{"id":3998,"date":"2010-06-03T10:30:46","date_gmt":"2010-06-03T17:30:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=3998"},"modified":"2010-07-01T10:36:02","modified_gmt":"2010-07-01T17:36:02","slug":"my-own-conservatism-condensed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=3998","title":{"rendered":"(My Own) Conservatism, Condensed"},"content":{"rendered":"

In my previous post<\/a>, I accused my conservative Republican friends of selfishness.\u00a0 Some of my conservative Republican friends read this blog.\u00a0 I doubt I’ve endeared myself to them.<\/p>\n

So I should probably clarify my own relationship with selfishness.\u00a0 All humans are selfish, covetous, and jealous.\u00a0 I’m human.\u00a0 I worked hard for what I have and will fight to protect it.\u00a0 Is that selfish enough?<\/p>\n

Where I differ from my conservative friends is over what they call enlightened self-interest, the magical belief that if only everyone acted out of pure selfishness, society as a whole would benefit, that the rest of us would be inspired to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps, that unfettered capitalism is all the government we need.<\/p>\n

As far as I can see, unrestrained personal selfishness and unfettered capitalism are ruining America.\u00a0 The disparity between rich and poor is widening, workers are losing rights and protections, and greedy investors and industrialists are closing plants in the USA and moving them overseas.\u00a0 Our infrastructure is becoming so decrepit only a massive national-level WPA-style effort can rebuild it, let alone improve it for future needs.\u00a0 Our public education system is slowly being replaced with a privatized low-wage charter school system.\u00a0 The nice little extras we get in return for the taxes we pay — libraries, parks, bike paths — are on the chopping block from coast to coast.<\/p>\n

Unrestrained personal selfishness and unfettered capitalism will not address any of these problems.\u00a0 Government is the only institution that can.\u00a0 And government lives on our tax payments.<\/p>\n

Though I’m as selfish as anyone else, I don’t want to see my countrymen starving in the streets.\u00a0 Americans need jobs, and along with those jobs, they need living wages, health care, and viable pension plans.\u00a0 I don’t mind paying higher taxes to help make that happen.<\/p>\n

I’m a socialist.\u00a0 I could not have gone to college if it weren’t for taxpayer-funded state colleges.\u00a0 I would not have a pension and health care today if I had not worked for the government.\u00a0 Government has been good to me.<\/p>\n

I’m also a selfish socialist.\u00a0 I would not have gotten an education without hard work or the will to better myself.\u00a0 I would not have succeeded in the US Air Force without a well-developed work ethic and sound values.\u00a0 I would not have raised a family and made a good life for them without constantly putting them first and looking out for their interests.<\/p>\n

So I’m hardly a communist.\u00a0 I don’t believe in to each according to his needs; I believe in to each according to what he’s earned.\u00a0 But for people to earn, there must be jobs, including jobs for those who now receive welfare, at least those who can work (and day care for their children).\u00a0 Along with jobs, there need to be minimum standards for wages, health care, and pensions.\u00a0 Unrestrained personal selfishness and unfettered capitalism will never make any of that happen.\u00a0 It won’t happen without government, and it can’t happen without taxes to pay for it.\u00a0 The well-off need to pay proportionally more in taxes; the rich more yet.<\/p>\n

I am, in addition to being a selfish socialist, a protectionist.\u00a0 We have to reverse the exporting of jobs overseas.\u00a0 American companies that have outsourced jobs should have the shit taxed out of them, and by that I mean taxed so heavily they’ll have no alternative but to bring the jobs back.\u00a0\u00a0 Foreign corporations wanting to sell goods in America should pay hefty import tariffs — or build plants here.\u00a0 Employers who do not offer health care and pension plans to their workers need to contribute heavily to government-run health care and pension plans.<\/p>\n

Socialism is just a demonized name for regulated capitalism.\u00a0 We need to bring back regulation.<\/p>\n

My conservative Republican friends will read this and think, how na\u00efve.\u00a0 Guilty . . . perhaps.\u00a0 What I propose can happen.\u00a0 It’s doable.\u00a0 Moreover, unlike communism, it conforms to and accommodates human nature.<\/p>\n

What my conservative friends dream of — a Randian paradise of enlightened self-interest — can’t happen.\u00a0 We just aren’t like that; when selfishness is unrestrained and capitalism is unfettered, the inevitable outcome is that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.\u00a0 And that’s not the America I want.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In my previous post, I accused my conservative Republican friends of selfishness.\u00a0 Some of my conservative Republican friends read this blog.\u00a0 I doubt I’ve endeared myself to them. So I should probably clarify my own relationship with selfishness.\u00a0 All humans are selfish, covetous, and jealous.\u00a0 I’m human.\u00a0 I worked hard for what I have and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,19,18,2,8,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3998","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big-brother","category-class","category-consumerism","category-personal","category-politics","category-the-economy"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3998"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3998\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4010,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3998\/revisions\/4010"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}