Conservatism and Socialism

First of all, it would be a mistake to confuse congressional leadership or tea party activists with serious conservatives.  The tea party is a loose collection of dabblers in libertarianism of the window-shop variety-- populism meets libertarianism.  Were the congressional leadership concerned with governing on principles-- even ever so much in the slightest-- we would see them busy advancing policy items, and we see none of that.  Let's not confuse noise with speech.

I was going to go on to the history of it, but the lassez-faire thing isn't too far off, but it shows more similarities to the robber barons.  That's the sort of thing that would incline a serious conservative as Bruce Bartlett, policy adviser to Reagan, to "[characterize] the Republicans as the greedy, sociopathic party."

And it's not really limited to the Right.  The DNC is the "centrist" pro-business group on the Left that advocates much the same free trade policy.  But China is substantially different from the Banana Republics in the sheer size of it, and the fact that it is a notable military power.  And there has been enough political stability for long enough that the production of goods has moved more and more away from the location of the natural resources.

Those are big issues.  They should be addressed.  It's just that those are outside of the scope of this article.

Of course, the structure of social security needs to be examined.  And of course, the casino owners would like it were everyone to bring all their savings to the casino, and those casino owners have their own advocates.  But when the discussion is turned away from such silliness to the real question--What is the scope of this program?-- we see the real difference at play.  Social security is, at its base, an insurance program.  It guarantees all retirees some form of income, and it removes older, higher wage, less productive workers from the workforce and increases demand for younger, lower wage workers.  All that's good.

Again, government is the one and only institution that Liberals are able to trust, and they trust implicitly in government.  Conservatives view government as only one of a great number of social institutions, one which is limited in its usefulness or desirability.

And so, the Left sees social security as a guarantee of self-sufficiency, of quality of life, and any number of things-- for the very reason that they view government as the one and only social construct which can be relied on-- and toward the end of producing equality of outcome.  Let the prudent be punished that the fool may be spared.

Well, if you're retired, then you have an insurance program for life that you don't have to pay a dime for.  Co-payments don't count as premiums, mind you.  Your house is already paid off, or you have no business retiring anyway.  So how much income does one really need without housing and insurance costs?  Is self-sufficiency really the objective?  And if so, to what extent is the government obligated to provide for that?

This is why Liberals were aghast at the partnership of government with private religion-based charities.  Here's an unapproved social institution (ie, something other than government) becoming stronger in their communities by providing a service open to all.

The material presented here is solely concerning moral judgments, and not economic policy.

The blog post was written after I had spent some time in consideration of the research of Jonathan Haidt.

Here's his bio and here's his article, "What Makes People Vote Republican?".

From the article:

For my dissertation research, I made up stories about people who did things that were disgusting or disrespectful yet perfectly harmless. For example, what do you think about a woman who can't find any rags in her house so she cuts up an old American flag and uses the pieces to clean her toilet, in private? Or how about a family whose dog is killed by a car, so they dismember the body and cook it for dinner? I read these stories to 180 young adults and 180 eleven-year-old children, half from higher social classes and half from lower, in the USA and in Brazil. I found that most of the people I interviewed said that the actions in these stories were morally wrong, even when nobody was harmed. Only one group—college students at Penn—consistently exemplified Turiel's definition of morality and overrode their own feelings of disgust to say that harmless acts were not wrong. (A few even praised the efficiency of recycling the flag and the dog)....

The second conclusion was that the moral domain varies across cultures. Turiel's description of morality as being about justice, rights, and human welfare worked perfectly for the college students I interviewed at Penn, but it simply did not capture the moral concerns of the less elite groups—the working-class people in both countries who were more likely to justify their judgments with talk about respect, duty, and family roles. ("Your dog is family, and you just don't eat family.") From this study I concluded that the anthropologist Richard Shweder was probably right in a 1987 critique of Turiel in which he claimed that the moral domain (not just specific rules) varies by culture. Drawing on Shweder's ideas, I would say that the second rule of moral psychology is that morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way.

(emphasis is the author's)

That is a good point about rights being extended to individuals.  Not quite factually accurate though.

First of all, the Constitution does not grant any rights.  It can't grant any rights.  The rights are already there and present through natural law.  The Constitution serves only to limit the power of government from intruding on those rights.  But it doesn't create any new rights where none existed.  The rights were pre-existent to the document.