Conservatives believe that less government is better. They
want to leave much to private industry, rather than having government involved in
it (financing it, etc.) because they believe government is inefficient,
wasteful, and even corrupt.
They also believe in lessening government regulation of
business. This is a major conservative tenet. Rather than government ensuring
that business takes measures to protect its workers (e.g., from factory
injuries), protect consumers from unsafe products, and avoid polluting the
environment--the air we breathe and the water we all must drink--conservatives
believe that if you just leave businesses alone, they will do the right thing.
This ignores the innumerable times that businesses have put their own profit
and other business objectives before the health and welfare of their workers,
customers, and the public.
Conservative economics have given us "trickle-down"
economics under President Ronald Reagan (when it did not work) and now again
under Donald Trump. This idea holds that if you cut taxes to the wealthy and to
big corporations, they can invest the money they save on taxes and use it to
expand their businesses; this creates new jobs--or so the theory goes. As I
said, this theory did not work in Reagan's day, and today this same economic
theory is being urged on Trump by an economic advisor of his who has been wrong
over and over and over again.
Conservative individuals sometimes go so far as to say that
they feel they should not have to pay taxes, that the income which they have
legitimately earned (through hard work, or being enterprising, or being
rapacious) should not be taken from them and given to the poor and needy who,
they believe--usually with definite racist implications--simply do not want to
work. The recent incident (caught on video and gone viral on social media) involving
New York lawyer Aaron Schlossberg shows Schlossberg saying that his taxes go to
support these immigrant, Spanish-speaking restaurant workers whom he is complaining
about through "welfare". This makes little sense, because if they
were on welfare they would not be there, working in the restaurant. And if they
are there, working in the restaurant, they are not on welfare. But this is
typical conservative thinking: Reagan and Trump both got elected by implying
that these lazy people (African-Americans and/or Hispanics) don't want to work
and simply take money away from the good, noble, hard-working (white) guy who
pays taxes.
To go back to some of our earlier points: Public health has
been one of the major successes of government. Government entities identify
epidemic diseases (food-borne illnesses, diseases, and so forth), identify the
sources, and put public-health countermeasures in place.
Also, as I have said, government (except to the extent that
Trump is doing his best to undermine and even stop these functions) helps keep
our food and medicine safe, our air and water clean, pure, and safe, and nearly
every aspect of life in our country as
many of us would like it to be.
Update: A conservative (unfortunately I can't tell you who it was) appearing, I believe, on Fox News, said of the children detained at the US border and wrenched from their parents, "Well, they're not our kids. This exemplifies what I believe to be a very common characteristic of conservative people: no empathy--that is, the ability to imagine themselves in someone else's shoes.
One time, while I was on a business trip and pleasantly enjoying dinner in Lake Tahoe, I quoted a US Supreme Court justice (I think it was Justice Frankfurter, and I don't recall what the topic of conversation was or what prompted me to come out with this) as saying something to the effect, "Better nine guilty men should go free than that one innocent man should be unjustly punished." To this my colleague said, "See, I don't agree with that!"
But what if the innocent, unjustly accused person had been his spouse, or child, or parent, or sister or brother? I think that, were the matter to touch home in that way, he might feel differently.
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