Conservatives are not really pro-freedom

reply to post by Dispo

That was kinda fun to do as an exercise. I hope you don't mind if I mod'ed the original a bit and added a couple things but it seemed more descriptive and I need to keep my graphics skill up anyway.



The last column is where I have a direct personal interest...so opinions aren't quite unbiased or 'fair' so to speak.

Wouldn't it be so much simpler if life were closer to blacks and whites than it is? I was kinda surprised at how many I had to put as mixed...to be intellectually honest in doing this. Thanks for the excuse to explore that a bit, too.

reply to post by Wrabbit2000


I'm glad you liked it. I think your version was a lot better than mine too - could you provide the template please? I'd like to use it for any "WHAT ARE YOUR LOLITICAL OPINIONS LOL THIS THREAD HASN'T BEEN DONE 20,000 TIMES BEFORE" threads in the future, if you don't mind.

Originally posted by Wertdagf
reply to post by Ghost375

 

Well atleast this message is better than they one they had 100 years ago.

You have the freedom to worship our god or be murdered in the street. You have the freedom to be a black slave or we will hang you from a tree. You have the freedom to keep your homosexuality a secret or we will drag you behind a wagon untill your dead.

Id say they are making leaps an bounds just by not killing people who have differing opinions.

You're right....but a major point I'm trying to make is conservatives should realize that without liberals, what you mention would still be the case. And liberals need to realize without conservatives, we'd have something equally bad.

One without the other always leads to authoritarianism.

reply to post by Wrabbit2000


nice work you two.

Originally posted by beezzer
Why can't people be responsible for their own actions, their own life, their own wealth, their own happiness?

Why should any type of government get involved?

Another post tonight talked about earth being a prison planet because none of us are really free. We all have minimum requirements that need to be met in order to stay alive food, clean water, shelter, etc. We are not free to ignore these or we die. Thus we must compete to fulfill these needs whether it be against mother nature or our fellow man. The other post put it better but can't find it to link right now.

But to get to the point, Liberals tend to believe that these basic needs should be taken care of for people at a minimum, at least until a person can get by on their own. They believe it is societies responsibility to make this happen. Strive to make people better so they can make it on their own. In this respect the liberals are the party of freedom.

Conservatives believe that you need to earn it or you don't get it. If you don't get those basic needs met there is something wrong with you that you need to fix (liberals give you a chance to fix it). If you haven't been able to fix it, i'm not giving up any of my capital to give you a chance to earn it. For many people these days that is like sending them in the middle of the desert, telling them to find their own damn water and they deserve their fate if they have been too lazy to watch Bear Grylls.

Originally posted by Ghost375

I'm not trying to bash conservatives here.

edit on 18-1-2013 by Ghost375 because: (no reason given)

Sure you are.

There is a difference between Repulicans and Conservatives .

What do you think a politician, government employee and media have in common? They need problems, issues and fear-mongering for success and to keep their jobs. And when there are none, they dont hesitate to create, overblow or made up some. A big part of all restrictions on freedom is of this nature. And I know its a bit cliche to claim that both parts of traditional political spectrum are just as bad, but its the truth. None of them are really pro-freedom.

Both Liberals and Conservatives (most associated political parties being Democrat and Republican) are authoritarian, and that is the real problem and always will be the real problem. Both willing to use Law to maintain their beliefs.

reply to post by Ghost375


If you look at the original meaning of left and right wing, before it was twisted to suite authoritarian agendas, you are correct...

The original political meanings of ‘left’ and ‘right’ have changed since their origin in the French estates general in 1789. There the people sitting on the left could be viewed as more or less anti-statists, with those on the right being state-interventionists of one kind or another. In this interpretation of the pristine sense, libertarianism was clearly at the extreme left-wing.

www.la-articles.org.uk...

The conservatives are of course right wing, but so are the liberals by the original definition. Anti-statists were the socialists and anarchists (the extreme of socialism and the left). Libertarianism in that quote of course meaning anarchism, not American right wing "libertarianism" which is not libertarian at all, and fits firmly on the side of authoritarianism.

Conservatism was all about maintaining the status-quo through authoritarianism. Liberalism was about appeasing the working class by creating a social safety-net, but also maintaining the status-quo. The political battle in the 1800's was not between liberalism and conservatism, it was about authoritarianism, and statism, of capitalism against the anti-statist socialist working class. A lot of liberals came from the conservatives, such as Winston Churchill. They saw it as a way to protect the status-quo (down down, deeper and down, sry lol), to appease the workers enough to keep them from revolting.

So basically now they have you all arguing over nothing of real importance because liberalism will never go away, the real establishment conservatives wouldn't want it to.

This year, 2008, marks the 150th anniversary of the use of the word “libertarian” by anarchists.

As is well known, anarchists use the terms “libertarian”, “libertarian socialist” and “libertarian communist” as equivalent to “anarchist” and, similarly, “libertarian socialism” or “libertarian communism” as an alternative for “anarchism.” This is perfectly understandable, as the anarchist goal is freedom, liberty, and the ending of all hierarchical and authoritarian institutions and social relations....

150 years of Libertarian

One of the reasons all this get's confused is because people look at history through the context of modern pedestrian definitions of terms. You have to use, and understand, the definitions that were in use then.

I should add conservatives are pro-freedom, but for their class of people, the capitalist ruling class. Their freedom comes from their exploitation of labour. Capitalism gives a minority class of people freedom, because they are essentially outside of the bondage it causes. They set themselves up nicely to protect themselves from poverty of natural causes by accumulating wealth from our labour. We are left to deal with the poverty of natural causes, and artificial causes of capitalism.

Freedom really is not political, it's economics. The government really is just there to protect property owners, as Adam Smith pointed out. Without the privileged class to protect, it becomes powerless. It's capitalism that gives government it's power, because of the nature of money, and how it accumulates wealth. Massively unequal wealth is what gives the state, and the capitalist, their power. So government will protect the hand that feeds it, otherwise it commits suicide.