Conservatives vs LiberalsAnn Coulter, a self-proclaimed spokeswoman for conservatives, claims that Liberals want government to run our lives--because they advocate protections for non-smokers! Meanwhile, the putative conservative government of George W. Bush (George the Fifth, or George V), wants to tell us who to love and urges marriage (only for heterosexuals), and wants to decide for us whether we have a child.
NB: George III drove Americans to revolution, George IV only made a hash of "the first Gulf War," while George V has taken every chance he can get to regain the kind of autocratic power held by George III that Americans rebelled against in 1776. Which is more interventionist? A Liberal who wants to regulate business so that it doesn't pollute the air we breathe and the water we drink, or a Conservative who demands the right to imprison citizens arbitrarily, who demands the right to snoop into our bank accounts and our emails and telephone calls? Who is more interventionist? Liberals who advocate rehabilitation programs for drug users, or those who want to put them all in prison? Who interferes more with our children's education: Liberals who want to fully fund education programs so that every child has a chance, or Bush's government which funds only the tests, and then wants to penalize schools by withdrawing additional funding and offering the difference to those few who can afford to send their children to private schools? Who interferes more in the lives of High School students than the government which insists on imperial adventures (and the huge costs and waste accrued by them), therefore withdrawing funding from programs like job training, because of the massive needs of the armed forces in the Iraq war. Who mans (and womans) our armed forces, after all: the recent grads from High School who can't get jobs, or adequate in-school training. Why the shortfalls? Because of those funding cuts--and the globalization of business (not free trade), also supported by this administration, which is owned and operated by the global corporations. Note: they don't call themselves "American" any longer.
Oh, and Liberals want to regulate business! Horrors. We can't let government stop businesses from forcing their employees to work in unsafe conditions! Conservatives want businesses to be free to help government control every person, as in contracting out widespread data mining on everyone in the United States (driver's license, national ID card, credit card records, cell and phone records, travel history, consumption history, you name it) that the government (this non-interventionist government) gets to use as it sees fit--all for "national security," i.e. national security as it alone defines it.
Of course this conservative government also wants to "get government off our backs" by contracting out as many government functions as it possibly can--to its friends, through non-bid contracts. And it wants to reduce the burden of government by cutting taxes on investors, and passing the burden on to workers, while Liberals want to do something unthinkable: tax people according to their means, that is, wealthy people who benefit more from government's existence, should, according to Liberals, also pay more. Ultimately, conservatives don't want to tax--this generation of investors--themselves. They want to pass the burden on to the next generation--unless the US goes bankrupt first. The Roman Emperor and the Senators in the fifth century were also "conservative," but they made no hypocritical claims that they advocated "freedom" or democracy. Everyone's job was legally defined; most were slaves or serfs; only the Senators had wealth and freedom, and, yes, they allowed the Empire to bankrupt itself, rather than levy taxes on themselves. To see more on how the fifth century Roman Empire demonstrates the kind of society our "conservatives" would really like to have, click here, or see Conservatives and ideology
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