives; not because they are especially virtuous but because conservatism on the whole is so sadistic and destructive.
You have to take the world the way it is. Pretending that conservatives and liberals aren’t political opponents is a little naive.
The conservatism I can respect accepts the need for change, but only cautions for prudence, that we not do anything destructive to our goals in our enthusiasm for our goals. I can offer an ear to such arguments, and offer counter-arguments without feeling rancor or enmity.
Reactionaries are a whole different ball game, cynics a third variety altogether. There is no point in declaring them my enemies, they have declared me theirs.