***OT****
How is it possible to embrace a fiscally conservative position and at the same time a Democratic body that's hardly met a social program it hasn't liked?
It has been painful at best, and I was a long time in coming to my current inclination. I had to be dragged kicking and screaming by the facts which, once I started really looking objectively and without prejudice, started to pile up rather conspicuously. It took me a long time to realize that some of the social programs, which were set up with the very best of intentions, were in fact causing some of the same problems they were set up to eliminate. My liberal friends call my conversion "going over to the dark side". Such is the power behind a set of beliefs, they have little proof to contradict what I say, but they'd rather die than admit that the conservative stance has any validity. Mostly they are turned off by the social agenda of the religious right, as I was.
I keep hoping if I explain my views often enough to enough people I know that maybe a few Democrats will stop shooting themselves in the foot with their war on wealth and their embracing of government solutions to every problem. Most Democrats are sincere, honest, hardworking individuals. They aren't stupid but they've been lead around by an entrenched self interest group that has the urge to set up program after program to "do good". The unintended consequences are that the demand is always running ahead of supply which leads them to believe these programs are needed even more. They really don't want to face that the supply of public services creates it's own demand. I keep wondering at what point Democrats will start to get angry at how poorly these programs work. Actually they think they are working and that without them, things would be far worse even though all the evidence points to an ever escalating spiral of violence and poverty beginning right around the time some of the first "Great Society" programs were first introduced.
As for being a registered Democrat, I lived in Baltimore City when I registered to vote. My first impulse was to register as an independent, but alas, I realized quickly that meant I was giving up my right to vote local elections primarily because Republicans seldom ever won any of the local and state offices, so almost all the elections were decided in the primary. Registering as an independent or Republican was equivalent to giving up my right to vote in the city.
I've followed some of the Libertarian Party views. If I'm turned off it is by the same thing that turns me off about both mainstream parties and it is that the platform is sometimes run by the more radical extremes. I for one, might complain about the public schools but I don't necessarily want to see them abolished. Some Libertarians want most or all government run programs discontinued and I think that there might be a way to make them more competitive with the private sector. Maybe this is my lingering Democratic distrust of the public to do the right thing with their own money. I still suspect that if the government didn't compel parents to send their children to school and provide them a place to have that school, a lot of children who grew up poor like I did wouldn't get an education. |
