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To: techguerrilla who wrote (19331)	11/25/2000 12:43:24 PM
From: bela_ghoulashi	Respond to of 65232

The following is a slightly edited version of a pm bland sent to a fellow poster on SI about a week ago, in response to that poster questioning how any thinking person could ever possibly be a conservative: .......................................................... Just for the record, I was a liberal until I was about 25 years old. Carter was the first president I voted for, and--at first--I considered Reagan a joke and possibly the harbinger of the decline and fall of the 2nd Roman Empire. Three (well, actually four)things changed my thinking: 1. I took graduate classes in World Politics, Soviet Foreign Policy, and Russian History. More than anything else, it was the deathgrip paralysis and rigidity of Russian government bureaucracy over the course of the past few centuries that led me to ponder deeply on the "drag" created on social and economic evolution by entrenched, powerful, self-perpetuating but highly inefficient bureaucracies that do not die natural deaths once their initial utility is outlived and outgrown, but simply rot to the core and continue rotting and absorbing resources that would be much more effectively deployed for newer, timelier, more creative purposes. 2. I also took a course in macroeconomics, and on the basis of the numbers I was looking at, concluded that Johnson's Great Society programs were not solving the problems they were designed to address, but rather institutionalizing and perpetuating them generationally in ways that I believed were clearly harmful for our society and disturbingly similar to the entrenched bureaucracies I could see had done so much damage in Russia. 3. I looked around at the changes in the media and popular culture that had taken place just within the span of my own brief lifetime and saw an acceleration in the direction of crudity, low standards and expectations, and amorality that I believed was harmful to the values and ideals instilled in me as a child, and harmful, I firmly believe, to the future of this country. 4. I entered the working world from the sheltered environment of college and finally had to deal firsthand with personal responsibility, accepting it, observing close up and firsthand the immediate consequences of not accepting it, wielding it over others in some cases (I have always worked in a supervisory/managerial capacity), and frequently trying to motivate others to accept it as well for the benefit of everyone concerned in the immediate workplace. I want a great country. I want a free country. I want a country that will continue to lead the world by example. I do not want a country that suffocates itself by penalizing creative achievement and promoting and deliberately expanding parasitic unselfsufficient dependence. That's how I personally came to be a conservative. It was a gradual, rational process, not an emotional, visceral one...as my liberal opinions previously had been, in all candor and honesty. Bland