Posted by
Dave Perkins on Monday, September 03, 2007 3:53:29 AM
This is the newest post from the new blog--Davo Grande (Texican for Big Dave)I'll be leaving here soon enough, unless some intrepid Townhaller convinces me that the technical problems with their blogging software are over. :-)****************************************************
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.