It’s unfortunate that we use the words liberal and conservative, since they carry many meanings and connotations. For instance, the classical concept of liberal meant liberty and it has changed its meaning completely over time. There are religious and economic conservatives and they are often not on the same page. The word “mainstream” may illustrate numbers of people at the height of the bell curve, but that is not an indicator that they are correct and further, the “mainstream” moves laterally back and forth at the apex of the bell curve over time.
For want of a better term than “conservative,” I prefer “constitutionalist” because it goes directly to a fundamental philosophical first premise. The principle is that you own yourself, and it logically follows that if you own yourself you have rights and, more importantly, responsibilities. In this framework it’s a great virtue for the able to fend for themselves as long as they honor their neighbors’ right to do the same, peaceably and without harm to either. Legally acquired private property is protected within a rule of law. Our founding fathers incorporated this audacious philosophical idea into the concept of a very limited government of the people, by the people and for the people, which exists to protect the aforementioned rights. You are a slave to no one and, most importantly, to government.
So, we have to be very careful in assigning every conceivable problem to government and the drift into a tyranny such as by the “common-sense mainstream” voters that ushered in a Nazi Germany. A new government program has a life of its own, creating new employees and interest groups and expanding costs. When monies are raised through taxes they are filtered through the grasping fingers of bureaucrats and spending is less intensely monitored. Taxes are ultimately by force (try not paying taxes). The idea of comprehensive intervention by government into competitive free market capitalism is the “new socialism” that has sprang up since Karl Marx ideas collapsed with the Berlin wall.
What about the truly unable? Americans have demonstrated in the past that they take care of their own and they take care of others. Earlier in our history, every conceivable group formed as needs arose. These great and noble moral decisions to give of oneself and resources were part of our individual being. Government has become so involved that we as a nation are incredulous that needs can and have been met without bureaucracies solving every perceived problem of our lives. Philanthropy or the private-sector spending of your own money and effort goes to the heart of a perceived need and is intensely monitored for efficacy and effectiveness and, when the need dissolves, there is a more rapid response to the change.
Government, always spending someone else’s money, largely shunts aside, replaces and dilutes much of the direct moral involvement that has been a hallmark of the private sector in our earlier history as a nation. Check into the private sector response to the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and the government response to the more recent Katrina disaster.
So yes, count me in as another “absolutist zealot looking through the wrong end of the binoculars.” I love and cherish what freedom I have left and do not take it for granted.
C. Ted Nyquest lives in Missoula County.
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