Conservatism

Let me try to explain conservatism as best as I can. I can't speak for other conservatives, but I did listen to conservative talk radio every day for many years. I even voted for Trump one time.

Lower Taxes

People usually gain wealth in one of several ways. They run businesses that employ people, they invest in others' businesses, or they lend to those who need to borrow, any of which is usually good for society. When you increase taxes on people and businesses that do well, it's like punishing them for being successful, and it reduces their ability to hire or invest or lend or whatever they do that makes other people want to do business with them. In many cases, it drives them overseas.

The leftists promote class warfare, demonizing the financially successful as getting there by taking advantage of others. In reality, people who do bad business tend to wind up with a bad reputation, and they don't do business for long. There are exceptions. Many feel credit card businesses are overly exploitative. I personally have no sympathy for the biggest businesses such as Google and Microsoft and most of the billionaires, but I say reduce taxes on the little rich people, the millionaires in our communities who don't own monopolies or have lobbyists, they have to play by the rules, and they hire our broke asses when we need a job.

The leftists say we need to take money from those who are good at managing money and give it to those who are bad at managing money. But everyone isn't poor due to bad decisions. Sometimes it's bad luck or it's just where you're starting from. Sometimes people need a boost, and the wealthy are often very philanthropic, so conservatives say let us as individuals choose how to help others, but the left wants government to decide how to help the poor. Government is like God to the leftists.

Capitalism

Capitalism improves our standard of living in various ways. Capitalism gives everyone an incentive to do better, and capitalism lets individuals and their networks solve many of the problems that communism requires a centralized command structure to address. For example, supply and demand usually take care of pricing.

Smaller Government

Government is bloated, wasteful, and inefficient. There's too much red tape. There are too many restrictions to impede growth. We need less government, but the leftists only want more and more government, which is like a parasite on our economic growth, reducing our standard of living.

We do need some regulation in a modern society, but our government is out of control. No one can even tell you how many federal laws there are. Yet many of the biggest cap businesses are out of control. Big pharma, big data, we need to regulate them.

Minimum Wage

Conservatives say we should let the market decide what a person's labor is worth. A business provides a salary suited to each employee. The janitor earns enough to keep him from going to look for another job that suits his skills, and the executive earns enough to keep him from going to look for another job that suits his skills. No one is in chains.

Many janitors or custodians do a great job and are valuable members of our society, and there's no job to be ashamed of, but you can always use your free time to learn other skills if you want to earn more money. If you mop floors or flip burgers, we love you. I adore clean floors and well-made burgers. But don't forget that you can use your spare time to learn some other skills to earn more.

There's the idea that executives want to increase their salary and pay workers less, and I guess it happens, but if you try to pay anyone less than they're worth to a business, they'll just find another job, work less, or something else bad. Businesses usually try to provide competitive salaries to keep the good employees and reduce employee turnover that reduces productivity or sales. If you want to earn more, be worth more to the business. If you're already worth more than you're being paid, try to negotiate a better deal. Negotiation skills can be important in life. They should teach them in school instead of all the wokisms. If you don't negotiate well or stand up for yourself, you will be run over or exploited or whatever.

Raising the minimum wage sounds nice, but it means forcing business owners to pay some workers more than the market says their labor is worth. If you raise the minimum wage and I'm trying to run an efficient business, I'll try to hire fewer low-wage workers, and maybe try to shift to automation. Or maybe the business is already struggling, and now we can't make ends meet, so we're out of business, and everyone loses a job. So something that sounds good might not be good if it works against the free market.

Raising the minumum wage is another government intervention in the free market, and leftists can come up with an endless variety of interventions that sound nice but ultimately lead to more suffering. Government interventions can sometimes be like whack-a-mole, where one intervention causes another problem that requires another intervention, and so on.

If the labor of the less-skilled workers isn't worth enough, we should blame overpopulation and probably illegal immigration.

Fake News

The leftists' argument against conservatism is to demonize conservatives, and much of what is called news is political propaganda that aims to do just that.

Abortion

No decent person wants there to be more abortion, especially when we're talking about babies that could survive or almost survive outside of the womb. Those who do want more abortion vote for the democrats. Most sane women know that is not just their body, it's another human being developing in there. My body, my choice? My foot. Get out of here with that nonsense.

That said, overpopulation can be a problem. It doesn't just mean lower wages and less room, it means psychological harm.

Positive vs Negative Energy

Conservatives are about building things up, growing businesses, and hiring more employees, while leftists are all about tearing things down, rioting, boycotting, burning down cities, and punishing the successful.

Kill 'em All!

Now, let's git stoopid! To vote for Republicans these days, you need to support a lot of highly ign'ant stuff!

• Genocide the Gazans!
• Ban pornography!
• War with Iran!
• Punish the childless cat people!
• Hate hate hate!

Wtf. I was totally with you folks until that crap. Not sure if I should shift back to leftism if it's even possible now or branch off into my own brand of conservatism. Maybe there are others. Surely there are others.

It isn't enough anymore to believe in the free market, lower taxes, less abortion, and even no LGBT agenda in kindergarten. Now, you've got to believe in genocide and hate and such. Oh well. I tried.