Fairness: Liberal vs Conservative

[_Darth J]

[deleted]

[MODERATOR NOTE: Darth J, please do not alter the quotes of another poster. Thank you.]

[_subgenius]

i retract my reporting, mistakenly thought i was in celestial forum.
Should have known better since Darth J left the usual inept post.

[Guest]

i retract my reporting, mistakenly thought i was in celestial forum.
Should have known better since Darth J left the usual inept post.

Thank you for sharing the heretofore unknown fact that "all men are created equal" is found in Article I of the Constitution.

Moreover, your appeal to "common sense" is nonsense. Common sense does not tell one that every human is born with equal abilities and opportunities. Your proposition is the absolute one -- and can be defeated with a single counterexample.

then please provide counterexample otherwise concede
i actually prpose that it is commons sense and "self-evident":
my examples of it being common sense are as follows:
Article 1 of the US Constitution
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen
United Nations - Universal Decalration of Human Rights
Pericles in 431 B.C.
etc...

(edited to add examples)

[_Darth J]

Subgenius, I would like to know more about how when Thomas Jefferson drafted Article I of the Constitution, he meant that every human being has the same socioeconomic background, the same innate talents, and the same absence of handicaps when he said "all men are created equal."

[_beastie]

This is not intellectually serious analysis but the same old, threadbare, self-serving leftist tropes about the differences between the Left and the Right that the Left, which has dominated cultural and political discourse for so long, has been able to set as the default received wisdom among primarily themselves.

If you want a philosophically serious discussion of these differences, we can have that, but this book is probably not a good place to start.

In the first place as both present, recent, and two centuries of history tell us, leftists, collectively speaking, are the most dogmatic, reactionary, closed-minded absolutists among the human family. The "new ideas" they are "open to" - socialism, eugenics, the sexual revolution, the welfare state etc. - always end with human debasement, deterioration, and, in a number of cases, catastrophe, but all these historical realities ever do is make the Left dig in its heels ever deeper, shout down alternative theories/ideas ever louder, and continue with the same policies with ever greater fervor and reach.

Well, I doubt you will be open to this, (ha) but here goes. This site gives a quick summary of the differences between the liberal and conservative mind. Note that sixteen separate peer-reviewed were the sources of this information. Number 12 says:

Compared to liberals, conservatives are less open to new experiences and learn better from negative stimuli than positive stimuli.

http://2012election.procon.org/view.res ... eID=004818

The focus of the 47% remark, however ham-fisted Romney was with it, was not on the small sub-set of the total 47% who, for whatever reasons, don't work at all, nor was it about soldiers, the aged, or the disabled (where to got this from I have no idea). It was about a huge group of Americans, now nearly equal in size to those who produce wealth, that either pay no federal income tax, or pay income tax/payroll tax but receive more in government benefits/gratuities than they pay in supportive taxes, and this also includes the entrenched welfare underclass.

We are fast becoming a nation that has decoupled economic independence and reward from work and in which a clear majority will have no more incentive or personal interest in limited, clearly restricted government.

Romney was very clear on who comprised the 47%. He said:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what … who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims. … These are people who pay no income tax. … and so my job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

Read more: http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/12/13/mit ... z2HiIyMduX

This has been discussed quite a bit on this board, but I’m sure you weren’t open to the information. (ha) This graph shows who does not pay federal income tax.


You are part of the 47% that Romney disparaged. You are part of the group that he thinks, simply because you don’t pay federal income taxes, don’t take personal responsibility and care for your life. You are in denial about what his comment meant.

1 Liberals emphasize enforced leveling of material/social condition between human beings in the name of their core value, equality (in a literal, existential sense as reflected in actual economic conditions).

2. Notice the personification of "society" in this statement, and the claim that this entity called "capitalist society" does things to other people, like "leave" them behind. This is quite de rigueur on the Left, and bespeaks the bulk of the ideological iceberg below the surface.

Oh, for heaven’s sake. I refuse to get play your game of twisted semantics, so I will explain this one more time and then ignore future comments on it.
When I say that capitalist society leaves some behind, my meaning is self-evident to all but the deliberately obtuse. I mean that a capitalist system enables certain people to obtain quite a bit of money and material goods, and, conversely, others who do not have certain abilities or attributes are not able to obtain quite a bit of money and goods and may struggle to survive. Compare this to other systems, such as communism.

This isn’t about “equality”. There is no way that our system of helping the impoverished makes them materially “equal” to those who have the ability to make it on their own. It only helps them survive.

Again, an entity or personified abstraction called "capitalist society" is determining the fate or place of individual humans within its precincts. "It" rewards some and "punishes" others. "It" chooses, discriminates, and determines. This entity is "fair" or "unfair."

In actuality, what determines the general course of a person's life, in a free, open, democratic republic grounded in a relatively unhampered market economy are a number of key factors and variables in complex interaction, not an abstract theoretical structure termed "society," and not "capitalism," which is a fiction created by Marx and his later disciples that has no relation to actually existing liberal democratic, free-market societies.

"Society" does not reward or "punish" anyone. The market - about 300,000,000 individual people - who, excluding very small children (but not excluding their wants and needs), choose, discriminate, compare, contrast, sift, calculate, and decide what to buy - and what not to buy - in what quantities and variation, on a day to day basis, is that which determines, over time, what businesses thrive, which thrive only modestly, which are marginal, and which goods, commodities, and services disappear.

This is the great quandary and trade-off the concept of liberty presents, and why the Left disdains and despises it so deeply.

Further, the concept of "fairness" within an open, rule of law based free-market social order is nebulous. It has no logical or rational initial state or basis of comparison with that which is "unfair," and hence must always be essentially arbitrary. Its historic use as a populist club to incite and fan the flames of class war sentiment is its only real value, and that is political, not in any serious sense, philosophical.

See above.

Let's be a bit more specific and precise: free-market economic relations work because of the constitutional guarantees of the rule of law, equality under the law, the right to life, liberty, and property; freedom of association, speech, press, and political activity, and the substantive restrictions on government intervention in most areas of human life.

It is ordered liberty - individual freedom, property rights, the rule of law, and protection from arbitrary government control and confiscation of property - that make "capitalism" work.

So our society, as a whole, did contribute to the circumstance which allowed some to be so heavily rewarded.

No. Individuals (like Thomas Edison), free to think, work, create, and prosper, contributed to the overall material wealth of society in concert with others also motivated to improve their own condition and that of others through the creation of wealth. Government provides the overall societal infrastructure - individual, unalienable rights, a vast field of liberty in which to develop and expand one's talents and abilities; a strictly limited government with clearly enumerated powers; the rule of law, a system of civil and criminal courts etc., but the free individual, in free concert and contractual relationships with other free individuals, creates all the actual net wealth existent within that society.

"Society" created nothing. Collective abstractions create nothing.

If we did not live in a society that kept our streets fairly safe, that educated the general population, and that provided an infrastructure, entrepreneurs would not be able to succeed in the manner in which they do. They would have to build their own roads, hire their own police force, educate future workers, all on their own.

So, yes, those who succeed materially in our society owe part of that success to the fact that our society, collectively, has offered these basic services.

1. No. The poor should be helped not because of the theoretical abstractions of "fair" and "unfair," but because they are our brothers and sisters, human beings, and we are to do unto them as we would do unto ourselves.

2. Who are you to say any particular person will never rise from poverty and want? This is among the classic symptoms of the mindset common to the Anointed; the Platonic parent who makes grand, sweeping pronouncements about "society" and various individuals or groups of individual within it, and then proposes grand, sweeping "solutions" to the problems of the human condition, seeking to "change the world."

This is the problem we face.

This is such a gross distortion of my words it's beneath response.

I don't know any conservative who has ever argued for anything like this.

Oh really? Republicans have been fighting the New Deal since its inception. This opposition is evident in their enthusiastic support of the Ryan budget, which slashes programs for the poor.

If you’re not cutting Medicare or Social Security or defense you’ve already taken more than half of the federal budget off the table. And you know what’s mainly left, the big pot of money you can still cut?

Programs for poor people.

And so, if you look at Ryan’s specific cuts, most of them are programs for poor people. In fact, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that more than six of every 10 dollars Ryan cuts from the federal budget is coming from programs for the poor.
Take Medicaid. Ryan cuts nearly $1.4 trillion from Medicaid over the next 10 years. That’s a 34 percent cut to the program’s expected spending over the next decade. Those cuts, unlike the cuts to Medicare, are specific, and they begin immediately. Estimates from the Urban Institute suggest that if those cuts are made, about 30 million people could lose their health insurance.

Oh, and Ryan repeals the Affordable Care Act. That’s where some of his Medicaid cuts come from, but that also knocks out all the subsidies for lower-income Americans to get health insurance. So that’s another 15 million people without health insurance. So under Ryan’s budget, about 45 million people would lose health insurance they otherwise would’ve gotten.

Ryan’s budget cuts $134 billion from food stamps, which is enough to kick 8-10 million people off the program.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/won ... -the-poor/





The rest of your post isn't worthy of any response at all.

[_beastie]

Subgenius has repeatedly shown himself incapable of actually understanding other people's posts. His responses are so off-the-wall that to entertain them is sure madness. Just rest assured: whatever he thinks I said, chances are very strong I said no such thing.

[_Res Ipsa]

Subgenius, you really ought to take a class or two in formal logic. I'd recommend prop logic and quantfier logic. If you did, you'd understand why your translation of what beastie said is nonsense. "Not all X are Y" is not equivalent to "no X are Y."

And you really should take a course in evidence, too. The documents you cite are no more evidence that, in fact, every person is born with equal ability and opportunity than is the latest issue of Spiderman.

[Guest]

Compared to liberals, conservatives are less open to new experiences and learn better from negative stimuli than positive stimuli.

http://2012election.procon.org/view.res ... eID=004818

Until otherwise indicated, this retreat into Soviet-style pseudo-social science brands you as completely outside serious discourse. This is what the Nazis did to the Jews, what early to mid-20th century communists did to those who didn't agree with them ("deviationists" and "counterrevolutionaries") what whites in the old South believed about blacks, and has perhaps, save for only a few other ideologically salient leftists proclivities (like eugenics), the longest and most checkered history as a means, most beloved of the Left, of silencing debate, circumventing the arena of ideas entirely, and
relegating their ideological enemies to the level of innate inferiority who's ideas deserve no further consideration.

This was pseudo-social scientist Thadore Adorno et al's meat and potatoes, and has been resurrected time and again when leftists like yourself have come to the realization that they are sitting ducks in the open marketplace of ideas when they cannot control the discourse and set the terms of debate.

The gross politicization of social science for ideological ends here is easily the equal of anything that came out of Soviet psychiatry during the 20th century. Its patent (and crudely transparent) absurdity casts a very dim light, both intellectually and morally, on the intellectual hacks that created it and the self-satisfied drones who take it from their spoons.

Romney was very clear on who comprised the 47%. He said:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what … who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims. … These are people who pay no income tax. … and so my job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

Romney was caught running off his mouth in an unguarded moment. You have no idea what he was actually thinking, or what he actually believes, because you neither care or have any intention of knowing. Nor do you have any intention of ever intellectually grasping and digesting conservatism (which, as William Buckley said many years ago, is an intellectual movement and political philosophy and can only be understood on those terms and with consistent, concerted intellectual engagement). Well, I do, and whatever Romney said, I understand the ideas and facts behind it, and they have been developed and elucidated by many others long before Mitt Romney ever came on the scene. Nor is Romney anything but a marginal conservative, and I'm not even sure he really understands the full implications of what he was (trying) to say.

Read my post again. The salient point is this:

We are fast becoming a nation that has decoupled economic independence and reward from work and in which a clear majority will have no more incentive or personal interest in limited, clearly restricted government.

You are part of the 47% that Romney disparaged.

This kind of disingenuous, tendentious argumentation is why most people who disagree with you gave up so much as any attempt at discussion with you long ago.

I cannot be part of that demographic by definition, because I voted for him (with my fingers crossed). The people he was talking about, and which other thinkers have discussed time and again in much more detail and with far greater intellectual substance (and what he said was not meant to be a lecture at a symposium), are both the underclass and a substantial portion of the electorate from the working poor up into the middle class, who receive more in government benefits that they pay in taxes and which creates perverse form of self-interest and erodes the love of liberty while incentivizing a desire for ever expanding government, and large-scale government is inimical to liberty.

I mean that a capitalist system enables certain people to obtain quite a bit of money and material goods, and, conversely, others who do not have certain abilities or attributes are not able to obtain quite a bit of money and goods and may struggle to survive.

Yes, and so what? First of all, there is no such thing as a "capitalist system." That is an ideological construction of the Left (originating primarily in Marx) and has no relation to actual reality. "Capitalism" is nothing more than liberty in the economic realm. It is economic freedom to apply one's talents, abilities, skills, potential, and desires to the surrounding environment for the purpose of improving temporal circumstances.

What you are really against, then, is that very freedom, and there is no possibility of anything other than a wide variety of disparate outcomes in an environment of individual freedom.

It is the same within LDS doctrine. In a situation of individual agency (the ability to choose) and individual liberty within the context of agency (free agency) to choose against a background of alternatives, there will be a wide variety of outcomes and relative states. It is no different in the temporal/economic realm.

Compare this to other systems, such as communism

Socialism (revolutionary, utopian socialism, which Marx later dubbed "communism" for polemical and political purposes) is a system of collectivized, enforced equality of poverty and requires totalitarian repression to generate and maintain. What is the comparison you are seeking here?

This isn’t about “equality”. There is no way that our system of helping the impoverished makes them materially “equal” to those who have the ability to make it on their own. It only helps them survive.

Well, thank heaven for that, as if the attempt was to be made, it would mean the end of liberty and human dignity - as it always has when it has been tried before.

If we did not live in a society that kept our streets fairly safe,
that educated the general population, and that provided an infrastructure, entrepreneurs would not be able to succeed in the manner in which they do. They would have to build their own roads, hire their own police force, educate future workers, all on their own.

Did I not say the rule of law, equality under the law, the right to life, liberty, and property?

So, yes, those who succeed materially in our society owe part of that success to the fact that our society, collectively, has offered these basic services.

"Society" does nothing. There is no such thing as an entity called "society" that "gives," 'offers," or is "fair" or "unfair." It is the constitution, accepted and upheld by the vast majority of individual citizens, and the laws that govern and protect the individual, from both government itself and other individuals who do not respect the rule of law or the rights of others, that allows free market capitalism to work and work so well for so many (indeed, the overwhelming majority, when its actually allowed to work).

I find it fascinating the way in which you are forced to compartmentalize groups of people such as "entrepreneurs" from "society" as if "society" was a separate phenomena from "entrepreneurs" that does various things "for them" such that the can then succeed.

In all of this, you still ignore the unavoidable fact that the wealth and money needed for the roads, police, and public schools are all, every brick and textbook, provided by the private sector and the working, wealth creating, striving individuals within it, without which the government treasury would be bare and the schools never built.

I noticed you capitulated immediately on the reasons why we should help our fellow beings, which, although not anticipated, is the better part of empty valor.'

Oh really? Republicans have been fighting the New Deal since its inception. This opposition is evident in their enthusiastic support of the Ryan budget, which slashes programs for the poor.

Just class-war boilerplate suitable for nothing intellectually above a Michael Moore speech at a MoveOn.org fundraiser.

Your right, this is not worth responding to.

[_beastie]

Droopy - I have to give it to you. You are the master at packing very little substance into verbiage. Even worse - most of your "substance" consists of diversionary games of semantics.

[_Gadianton]

1. No. The poor should be helped not because of the theoretical abstractions of "fair" and "unfair," but because they are our brothers and sisters, human beings, and we are to do unto them as we would do unto ourselves.

That's fine with me. If you help poor people with this reasoning, then I think you're a good person. Of course, if what you're trying to get at is that Beastie has no connection with children she helps read and only does it because she's made a theoretical, mental-only calculation, well, can you possibly believe that?

Don't you think that notions of "fairness" come about by "abstracting" how one should act based on empathy, or the golden rule, or whatever? The motivation would be the same practical motivation behind any other rule. I don't want to hit people with my car based on empathy and how bad I'd feel about it if I ever did, so I don't drive around my neighborhood at 70 mph weaving in and out of lanes. However, this does not imply that there shouldn't be a speed limit, even though pretty much everyone else reasons as I do as well. You might have a problems with rules that lose touch with the reasons for their creation. For instance, one can satisfy himself that he's driving the speed limit, but still hit someone out of carelessness. And then there's the police state, where what started out as a good idea, simply becomes a feeding ground for government to make money off of technicalities as the underlying problems go unsolved. And of course, there are the free riders, pedestrians who intentionally take their time in a crosswalk. But understanding there are problems with laws, whether about welfare or traffic, doesn't mean we should do away with laws, that's as impractical as the belief we can solve all our problems with laws. And the church has a rule-based welfare program, does it not? I have relatives who do a lot of volunteer work for it, and the same range of perspectives exist there as in secular society; one of these relatives feels very connected with the poor, the other I'm pretty sure feels far less connected at a personal level, but duty bound, and both think there is quite a lot of free riding going on. They also believe the program should expand notwithsdanding the free-riding and the paid positions that are probably filled by people who just want a job.