yossarian wrote:
Further, some people simply don't believe that they exist at all:
wikipedia article "market failure" wrote:
Many advocates of laissez-faire capitalism, such as libertarians and economists of the Austrian School, often deny the existence of market failures altogethe
Yeah. But that's what distinquishes "conservatives" and "libertarians". A fallacy that I see all the time is the assumption that there's this big political line and everything to the left of center is "liberal", and everything to the right is "conservative". There are many aspects of each, and that's an incredibly simplistic model to use.
If we're to look purely at the power and scope of government as it relates to domestic living, the "classic liberalist" would say that governments only role is to create an environment for people to live. It's responsible for protecting the nations borders from foreign incursion, and to deal with foreign matters (heads of state, trade, etc), and that's about it (some concessions for road building and such is included in the trade part of it). That's the kind of state people like Locke were talking about when they started the whole liberalist movement.
When the industrial revolution rolled along, it was realized that due to the change in the type of labor, there could exist an environment where most of the people could not realize opportunity. A farmer could, through his own labor, improve his lands and become wealthy. A wage earner in a factory could not. With a huge shift in labor from one to the other, there was a fear among the liberalist thinkers that this would produce a very class separated society (which was the opposite of what they wanted). A realization that there was a need for "dignity" among the workforce appeared. Afterall, the point of the whole thing was to build a society where everyone could achieve to their full potential without arbitrary restrictions. A school of thought arose that if the economic structure ensured that for many citizens, full potential could not be reached, then this would detract from the society as a whole (and cause lots of problems like riots and revolt). The thought was that one should correct for the imbalance that industrialized society created by shifting "capital" from the haves to the have-nots. Thus, the "social liberalists" were born. Their agenda was to engineer society to counter the imbalances imposed by an industrial workplace to allow for the "pursuit of happiness" for all people regardless of status.
This caused a problem though, since it was quickly realized that the only way to provide that capital to those who could not obtain it themselves, they had to take it from someone else. This ran directly counter to Locke's (and others) ideas that private property, free from government reposession, was the key to liberty. The "dignity versus liberty" argument arose as a result. This bubbled down into a compromise solution of "moderates" or "conservative liberalists", who believed that there was value to government providing aid to the people domestically, but *only* in cases where the market could be shown to fail. This applies to a broad range of things. But it's a basic recognition that we as a people *can* look at the outcome of market events and decide when the result is negative or positive and regulate the market to prevent "market failure". This is what the conservative position in the US is about.
Obviously, there's always disagreement over what and when something is a market failure. And you'll get a whole range of folks between those that tend strongly towards the liberal position (anything that can be improved by government intervention or regulation should be) and those that tend strongly towards the libertarian position (nothing should be constrolled by the government). Most are somewhere in the middle between those two extremes. Most conservatives accept that government should tax it's people, and it should use those taxes on domestic programs that can be shown to be "needed". The key difference between conservatives and liberals is that "needed". Conservatives define "need" as something that cannot be provided via the normal market process (can *only* result if government gets involved). Liberals tend to approach the problem by proposing that all things that *can* be controlled/regulated by governemnt should be. Thus, we have liberals espousing things like universal health care, universal education, universal housing, government job placement, government wellfare for those who can't get jobs, etc, while conservatives tend to oppose most of those to some degree.
Scary thing is that's the short version of this issue. It's actually far more complex then that. I only covered some very basic domestic program issues of the different "sides". My main point is that it's incredibly flawed to just call everyone who's not "Liberal" a conservative. We do tend to do that, but it's incorrect. It's more accurate to place Libertarians at one end of a spectrum, Liberals at the other, and Conservatives in the middle.
But them I'm undoubtably biased... ;)