Kavekkk wrote:
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Again, I take issue with the term liberal
You're the one who used the term 'liberal ideology', on the last page. I'm using it because I'm joining the comment chain which sprang from you using it. Why did you use it if you find it so problematic?
Because when I use it, I'm referring to modern liberal political ideology. When you used it in return, you seemed to be using it as a synonym for "a philosophy based on the principles of liberalism". Which, as I explained in my earlier post, is not remotely what modern liberal political ideology is about. Modern liberal is more properly aligned with "social liberalism", which is itself a rejection of the core tenant of classical liberalism, that places individual rights at the forefront. Social liberalism is not classical liberalism. It's an ideology that places broad social outcomes ahead of individual rights. While it's technically in the same school of philosophy in the sense that it's an attempt to operate a government that rules for the betterment of the people rather than merely the betterment of those in power, it's very very different in terms of how it measures "better", and what methodology it allows in the pursuit of "better".
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Again, neither Stalin or Hitler are liberal in any sense
Not if you mean "liberal" as "putting the rights and liberties of individuals first". Clearly he was not.
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...they are not liberal in the classical sense or in the sense that Hillary Clinton or even Sanders is a liberal.
I disagree. You're getting caught up in the label "liberal" and an assumed meaning based on the root. But if we mean liberal as in "those ascribing to a modern US political policy broadly labeled as liberal", then yes, they were liberal. Because modern US liberals most closely follow the same ideology of "social liberalism" that Hitler and Stalin followed. The underlying defining concept is the idea that it's ok, and even necessary for the government to infringe on the rights of individuals in order to make the social and/or economic outcomes of the whole society better.
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They are not liberals or social liberals. They have two very divergent ideologies (and if you claim they're both socialists, you must therefore accept that there is not 'a' ideology of socialism, but several) which both see any form of liberalism as effete, intellectually dishonest and ineffective.
Again though, you're retroactively applying the label based on whether the resulting outcome was "good" or "bad". But I'm looking at the methodology. In all of these cases, the underlying assumption is that government can put the good of the whole ahead of the rights of the individual in the pursuit of making that whole "better" than it would be otherwise. What do you think justifies Obamacare requiring that individuals must purchase health insurance even if they don't want to? Putting the whole ahead of the individual is the core concept behind it. That if we force people to buy something they don't want or need, it'll add to the total pool of money for health care, thus helping pay for that care for those who do need it but otherwise could not afford it.
That is social liberalism. I don't want to call it "socialism" because that has a specific meaning in terms of actual established governments (definitions get tricky here). But when someone says they are a "socialist", it means that they are an adherent to the basic concept of social liberalism I just outlined above. They believe that the government should take actions which infringe individual rights when it believes that a greater good will result.
How extreme the actions, or the infringement, or whether we agree with the greater good being pursued does not determine whether it is or isn't social liberalism. It's the fact of weighting that greater good higher than individual liberty when contemplating government action and power that does. It's the concept behind the action that defines it, not the action itself. And in all of these cases, the underlying assumption driving them was (and is) that the government should be the vehicle to force individuals to work for or contribute to a greater good, even at the expense of their own liberty. It's the same whether we're talking about social security, or medicare, or ACA, or welfare, or food stamps, or a host of domestic programs that take from one group to provide for another. The underlying assumption is that the government can do a better job with your property than you can.
And that is in complete opposition to the principles of classical liberalism.
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The problem is that, once you've accepted the fact that government can infringe individual liberties to make society as a whole "better"
If you see taxation as an infringement of liberties then... almost everyone agrees this is fine.
No, we don't. For things like national defense and some basic interstate rules and regulations, sure. Those are necessary roles of our federal government. Most conservatives are very much opposed to the federal government taxing them to spend money on welfare, and even education. This is something that can and should be done at the state or even local level, where the people have more power and choice.
We don't spend money on the military to make our society a better place. We do it to protect us from foreign threats and to have the ability to press our issues around the world. You're still missing the key components that the objective is to make "society better". This means social programs. Taking money from private citizens and giving it to other private citizens because you think it's more fair that way, or will make a greater percentage of the people happier, is what makes it social liberalism, and what makes us conservatives oppose it. It's not that we hate the poor, or want people to starve, but that we don't think the government, especially the federal government, is the right vehicle for providing that help.
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It's not a defining attribute of any political position. The republican party is 100% behind it.
Except for our constant calls to eliminate spending on things like NPR, right? Social security and medicare is a bit trickier because even a socialist like FDR couldn't quite get them set up as true socialist programs and had to structure them like investment accounts. Um... But the opposition to those programs on the right is stronger today than it has been for decades, ever since the left more or less abandoned the idea that these were investments and are now treated as just additional tax revenue to use to fund retirement and medical care for the elderly. Add in Obamacare, which tosses out even the most basic idea of people having to pay into the program in order to get anything out, and you see even more opposition.
There's a pattern to what we oppose and how much we oppose it. And it does align with these principles I'm talking about.
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Some libertarians, who are advocating a certain kind of anarchy, are against it, but while their arguments are often used to attack increases in taxation etc proposed by the left, their actual implications are never followed through with. The republican party will not oversee the destruction of the welfare state or any serious reduction in government spending anytime soon. The right in the USA is miles away from accepting this.
The GOP would love to destroy the welfare state. I'm not sure why you think otherwise. The reason we haven't done so is because it's actually quite tricky, once you have so many millions of people dependent on government benefits, to get them off those benefits. But yeah, if there were way to wave a magic wand tomorrow and eliminate welfare entirely, without having some serious short term negatives on those currently addicted to it? We'd do it in a heartbeat. Because we believe that it serves more to trap people in poverty than to help them deal with it.
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There is a strong consensus in the USA and all modern nation states that it's fine to tax income and use the revenue for social goals (infrastructure is, for example, a social goal, as is law and order). This is not a defining characteristic of socialism.
Um.... There's a massive and really critical difference between infrastructure that is neutral in terms of application versus programs that directly interact with individuals and their own outcomes. A road doesn't tell me where to go. Police protect my property just as much as the next guy's. The law, in theory, is blind, and we're all equal under it. These are all things that government can do, and arguably should to in order to create an environment in which a society can exist. But none of those affect the resulting society itself.
When government gets into the business of directly providing people with food, shelter, health care, and education, it's going too far. And yes, that's generally where conservatives tend to draw the line. And that's not arbitrary. If I pay taxes to maintain the roads, everyone benefits from those roads to the same degree. Same deal with police, courts, fire department, etc. When i pay taxes to pay for someone's food stamps, I'm being taken from and given nothing in return other than a person that has become less productive and more dependent on future government services as a result.
The socialist argument for such things is that society is "better" if we pay for these things for those less fortunate. I don't agree. Well, I don't agree that government should do it. Because when private charities do it, it's by their own free choice. When government does it, it's via coercion of the people. And that's the point at which the infringement of individual rights comes in.
It's funny because I got into an argument with a co-worker just this last week about Bernie Sanders. At some point, he veered off into an argument that having so much of the wealth in the economy focused in so few hands was bad. I asked him why it was bad. He just kind of looked at me and incredulously asked if I was serious. I said yes. And he proceeded to tap dance around the answer for several minutes. He was sure it was bad. Was so sure that he couldn't believe that I seriously didn't agree with him, but the funny thing is that he could not for the life of him actually say in words
why it was a bad thing. It had just been presented to him as a fact for so long that he never questioned it. And I suspect he'd never once in his life (the guys in his 60s) actually stopped to ask if it was true, much less examine it intellectually.
I see this kind of blind assumption on the left all the time. And it's equally funny when I challenge those assumptions. I can give a clear logical answer for every single political position I hold, that starts with a basic ideological principle and ends with the position. Liberals generally cannot do this. They jump from one assumption to a conclusion, often failing to support the assumption, and missing steps to the conclusion, and also rarely with a propose solution, much less why said solution addresses the starting problem. Most of their positions are based on someone using emotional appeals to get them to adopt said position, but can't be supported with actual logic or fact. Some examples:
Do food stamp programs actually decrease hunger in the US?
Does income assistance actually decrease poverty in the US?
I think most liberals assume an answer to this. I think most of them are wrong.
Bernie Sanders' answer to all problems is more government. But some of us have known for a long time, that, as Reagan correctly stated, government isn't the solution. it's the problem.