The Basics

ON this my newest blogging venture, I intend to state from time to time my views and beliefs regarding life, culture, society and government, and what form these take or ought to take...

Stated opinions and beliefs will be so labeled, but so shall facts, even if I do not at that moment offer provenance or rationale to support them. If challenged, I shall make every effort to do so for anything treated as a fact, but I will not make such efforts ahead of time in every case.

I intend to write when something strikes me, and hopefully when nothing does so, I shall not. :-)

**********************************************

It's midnight, and I'm struck now by some basic thoughts on free markets and social welfare and conservatism. Here they are, and pardon (if you must) the archaic "he", rather than the time-wasting, politically correct "he or she":

It is an unchangeable part of the human condition that we are at our best when we are doing our best for ourselves and the ones we care for. In other words, the most fulfilled and best natural state of a person, in society and in family, is when that person is doing and being and giving and earning all that he can, contributing his own productivity for his own sake and that of his family. This applies no less to a mother at home than to any other person; it is simply for each of us to be aware of what parts of our efforts are valuable in our own eyes and valuable to others, and to aim those efforts properly.

This measure of our own productivity is a primary source (although not, in my view, the highest) of the sense of personal worth and value that every person needs. They call it 'positive self-esteem' in liberal-land, but they seem to have forgotten where it comes from; achievement. Liberals try so hard to create an environment where children are never given a moments chance to feel badly about themselves; they do not realize that they are denying these children necessary lessons in life and setting them up for failure in the future.

Or perhaps they do realize it, and their offenses against their own culture and society and children are even greater than I thought.

At any rate, now to the opposite side of the coin.

If a person lives a life in which he produces little or nothing, and is needed by nobody, and nothing is demanded of him, and moreover he is supported by others, including others who do not know him nor care about him but are compelled to pay for his support nonetheless, this person is living in a petri dish of festering low self-esteem. Don't get me wrong; he wants to feel needed and important and good, but he has no touchstone for those feelings.

There are two approaches commonly recommended to help this man.

The first is the liberals' approach, in which he is told that his condition is the fault of someone else and encouraged to dislike these people and to act (vote) in ways prejudicial to them, on the grounds that they deserve punishment for their treatment of him. This is how many a block of voters is netted by liberal pols. The poor are encouraged to hate the rich, the minority to hate the majority. Whatever is wrong in his life, the man of low self-esteem is told that it can't be helped, but that the people who did it to him can be held to account. It is an appeal to justice; it offers revenge to the suffering. It TEMPTS them by offering to paper over their own inadequacies with the glossy wrappings of righteous vengeance.

Of course, if these people ever did actually improve their lives and regain their self-esteem by being productive, these appeals would hold little attraction; thus the quandary of the liberal voter-- the politicians who claim to speak for you will be the worse if you actually do improve your life. Socially and economically, IT IS IN THEIR INTEREST TO HOLD YOU EXACTLY WHERE YOU ARE. Their elective power lies in their appeal to the discontented. They do not want a world in which there are fewer and fewer of those. They are calling themselves 'progressives'; the reaching of a goal implies the end of progress and the end of a need for progressives. They cannot afford to actually reach the goals they claim to have; progress must go on forever if their claims are to be valid. Thus their reluctance to clearly identify the goals toward which "progressives" are "progressing".

Of course, the conservative has a wholly different view of what is best for these suffering people, and its real life results are very different. Rather than having political power vested in the 'status quo' condition of millions of unhappy people, conservatives visualize a nation and a state and a community in which the natural health of a vibrant economy offers what liberals cannot, namely the chance to make something of yourself instead of slumping in dejected acceptance of the idea that you cannot.

We conservatives are first to give and to help, and virtually all statistics on charitable giving support this assertion. On a recent list of states ranked by citizen charitable giving as a percentage of income, you had to scroll down through the first ten positions before you found a 'blue state'. This is sensible, given that liberals leave the charity to government, the most inefficient and the least interested of any organization that has ever given anything to anyone.

And given the conservatives' naturally charitable disposition and naturally optimistic outlook on life, we are the last people to abandon the truly needy. But our vision of our nation begins with employing and uplifting as many of the disadvantaged as possible, through their own efforts, then caring for the remainder who truly cannot help themselves.

The liberals cringe at such a development; who would vote for them if there were no miserable people who felt like striking out at someone else and blaming someone else for their woes?

So remember--

The actions liberals take are never actually aimed at helping the disadvantaged in any meaningful way; if they did, they'd be compromising their own political future by dissolving their voter base, just as Jesse Jackson's future would disappear if American black people ever actually achieved the things he's been promising them for decades. If political power is vested in a status quo, the powerful will not actually attempt to change it. It's political suicide.

This is the same power principle that always guides the actions of dictators. They gain power by promising the nation all sorts of improvements. And then it's 'one man, one vote, ONCE', and after that, a dictator's every action is aimed at solidifying and increasing his own power. For a Hugo Chavez or a Kim Jong Il or a Saddam Hussein, life without power is not life at all.

And of course, since many dictators would be immediately killed if they were to lose power, that previous sentence has multiple levels to it. :-)

The conservative vision is of empowered individuals, productive and happy people who have self-esteem for the right reasons, because they're providing for families and can be proud of what they produce.

The liberal vision is of a government that runs and rules every life, dispensing rough justice to evil corporations and seizing and redistributing wealth to ensure loyalty from constituents, to ensure their own power. They throw around a lot of trash these days about Bush being Hitler, but it is an all powerful central government that they work for and dream of, and that is a work of totalitarianism, not democracy.

So ask yourself whenever you hear a Democrat attack a corporation or insult 'the rich'-- which world would be better for more people? One that concentrates on offering opportunity for individuals to improve themselves, or one that places all responsibility on government to make people's lives better, and to make them feel better about their lives?

And if you've chosen the latter, how do you suppose the bills will be paid? Government produces nothing and has no money. And if 'evil corporations' are shut down, or even compressed and hobbled and burdened, the tax revenues to government will shrink, and the tax rates on YOU will then increase. Of course, you won't have to pay them if you have no job and no income... :-) But then who will pay for YOUR food, clothing and shelter?

A nation is the sum of the personal productivity (economic and otherwise) of its citizens. If circumstances discourage personal productivity, the entire nation will suffer. Ask anyone who's ever lived in a communist country. They're all around you, usually the hardest working and happiest people you see in America.

We really do have to put up fences to keep people out, while other countries build walls to keep their people IN. And there is a good reason for that, at least until liberals here succeed in their long term plans. Then we can skip the fence (which our present crop of phony conservatives were never really going to build anyway).

When liberals are through with America, there will be few in the world who still want to come here.