[quote]vroom wrote:
However, you should see that a government working to provide opportunties to people does not impinge on their freedoms in any way. In fact, people are generally free to not accept welfare if they wish.[/quote]
But I never said it did. Welfare doesn’t diminish your freedoms - it presumably enhances them. The problem is that by doing do, bad side effects follow suit.
And it should be noted - the welfare state and the opportunity-providing state are not the same.
Huh? This is largely bad semantics. An institution has to be empowered if it is going to help anyone. You need to tighten up your language - it is getting difficult to know what you are getting at.
I have no interest in getting rid of government institutions. You are losing me here.
As stated earlier, a desire for a welfare state is not being for people controlling their own destiny and being self-masters. Now, make the distinction - I am talking about support for the welfare state, which is nothing more than a full-on nanny state, not government help generally, which I am not entirely opposed to.
No, you completely missed it. Liberals don’t like judiciaries that protect rights - they like judiciaries that invent rights and remove them from the democratic process. They also like the judiciary to take away democratic powers to make law when Liberals don’t like the policy results the laws, by way of majoritarianism, are achieving.
In short, Liberals don’t want judges to be judges - they want them to be all-wise oligarchic rulers that make policy that Liberals prefer because stubborn legislatures won’t, i.e., provide an end-around the legislative process.
[quote]Anyway, again, these are political hot potatoes, so it is going to be hard to dig past that rhetoric.
Personally, I don’t believe liberals are “for” big government, but I suspect that it has been how significant programs have been conceived and administered in the past. However, the two ideas of helping people and big government are not synonymous.[/quote]
I agree, and there is a bit of a difference in the old school Liberals and the new school Social Democrat types on this thinking.
[quote]Political ploys making such ideas synonymous are in fact master strokes. It villifies the other party for having the principles it does, because it equates them with principles the opposing team finds themselves directly opposed to.
We see it all the time in the forums. Speech breaks down into short buzzword snippets representing opposing views. It is powerful, but unfortunate.[/quote]
Yes, labels like cheerleading, for example.
Then that makes me a liberal and nearly every conservative I know a liberal. The question is how to achieve those ends, not the desire to see it done.
[quote]I guess on top of that you get social concepts of equity, such that opportunties are also provided for those that traditionally haven’t been able to take advantage of them.
These basic ideas are pretty sweet. Now, on the other hand, conservatives are supposed to help keep watch on these ideas, to make sure that business isn’t unduly restricted and that spending and government programs don’t balloon out of control.
Also, wise and laudible goals.
How have we progressed from those types of concerns to the near ideological warfare we have now?[/quote]
Ideology. People can’t compromise. People are certain they have arrived at unassailable political truths and there is no way you can see merit in the other’s sides concerns. It happens on both the left and right. I must say, I do think it happens more on the left, but those on the right are just as guilty lately. Radicals and revolutionaries on both sides of the aisle are contributing to this garbage.
Good stuff, enjoying this.