pugg's Blog

Liberals want humans to control everything; conservatives want humans to adapt to everything.

Liberals believe that everything can be ultimately controlled: minimum wage, the environment, the economy, poverty, wealth, success, failure, all people in general.

Conservatives know that nothing can be ultimately controlled: the market does what it does, nature does what it does, people do what they do, life is as unpredictable and as chaotic as the weather.

That's why conservatives value freedom and liberals value power. Freedom allows people to naturally adapt to changing circumstances. Power forces people to follow orders and remain under control.

Take this market crisis for example: liberals want more regulation, more control, more government. The 1929 market crash created the Great Depression and lasted for close to 25 years. Obama wants to repeat those policies with the new "New Deal." Therefore, regulation will produce the same results. Plan on looking at your 401(k) again in 2032.

Take another market crisis for example: the 1987 crash. No one even talks about it much. Why? Because Reagan didn't rush us into a new "New Deal" and, therefore, the market was able to correct itself as it is supposed to do. Reagan was smart enough to recognize that we have to adapt ourselves to the market, not try to control it. By doing so, the eighties remained a time of prosperity, not soup lines. And we didn't need a world war to get us out of it.

In a way, Jurassic Park the novel encapsulated everything that happens with our political system. The Democrats are the park creators and owners, running around trying to control these big giant dinosaurs in the name of happiness and entertainment and scientific study. But the scientists brought to the island are the Republicans, saying "You can't control this stuff! You have to let dinosaurs be dinosaurs and let nature be nature and the more you try to control it, the worse things will get." Crichton wrote frequently about the difficulty in controlling complex systems and, if you read a lot of his nonfiction essays and speeches (at his website), you will see that there are a lot of real-life examples that illustrate these principles, such as with the overmanagement of Yellowstone Park.

George Bush is no conservative. He acted very liberal in rushing in to Iraq to try to "control" a completely chaotic system: the Middle East. Are we surprised it failed? But yet Obama wants to do the same thing with our stock market. Stocks are far more unpredictable than terrorists - you know what a terrorist is likely to do. But no one can predict whether one stock will spike or plummet on a given day. There are billions of transactions occurring simultaneously. It's probably the most complex manmade system in existence.

Anyway, I doubt many people have read this far, and those who have likely already agreed with me or have completely shut me out, but if you are willing to take an honest look at things, which party lines up according to "let's control things" and which party lines up according to "let nature run it's course?"

Abortion: liberals want to control birth, conservatives say "let it happen."
Taxes: liberals want to control the amount taxes, conservatives say "let people keep their money"
Guns: liberals want gun control, conservatives don't
Speech: liberals want the Fairness Doctrine, conservatives don't
Environment: liberals want to try to control global warming, conservatives say "we can't stop nature from being nature"
Economy: liberals think they can "jolt" the economy, conservatives know that the market is too smart for that, which is why the last two "stimulus" events failed

So it will be fun watching Obama try to "control" a country of 300 million independently-minded adults, a market with trillions of transactions, a planet with wonderfully complex weather patterns and flora/fauna, etc. No small task for a 45-year old clown who's never held the same job for more than two years.