ConservativeINC

The problem with the debate over fundamentalism is how the word is defined because the way I look at it everyone with a brain is a fundamentalist. How could you not be? You are an adult, you have a world view, and you have a set of guiding principles that you rely on to get you through life as best as possible. But those on the left, those who want you to think that they are progressives and not wed to any one set of beliefs, moderates if you will, have defined the term so that it can only damn people with traditional views.

Think about it this way. You are a libertarian who thinks that there should be a drastically limited government that only provides for the national defense; everything else is permissible because you believe that people are responsible enough to lead their own lives and that all government intrusion is a pox on personal liberty. To me that person is a fundamentalist.

Or think about it this way. You are an atheist who thinks that the worse thing a person can do is turn over their life to a fictional character that was conjured up millenia ago so as to gain control over a mass of people. All connections between religion and government should be severed as well as all connections between man and God. To me that person is a fundamentalist as well.

Or you could think about it this last way. You are a moderate who thinks that no one is right and everyone should just decide what they want to believe and do. No opinion is more right then the next and everyone would have a happier life if everyone would live and let live. To me that person is also a fundamentalist.

All of these people are fundamentalist because they have a set of guiding principles. Furthermore, if they were truthful to you they would say that the world would be a better place if everyone had the same core principles as they did. This is natural, folks. You have built your life on your beliefs and you at least think everything would be better if more people agreed with you.

Why else do we have elections? If there were no fundamentalists around there would be no need for elections because everyone would probably be dead. It takes a great deal of time and effort to formulate beliefs and even more time and effort to live by your code. But without all this work you would have an aimless life and if everyone led these aimless lives nothing would ever get done.

Fundamentalists are the only type of person who have the opportunity to do great good for people. Jesus was a fundamentalist. Recently some of the greatest fundamentalists have been Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher, Sam Walton, Walt Disney, and Ghandi. All of these people believed so profoundly in their ideas that they worked to spread their ideology to as many people as possible so the world would be a better place in their eyes.

Fundamentalists also have the ability to do the most harm on this world as well. Fundamentalists who use their ironclad beliefs to do evil have been around since the dawn of man. Hitler, Lenin, Mao, and bin Laden are just some examples of recent fundamentalists who have directed their fundamentalism in the worse possible manner.

But still, I believe that fundamentalism isn’t “bad” just because it is fundamentalism. For most fundamentalists their fundamentalism brings them purpose and that purpose leads them to improve their families and communities. I am a fundamentalist conservative and absent my fundamentalism I strongly doubt I would take the time to write for this blog.

The reason why leftists are so uniformly against fundamentalism isn’t because it can lead to horrible results like Islamofascism, Nazism, and Communism. They are against fundamentalism because most people connect fundamentalism with religion and lets face it, leftists aren’t classically religious.

Leftists have waged their war on this word because it is an easy strawman for them to take whacks at. Most of the time people only see news stories about fundamentalists doing horrible things to other people while all the good that fundamentalists do goes unnoticed. In this environment it is easy for the leftist to connect religion to fundamentalism and then to connect it all to death and destruction and generally evil behavior.

More sinister a reason for their opposition to fundamentalism is that it has the effect of making everyone hesitant to take a concrete stand on anything. The left’s attack on the word fundamentalism has created an environment where young people won’t stand for anything except total disdain for everything. Leftists have so polluted public discourse in this arena that taking a stand is taboo and the result is a generation of nihilistic twerps whose only goal in life is self gratification.

By lumping in good fundamentalists (I think they represent the vast majority of fundamentalists by the way) with the bad fundamentalists has created this hoard of zombie-like neo-fundamentalists whose core belief is no beliefs. This neo-fundamentalism is going to eat away at our individual and national will until we just lay down one day and die. I pray that there is a reawakening of conservative/Christian fundamentalism in this country so that we can return to the ideas and beliefs that made this country the best country on the face of the earth. BigT

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Federalism is the best way to form a government for a large country. This system acknowledges the fact that there is no universal “right” answer for what laws a people should follow. This is important for conservatives because this system allows for differences between the states to develop so that they can have unique cultures and more freedom for its citizens. Federalism denies most domestic power to the national government and bestows it upon the states and its citizens.

Placing most of the domestic governmental power on the states is important for a number of reasons. One of the more important reasons for having a system like this is to allow states to develop their own unique culture. It is important for states to be different because people are extremely different. Some people may want to live in a state that provides socialized medicine and massive welfare checks for the poor. Some people may not want to live in a “Utopia” and would rather be in a state with very little taxation. Giving the national the government the ability to set nationwide policies is dangerous.

This is dangerous because the national government is often wrong. Even when I do agree with a policy there are many others who would disagree. Forcing everyone to belong to a system they are philosophically opposed to seems wrong to me. When the national government passes laws that should have been left up to the states they are violating the Tenth Amendment of the US Constitution:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved for the States respectively, or to the people.

The Framers understood that there were always going to be disagreements among the states and the best way to deal with these disagreements is to let the states make up their own rules as long as they don’t violate the rights of other states. But there is a more important reason for federalism in my estimation.

Federalism allows for screw ups to stay small. If California wants to have a 90% marginal tax rate on the richest 20% of its population then I can just move to another state. Federalism allows for a kind of governmental capitalism to form up with each state competing against the next. Best practices can be formed and states can choose to ratify or dismiss legislation as they choose. Giving this power to the national government negates all the advantages of federalism.

There is no longer any competition between policy decisions and every mistake is amplified when the national government makes all the decisions. But this doesn’t mean I don’t think there’s a role for the national government in the domestic arena. The national government needs to solve disputes among the states and ensure that commerce can occur among the states without taxation. The national government does have the most important role in our nation’s foreign policy though.

And the tip of our foreign policy sword is the Executive branch of the national government. The national government needs to have this power so it can make decisive decisions with the full weight of the country behind it. The national government needs to have the power to make decisions on behalf of the country so that our country can have power in the world. Whereas I believe it a good thing that the states could bicker about which domestic policy decisions to make and then go their own way that same process would be disastrous if we were at war.

Imagine it; the governor of Virginia declaring war on France, the California governor signing a peace treaty with Germany, etc. There would be chaos if we didn’t cede this power to the national government. As the case stands right now we are making this mistake on a smaller scale. War powers need to belong solely to the Executive because war is too important to be fought by committee. Instead, we have cities declaring their opposition to the war, congressmen heading up committees that makes important decisions about the war without knowing who our enemy is, and senators trying to make laws that dictate how the war is to be prosecuted to the president.

Present problems notwithstanding, the purpose of a federal government is to produce a national government that is weak domestically and strong foreignly with state governments that are strong domestically and week foreignly. Our current bastardized system has hefted most of the power to govern not on states and cities but on the national government. All focus is on the national government because they control so much power thanks to their stranglehold on our wallets. Unless that power is broken we will continue to live in a nation where the national government spends 20% of our national GDP every year.

This graph is astonishing because this trend is continuing to go up even though it has leveled off some in recent years. As long as the spending for the national government continues to grow federalism will continue to die in America. As long as total government spending continues to thrive our individual freedoms will soon become fond memories. BigT

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First some definitions. Capitalism is a system for distributing scarce resources using free markets and the laws of supply and demand. It is crucial that there be as little governmental intervention as possible because in order for this economic system to be effective people must have the ability to register their demand for goods and services in as straightforward a way as possible. The way they register their demand is through the prices the market (you and everyone else) sets for goods and services and how quickly and in what quantity goods and services are bought.

Capitalism is critical for the success of modern day conservatism because it places the greatest amount of power in the hands of individuals who then make independent decisions based on their own experiences, expectations, and intelligence. It is this freedom of choice that attracted me to capitalism in the first place.

Perhaps the most important factor that marries capitalism with conservatism is that they both make personal freedom the cornerstone of their philosophies. Anyone who has read Ayn Rand will know what I’m talking about. She stressed the fact that capitalism enshrined personal freedom into its tenets over everything else. To her, it didn’t even matter whether or not capitalism was more efficient.

I do not take such an absolutist view as she does but her writings are illuminating on this point.

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

Her brevity on this subject is as forceful as any 500 page book I’ve read that tries to convey the same message. I think, though, that what she says here is also the reason why many people don’t like capitalism in the first place. Many people need to “belong” to something that makes the feel self actualized or some other psycho mumbo jumbo. They are willing to give up their life’s work in the taxes that they pay so that they can feel good about belonging to a country that “cares.”

Individuals, in my view, should be judged on what they do and not on how big their governments welfare state is. Capitalism allows for people to make decisions about how they spend their money. Should I give to this charity or that charity? Should I buy this car or buy a cheaper one and invest the rest? Do I need health care or is renovating my 3,600 square foot house more important?

But when the government gets involved through their awesome power bequeathed to them thanks to their power over our purses these decisions become hopelessly muddled. Going to urgent care for a stomach ache is done because that service is free while that same person won’t even consider buying health insurance. The food that we eat is artificially higher then it needs to be because the government gives massive subsidies to sugar producers and to the growers of other crops in this country. Everyone is going to college because it is so cheap now and this influx of mediocre brain talent erodes the quality of everyone’s education at this level.

No one in the world is smart enough to manage an economy but governments regularly try. Implementing programs because they are for the “common good” seem to always end in worse service for that common good then before the government insisted they knew better. Our education system was at one point one of the best in the world. But it has gradually gotten worse as the government has gotten more involved.

Why did they get involved? Well, some people weren’t going to school and the government wanted to provide for the poor. But the little known fact is that in Revolutionary America when there was no government “assistance” for education there was higher enrollment then there is now. And the education experience was better because the children knew that their parents or some generous relative or philanthropist was paying for their education and failing to get the most out of that education would suffer severe consequences. Now the imperative has shifted and kids could care less what they get out of school because the faceless government is paying and there is not retribution for shoddy work.

Capitalism is only a brutal system if you decide to be destitute. In America, where capitalism still has some sway, nearly everyone has a job and the economy is still thriving. This is greatly thanks to the fact that the rule of law is enforced to protect the rights we are all entrusted with within the capitalistic framework. We have ownership over our property, we are able to own our own businesses, we can keep most of our money (although less then in many ex-communist countries, ironically), and we are still allowed to make decisions about our personal welfare.

This system needs to be nourished in every country. It sets people free and allows economies to work efficiently. It is a scary system for some because so much power is taken away from the government and people are allowed to do what they want as long as they observe other’s rights.

This is why I am for capitalism: it puts the power in the hands of individuals, takes power away from national and local governments, and because it is the most efficient system humankind has created thus far. Most importantly it instills a sense of personal responsibility and ensures freedom for all.