[Bill,
July 16, 2012]
Why right?
I once was asked, how can you be conservative. I explained it not in philosophical terms, but practical ones. There are always lots of good things governments can do. There are always needs -- economics explains that these needs are infinite, but resources, not.
Government will naturally grow -- just because bureaucracies naturally grow and expand, so do governments. It would take something like two-thirds of the country actively pushing back to get the government to shrink. And even then it would grow. Because we need a government, and they don't tend to shrink.
There are lots of things for government to do -- add infrastructure here, right an injustice there. So many in fact that government tends to kill the golden goose. It will naturally expand into everyone's life, and ultimately, strangle us all in a web of regulation, law and confusion. BTW, that's water under the bridge. We're already at the point where the laws are so complex that compliance is mind-bogglingly complex.
So conservatism is in one sense simply push back, especially against complexity.
Government will naturally grow -- just because bureaucracies naturally grow and expand, so do governments. It would take something like two-thirds of the country actively pushing back to get the government to shrink. And even then it would grow. Because we need a government, and they don't tend to shrink.
There are lots of things for government to do -- add infrastructure here, right an injustice there. So many in fact that government tends to kill the golden goose. It will naturally expand into everyone's life, and ultimately, strangle us all in a web of regulation, law and confusion. BTW, that's water under the bridge. We're already at the point where the laws are so complex that compliance is mind-bogglingly complex.
So conservatism is in one sense simply push back, especially against complexity.