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Confessions of a Low-Information Voter
Obamacare’s regulations run to about 11,000 pages. I don’t even want to read the first page. I’ve heard that F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom is a wonderful book that conservatives should read. I don’t want to. If you’ve read it, I’ll take your word that it’s a seminal work.
Obviously, I didn’t think my way to conservatism. My heart led me.
I don’t like bullies. In fact, I beat one of them up when I was about 11 years old. Oh yeah, I beat the hell out of Rusty on the school grounds of Mark Keppel Grammar School in 1949 and left him crying in the dirt around second base. Rusty was a mean bully who threw the first punch. Ask anyone who was there.
Rusty the schoolyard bully is the equivalent of the hard Left today. They’ve used the IRS to harrass conservative non-profit groups. In California, they keyed the cars and intimidated businesses who dared to support Proposition 8 (which banned same-sex marriage). That is, they don’t merely stop patronizing offending businesses; they try to shut them down. And violent mobs show up on college campuses to intimidate conservative speakers like Ann Coulter and Charles Murray.
I’m on the Right partly because it’s the Left who are the bullies these days.
I like America and I’m thankful for its opportunities. Perhaps all of those patriotic songs and military jet flyovers before NFL games had an effect on me. When I was a young man, my wife and I took a motorcycle trip around Europe, camping along the way. At the time, I was still, well, liberalish. One day we were standing in line for tickets to a Shakespearean play in Stratford-on-Avon. A hippily dressed American guy in front of us was telling the Brits around him how terrible America was. That wasn’t the only time on that trip that I heard an anti-American blowhard trashing his country.
Whenever the Left gets the chance, they always seem to compare America unfavorably to, well, almost any other nation, especially the Scandinavian countries. And when a bunch of ungrateful football players claim that America is a cesspool, leftists nod approvingly. I don’t particularly care for people or ideologies who find much to admire in dictatorships in Cuba and Venezuela but can’t find much to admire in their own country.
I like fairness. I was the kid who insisted we all follow the rules in sandlot ball games and Monopoly. And no fudging at the starting line of foot races either, not even a single toe.
It’s the Left who want to move some ahead of others, largely based on race and gender—and then dole out advantages to those it deems more deserving (and the “deserving,” coincidentally, usually happens to be their core constituents). Affirmative Action, heartily endorsed by the Left, only seems to be fair. At its heart, it’s a terribly flawed and unfair program that has embedded discrimination into the law.
Let’s say you’re a dirt-poor white or Asian kid living next door to a mansion in which lives a young black lad, the son of a lawyer and a professor. Who gets preferential treatment in college admissions? Based entirely on the color of his skin, the rich black kid does. Treat everyone the same, MLK said. I liked that idea then, and I like it now.
When I was a kid, I roamed the streets of Compton like a stray dog. I liked that feeling of freedom. In these, my latter days, I hate guided tours and prepackaged vacations. I like to go to a city and roam around and discover things. At home, I would never buy a house in an area overseen by a home owners’ association. I want to be able to paint my house pink, erect ugly statues in the front yard, and fly the American flag—even upside down if that suits my fancy. And I want my neighbor to have that same freedom.
The Left hates freedom. What they love is a powerful State that can boss people around through the multiplication and enforcement of the elephant-eye-high stacks of regulations, each of which, no matter how benign, subtracts a tiny bit from the sum total of freedom. (By the way, I’m not an anarchist. I just want fewer regulations; the Left wants more and more.)
Obviously, I didn’t come to conservatism through the doorway of logic and reason. I was driven through by ideas formed, piece by piece, in my youthful heart—and without much consciousness or self knowledge on my part. “The heart has reasons,” so said Pascal, “that Reason itself does not know.” I believe that to be true.
Postscript: OK, I’ve read a few books, mostly 18th-century stuff, but my heart has been the driver in my journey toward conservatism. Swift, Johnson, Burke, and Chesterfield, et al., have been my conversational companions in the back seat. (We’re crowded back there.)
Published in General
That is because they either killed or ran their political opponents from the field.
And it worked pretty well, too.
George III?
Miss RightAngles, I doubt it.
That’s the fellow. They recently released and digitized a huge archive from the Georgian period.
You realize you completely contradicted yourself here, right? You admitted to being a liberal when younger, but you also claimed that your heart let you to conservatism. You don’t go from one set of beliefs to another by hearting your way to them.
You don’t. Ricochet and the early members made a very conscious decision not to use nesting, since it made it harder to find new comments. So, it is all time stream, but the quoted part has the link (in clue above), so it is easy to trace back.
Ah. Thank you Mr. Arahant. I thought I was doing something wrong. Kent
Oddly enough the first thing that started my thoughts along this line was a TV movie about a man and wife going west during the frontier days. He takes an axe, clears some trees, builds a cabin, plants a field and so on. His wife muses, “I’ve never seen a man work so hard!” And I thought, yeah, he knows he will get all the fruits of his labor so he works with all he’s got. It’s that attitude carried forward by his progeny and our ancestors that has built the prosperity we enjoy today. But when too much is taken from our paychecks it’s a disincentive for doing anything extra. I’ve known men at the tire plant who were so discouraged at what overtime did to their withholding they wouldn’t work it anymore. Sometimes they seemed to make less per hour for the overtime. That is a problem not just for them but for the economy as a whole.
That is the real main problem with Socialism, reward for work is diluted so much that people don’t see any sense in even doing a good job let alone doing more than is required. So productivity declines steadily until everything collapses.
Freedom works in every way. Also, it’s the right thing to do.
Do you think your lack of reasoning makes you more or less likely to have the right positions? How would you know if you are correct?
At my company, they had the great idea of saving money by cutting our bonus from 7% to 3% (of our yearly salary) in a single cut. So to use a nice round number, a guy making $100,000 a year saw his bonus go from 7k to 3k.
$3,000 after Income and Payroll taxes get done with it isn’t even an extra paycheck. Do I have any incentive to go “above and beyond” this year? No I do not. I will work the amount I am paid to work. If they want to keep my bonus, they certainly may, and they may go pound sand with it.
You don’t? What other ways are there?
Similarly when I started at the Dayton Tire plant in OKC in 1971 tire builders (assembly) earned an incentive bonus based on their individual production. If a man (they were all men then) produced 150% of the established rate he got 150% of his base pay for that day. Over the years management diluted this formula (too simple for them to understand?) until if a man (or the two women who became successful at tire building) produced 150% of the rate he would get 107% of his base pay for that day. And several middle managers had the gall to ask me why no one wanted to produce any more. I simply told them there is a reason it’s called, “Incentive pay.”
So that ‘cost cutting’ idea backfired. Bigly.
If you only follow your heart instead of using your intuition as a starting point from which to discover truth through observation and reason, how do you verify you’ve come to the right conclusions? Something may feel right but be demonstrably wrong.
I tried, I really tried, but I couldn’t make it past the first chapter. However, there is an excellent summary here.
It was the same with me, and it isn’t just “these days.” I was disgusted as a teenager and young adult how the “compassionate and accepting” left ignored or even encouraged violent bullies on their side. The Black Panthers, the SDS, Abby Hoffman and his ilk, union thugs: All were embraced by liberals. It’s one of the reasons I didn’t support Donald Trump–bullying and thuggery is a Democrat trait. Of course, since he was a Democrat until very recently . . .
YES! You found it! And the Readers Digest’s digest version was about 30 pages long.
Vectorman (View Comment):
I’m still making my mind up about conservatism. Finding out about Burke was an important moment for me. I’d never heard of him and I was watching a press conference in ’08 where McCain started talking about him. He was never assigned in school, which I now find odd because of how many other figures of comparable or lesser significance were.
Swift, must be Jonathan Swift and I assume Johnson is Samuel Johnson.
Who is Chesterfield?
PS: That’s a handsome dog. What’s its name?
Old Phil Stanhope is the one usually known by the title.
Mr. Contrarian, his name is Bob. He’s the first dog, after about 15 cats, that my wife and I have ever owned. We love him, and he loves us. We walk him twice a day.
Kent
Mr. Plums, you’re right. They were bullies. if I had thought of of Hoffman, et al., while I was writing my essay, I would have mentioned them. Thanks for reminding me of those bad old days.
Kent