The guiding theme of American conservatism must be exactly what the preamble to the Constitution says: “to secure the blessings of liberty” and to “promote the general welfare.”
It is not government’s job to redistribute wealth. That’s Marxism. That’s inconsistent with liberty.
The American idea has always been to allow people to achieve whatever they can achieve. We don’t believe in punishing achievement the way Obama does.
There should be no ceiling on success.
Furthermore, punishing achievers doesn’t work. The achievers can take their money and businesses elsewhere.
This was Ayn Rand’s great point in Atlas Shrugged — where she posits the question of: What would happen to society if all the producers, achievers, and innovators just quit, just took their marbles and went home? What would happen to America if all the producers got fed up and pulled a John Galt.
To a large extent, this is happening right now to America. The stock market is the only aspect of the U.S. economy right now that’s sort of working because large companies have figured out how to make money by building their factories overseas where the labor is cheaper. Apple devices are mostly built now in China — which is now more business-friendly than America. The U.S. now has the highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world.
What made America great has always been that the achievers were not punished, as they had been everywhere else — that, in America, we have an “unalienable” right to the “pursuit of happiness,” as our Declaration of Independence says.
That’s the American idea.
But, as conservatives, we also adjust our thinking in accordance with reality — to meet the facts.
We aren’t driven by ideology the way libertarians are. If the free market isn’t working in certain areas, we reserve the right to make adjustments, to patch it up, to make rules that make the economy work better.
The NFL changes its rules all the time — in the interest of making the game better.
Generally, the NFL has adjusted the rules to make it easier for offense to score and the quarterback to complete passes . . . because that’s what the public wants. Defense always eventually catches up to whatever the offenses are doing. So if the NFL was still playing with rules that were in place during the 1960s, the offense would never score. So the NFL had to adjust the rules, and is constantly tweaking the rules to solve this problem or that problem.
That’s the job of the lawmaker and policy-maker — or at least should be their job: To adjust the rules to make the system work better.
Click here [1] for Part I of the series, Why I’m a Conservative, Not a Libertarian
Click here [2] for Part II of the series, We Do Need a Social Safety Net
Click here [3] for Part III of the series, What a Conservative Social Safety Net Would Look Like
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