Ich Bin Ein Liberal!

[silverscreenselect]

The path of today's liberalism is filled with good intentions littered with ill-advised rules and regulations, contradicting and incorrect analysis of situations and issues and most importantly with unintended and often catastrophic results. of the solutions they do manage to implement. I agree with most of the ideals of liberalism, but not the naieve, simplistic and often self serving solutions they propose.

Unfortunately conservatives haven't done any better.

"Naive simplistic and self serving solutions" are not limited to liberals. According to conservatives, the answer to the US energy problem is "drill, baby, drill." The answer to the economic problem is tax cuts for everyone. The answer to 9-11 was spend like normal and inade Iraq. Talk about naive, simplistic and self serving.

A good bit of the problem is the fact that there is no simplistic solution to the complex problems we face but the American public doesn't want to try to analyze complex, comprehensive proposals and, instead, prefers the type of easily digested sound bites that are delivered in campaign commercials and candidate debates.

In the recent election, the voters solidly rejected the usual Republican attempts at oversimplification "I want to cut your taxes and he wants to raise your taxes" rhetoric, acknowledging that these simplistic solutions won't work. However, they put their faith instead in a candidate who didn't offer solutions to those problems, only faith in himself as being the solution. In essence, Obama said, the solutions are too complicated for me to explain but trust me, I'll change things and fix them. It remains to be seen how much change and how much fixing he's going to do.

Conservatism as a viable political philosophy in this country is dying. The voters gave Reagan and the Republicans a 25-year run trying their way of doing things and it got us deeper in debt, embroiled in an unnecessary war and facing the worst financial crisis since the last time they had free reign at running the country.

[danielh41]

I did a search and found both a serious definition of conservatism: http://www.conservative-resources.com/d ... ative.html

and a serious definition of liberalism: http://www.conservative-resources.com/d ... beral.html.

They are both extremely long, so I'm not going to post them here. But I will say that this little item in the liberal definition is one that I disagree with strongly:

The fourth principle in the definition of liberal is a belief in the benevolence of government and of human beings. Modern liberals believe that human nature is essentially good, and that if an individual is corrupted it is usually the fault of some social or economic injustice.

I've seen enought to know that human nature is not essentially good (see the James Madison quote below).

The counter to that on the conservative description is one that I do agree with:

The fourth principle that defines conservatives is their suspicion of power and their hatred of big government. In his First Inaugural Address, President Ronald Reagan declared,


"Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. From time to time we've been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?"6

[18] And yet, what separates conservatives from anarchists is their reluctant concession that government is a necessary evil, as without it the good are often at the mercy of the evil.

[19] "What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?" asked James Madison. "If men were angels, no government would be necessary."7 Alas, men are not angels, and conservatives know as Madison did that we are imperfect beings and easily corrupted. For this reason, conservatives believe power must be spread out and decentralized, with adequate checks and balances to ensure that government does not devolve into tyranny.

Given all of the above, what do you think the role of government should be on moral issues, particularly that of abortion?

If government is necessary because the good are often at the mercy of the evil, then it only makes sense that it should act to protect those who are not able to protect themselves.

[mrkelley23]

I did a search and found both a serious definition of conservatism: http://www.conservative-resources.com/d ... ative.html

and a serious definition of liberalism: http://www.conservative-resources.com/d ... beral.html.

They are both extremely long, so I'm not going to post them here. But I will say that this little item in the liberal definition is one that I disagree with strongly: I've seen enought to know that human nature is not essentially good (see the James Madison quote below).

The counter to that on the conservative description is one that I do agree with:

Given all of the above, what do you think the role of government should be on moral issues, particularly that of abortion?

If government is necessary because the good are often at the mercy of the evil, then it only makes sense that it should act to protect those who are not able to protect themselves.

And in these cases, who defines what is "good" and what is "evil?" Is it the "government?" Or is good and evil an unquestioned dichotomy that everyone knows? And in your above sentence, who are "those?" I assume from context that you are talking about what you would call the unborn, but I want to make sure we are talking about the same things.