What is conservatism and what is wrong with it?

[Warpy]

Liberals in the United States have been losing political debates to conservatives for a quarter century. In order to start winning again, liberals must answer two simple questions: what is conservatism, and what is wrong with it? As it happens, the answers to these questions are also simple:


Q: What is conservatism?
A: Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy.
Q: What is wrong with conservatism?
A: Conservatism is incompatible with democracy, prosperity, and civilization in general. It is a destructive system of inequality and prejudice that is founded on deception and has no place in the modern world.

These ideas are not new. Indeed they were common sense until recently. Nowadays, though, most of the people who call themselves "conservatives" have little notion of what conservatism even is. They have been deceived by one of the great public relations campaigns of human history. Only by analyzing this deception will it become possible to revive democracy in the United States.

Much, much more at http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/conservatism.html

Please send this out where it will do the most damage good.

[FSogol]

1. Conservatism: search for a superior moral justification for selfishness

"...the differences between the conservative and the radical seem to
spring mainly from their attitude toward the future. Fear of the
future causes us to lean against and cling to the present, while faith
in the future renders us receptive to change. "
- Eric Hoffer

"When you are right you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong you
cannot be too conservative. "
- Martin Luther King

"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises
in moral philosophy: that is the search for a superior moral
justification for selfishness."
- John Kenneth Galbraith
economist and author

"All conservatives are such from personal defects. They have been
effeminated by position or nature, born halt and blind, through luxury
of their parents, and can only, like invalids, act on the defensive."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence; Conservatism
is distrust of the people tempered by fear."
-William E. Gladstone

"A conservative is one who admires radicals centuries after they're
dead."
-Leo C. Rosten

[TexanRudeBoy]

2. As soon as someone

As soon as someone anyone can explain how advanced economic action can take place absent markets to set prices, particularly for capital, or how anyone or any group can possibly know the trillions upon trillions of bits of information it would take to plan society...... After that I'll get on board.

[Warpy]

3. The liberals back in the FDR days

managed an economy that worked for nearly everyone for decades until it was systematically dismantled, mostly starting with Reagan. The people who were unhappy with that economy were the ultra wealthy who weren't getting richer quickly enough to suit themselves.

An economy can't be preplanned down to the last possible contingency, but we have had economies in the past that allowed the maximum number of people to prosper instead of reserving the benefits of this country to the top one half of one percent of its citizens.

Of course, you're not interested in that part, are you?

[TexanRudeBoy]

4. Nearly two decades of depression

is what you're using as an argument?
You can't seriously be talking about anything from the 30's or 40's....

People did do well in the 50's and 60's but it was built upon inflation of the money supply. We paid for those schemes with the massive inflation and unemployment of the 70's. This also had the added effect of discrediting the theories of Keynes that most of the interventionism was based on.

After that we had to abandon gold entirely or watch it all fly out of Ft.Knox as foreign dollar holders wanted to be repaid.

What we're experiencing now is nearly 40 years of inflation and failed planning.

And you also didn't explain how to manage any economic calculation absent a free market to price capital (Because the Fed is doing us tons of favors with its interest rate "managing".....). This has always been the single greatest problem with central planning.

[Warpy]

5. Funny you should mention that 40 years

because it's exactly 41 years since liberals went out of power. I doubt your libertarian website told you that, either.

Another thing they didn't tell you was why the gold standard got abandoned (no potential for real growth) and why the Depression was prolonged to just over a decade (1936 insistence on a balanced budget leading to the Great Recession of 1937 ring a bell?).

Keynes was only discredited by Friedman et al, men whose theories were then put into action and which proved to be spectacular failures, leading to the top heavy, miserable system we have right now. An economy based on Keynes worked. The only thing that made it appear not to work was the tripling of oil prices by OPEC in the early 70s, something Nixon and Ford utterly failed to recognize or deal with since it might have conflicted with Republican economic dogma.

You need to abandon libertarianism and learn some real economic history because you're being told only a very small part of the story here, the limitation of those parts that prove every single point in the article I posted.

[econoclast]

6. Economic history

Let's face it. The American economy just hummed right along in the post war years. Late 1940s. 50s. Even early 60s.

Why? Keynes? Partly. But mostly because most of the world's productive capacity was either a smoldering ruin or locked behind the iron curtain. America had a virtual monopoly on industry. THAT is the reason. When Asia and Europe rebuilt and retooled (say thank you to The Marshall Plan) America lost her monopoly. That's when things began to get less rosy for America.

And as for inflation of the 70's ... No less a liberal than Brad DeLong at Stanford disagrees with you. He says in part :

"it is hard to sustain the argument that the root of the U.S. inflation problem in the 1970s was the interaction of one-shot upward supply shocks with a backward-looking wage-price mechanism. The baseline inflation rate was some five percent per year in the early 1970s before there were any supply shocks; the baseline inflation rate was pushed up by perhaps two percentage points as a result of the collapse in productivity growth; the baseline inflation rate appeared to be eight or nine percent per year by 1980 "

the inflation began in the late 1960's and one way or another has been at the root of our economic problems ever since

60 and seventies high and higher inflation quashed in the early 80,s by Fed's high interest rates.
80's. But high interest rates killed off the S&L industry which made most of america's home mortgages
giving rise to the growth or mortgage securitization thru GNMA and Then Freddie and Fannie and then private securitizations
and here we are.

We are still living with the aftershocks of an inflation ignited in the late 1960's