Delaware politicsFollow

Majivo. I inaccurately understood how you misunderstood his post before, see my edit. You thought in the second sentence he was defining each classical when he was defining them in modernity.

Edited, Sep 17th 2010 10:03pm by Allegory

While this does make his statement accurate, it also makes it completely nonsensical, since there's no reason for him to say he defines them "in the classical sense" and then give them definitions in a modern context. They're essentially contradictory statements as he wrote them.

Gbaji, I'm fully aware of the relationship between the classical and modern-day usage of these terms. My point is simply that you're claiming one thing and then defining it completely opposite to that.

Allegory is right. Liberals don't give a **** whether government is big enough to smother us or small enough to drown in a bathtub. We're more concerned about how effective it is. A small, nimble, effective government is great. A bloated bureaucracy is a waste of money. But there are things that a government is supposed to do, and it needs to be big enough to be able to do them. Paved roads. Fire and police services. Schools. Collection of revenues to support those essential services. I don't mind paying property taxes to help the neighbor kids ride the school bus to the nearest elementary school, which is over four miles away.

The problem is that the higher the levels of government get, the more meta and the more distanced all the projects get. But we need those larger levels of government to organize and handle the bigger projects that stretch beyond cities and counties.

The Department of Defense is voluntarily shrinking itself by $100 billion over the next five years. With the war in Iraq ramping down, the need to feed the military industrial complex isn't as pressing. You'd think that the Republicans would be jumping for joy at this, but the only folks that have talked about it happily seem to be the anti-war liberals. Everyone else is ******** that it's going to cut jobs in the private sector - all those defense contractors that have been at the government feeding trough for the last ten years.

You can't have it both ways. Either you have a government that is tiny and doesn't employ anyone, or you have a government that provides jobs to people both in the public and private sectors, and has to pay for those jobs via tax revenue collected from other people.

TL;DR: It's not the size that matters, it's what you do with it that counts.

<insert joke here>

She only dabbled in witchcraft, she never joined a coven.

& her canceling all of her Sunday morning talk shows had nothing to do wtih that clip, either.

You're right, I don't believe this; I don't believe the "American Spirit" is or ever was greed.

The government doesn't take from one person and give to another though. The government collects taxes from us to run the country in the manner that the majority demands.

Unless it's about abortion, then you want the government all over that...

While it may be your particular religious belief, you want the gov't to change that for everyone.

At the moment abortion is legal. LEGAL! If you don't like that, write your senator and have him try to get that changed. If that isn't working for you, picket the senate.

You may not want to believe this, but the Republican politicians don't get a red damn about abortion. It's just a talking point for them. If they REALLY cared about it, Roe v. Wade would have been overturned during the Bush Admin. At least they should have tried. Did they? Nope, because if Roe v. Wade gets overturned, then they lose a big voting block.

They keep saying they're "pro-life" to get dopey people like you to vote for them, even though nothing ever changes.

However, picketing Abortion clinics, and more extreme tactics will not work. That won't get the law changed.

Gonna reply to this first, since you make great points.



Yeah. My fault. I sometimes skip a step ahead when posting and don't realize that I didn't clarify the bits in between. I had intended to clarify the association between modern conservatism and classical liberalism and modern liberalism and social liberalism when making my statement about defining in a "classical sense". I just skipped the "conservative = status quo = classical liberalism" bit.

Hopefully, my later post clarified that.



You're semi correct. I'm mingling intent and methodology, but in this case it's hard not to.



We could go a step further if we wanted to though. It's more correct to say that conservatives believe in individual liberty and responsibility, while liberals believe in group liberty and group responsibility (including concepts like positive rights). Those different positions result in the "We want liberty!" of the right versus "we want fairness!" of the left. Those then resolve further into "small government vs big government".

I'm just comparing the relative positions the ideologies cause. It's unfair to contrast the conservative position of "small government" to the liberal position of "equality and fairness". Those are different aspects of the issue. Apples should be compared to apples, right?



Sure. But what I was trying to get at earlier is that Conservatives seem to understand that small government and greater individual liberty go hand in hand, while it seems like only a small number of liberals can grasp that greater "equality" (as they define it) requires bigger government. It's like a strange sort of mental block in that they insist that we must intervene in people's lives to make the outcomes of their activities more "fair/equal", but bristle at the idea that this means that they are "for big government".

Kinda exactly like what you're doing right now. They are one and the same. You can't have the form of equality which the political left wants without using big government. To say you're for one, but not want to be associated with the other is kinda silly, isn't it?




I suspect the definition of "fairness" used in your graph isn't what most conservatives would agree is "fair". What you really mean is "equality". And not even "equality of opportunity", or "equality under the law" (because conservatives are for those things), but rather "equality of outcome". That's not really the same thing at all, and most people would argue that it's inherently "unfair", not the other way around.



It's not that they have zero interest in it, but rather that they don't talk about it. Their policies require bigger government. Therefore, whether they consciously intend it or not, or think about it or not, or talk about it or not, their policies are "pro big government". This is the mental block I spoke about earlier. They want things which require bigger government, but don't want to carry the baggage of their own positions. Which seems like an inherently dishonest position.



Sure. But whatever you call it, their policies require bigger government. Massively bigger government.


It is not incorrect for someone to condemn drunk driving because it'll cause more accidents and deaths on our roads and highways. What you're trying to do is insist that we can only look at the act itself and not the results. So supporting liberal policies promoting "equality/fairness" should never be condemned on the grounds that they result in bigger government. But just as supporting laws allowing people to drive while drunk will result in more traffic fatalities, supporting liberal policies will result in bigger government. Absolutely, it should be "fair" for opponents to point that out and hold those policies and those who support them for that fact.