War Between Social + Fiscal Conservatives: Lack of Compassion Does Hurt the Republican Party

The author is so clueless about the distinction between "Doing X would be nice" and "The government should make people to X and/or extract tax money to pay for X" that it doesn't even occur to him to acknowledge the existence of the issue.

That makes the essay pretty much worthless.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/03/conservatives_more_liberal_giv.html

Conservatives More Liberal Givers
By George Will

Read the statistics.

The more I thought about this issue, the more I understood my Constitutional rights are indeed being violated by the U.S. Government.

Yeah, the idea is that he has a Constitutional right to anything which will level the playing field. Braille bills is certainly permissible, and arguably a good idea, but to demand it as a "Constitutional right" is bullshit. I don't know this guy but he is no conservative. He is exactly the kind of phoney-baloney "victim" he feared he would hear about. ptui.

A couple of comments:

You can’t be surprised if people don’t immediately understand your point of view. If “conservatives” don’t automatically want to change the currency to suit the needs of blind people, neither do anyone else. You will have to persuade people, and you can’t do it by insulting them.

If in two hundred years we haven’t had currency with clues to aid the blind, it isn’t a conservative-versus-liberal issue. Its an issue whose time hasn’t come. You can help bring it to people’s attention, your special sensitivity to the issue makes it your special responsibility, but it won’t help to politicize it since you will need to convince people in general.

Your remarks about Sanger bring up a point. “Some” conservatives may resist re-tooling the national engraving office to produce a new currency. This doesn’t really compare to Sanger and the folks on her side of the line who would abort the infirm.

It doesn’t really make any sense to bring up the infamous 3/5 human argument either. Repubs were the ones who threw out that clause, they were the ones who forced the country to grant citizenship to everyone born here including former slaves. That doesn’t automatically mean they don’t need to be persuaded to re-tool the national engraving office, again. Its not the same issue, even if it seems so to you.

Any time you write, you have to be aware that there are several audiences reading your material. As you point out, there are several flavors of conservative, several flavors of so-called “liberals” and you have to understand how each views the world in order to tailor your arguments. Most of what we call “liberals” are not, they are populists for the most part and socialists. Most of what we call “conservatives” are not, they are classic liberals for the most part, some with religious roots and some with less or none.

But unless you are blind or are closely associated with someone who is, you aren’t going to be aware of their particular needs. You will have to be persuaded.

And thats where you come in. You’re the writer. You are the persuader.

I am a hardcore fiscal conservative (who believes the federal government could fulfill its constitutional mandate on 20% or less of its current revenue, with most of that going to the DoD), with strongly right-libertarian views on civil matters, and moderate-to-conservative views on social matters.

If it is not within the explicit purview of enumerated federal tasks in the US Constitution, the federal government has no business in the matter - it is up to the states or local governments, or the people themselves. It is not a matter of compassion - it is a matter of endorsing the legal framework America was founded upon, and respecting the separation of powers (between the federal branches) and division of government control (between federal, state, and local governments).

I acknowledge injustice, unfairness, poverty, lack of access, etc. and support some measures by state governments to address those concerns (the constitution aside, in general, the greater degree to which any social programs are voluntary, the better - and the more local, the more voluntary, assuming free movement of people and property is maintained). At the smaller scale of government, for example city level, yet more government interference is something I find somewhat more ideologically acceptable. I can always move if the local government becomes too large or too costly, and such a dynamic exerts downward harmonization pressure on local government, all but precluding the spread of (even well meaning) tyranny.

In the main example you cite - Federal Reserve notes - I submit that the federal government bears all responsibility for the minting of currency, and the state and local governments have no recourse. I would find nothing distasteful about future runs of currency incorporating, for example, small raised marks making distinguishing between denominations easier. I do not agree that it is a constitutional mandate to do so, but it is not antithetical to the constitution either (unlike the very existence of the NEA and other federal agencies).

Perception of lack of compassion does hurt the Republican party, just as the electorate’s general lack of common sense and reason will surely aid Obama.

Perception of lack of compassion does hurt the Republican party, just as the electorate’s general lack of common sense and reason will surely aid Obama.

It takes a spokesperson to represent that the GOP is the compassionate party. Unfortunately, outside of talk radio, there really is no spokesperson for conservatism right now. It is compassionate to help people get self-sufficient, it is not compassionate to generate more dependancy on the government. Liberalism promotes dependancy.

No wonder conservatives often take the brunt of criticism from the dominant media.

They take such criticism because of conservatives who are unable to articulate why self-reliance and personal responsibility are truly compassionate, and why failure to accept those burdens deprives a person of his full humanity -- and is therefore a false compassion. That is to say, a cop-out which is not compassionate at all.

It seems compassionate not to expel disrupter's from our public schools and to try to rehabilitate them within the mainstream of the system, until one considers the other tweny-five children in the class who are being subjected -- mercilessly -- to ignorance.

It seems compassionate to demand of the "rich" that they provide for my health care, or for the health care of the poor, until the law of supply and demand so overburdens the system with mediocrity that we no longer provide breakthrough drugs, or leading-edge technologies, or even for that matter, timely and competent routine care. The fruit of this compassion is that the government -- mercilessly -- decides who gets to live, and who gets to die.

It seems compassionate to provide cash payments to single mothers with dependent children, until we create an entire class (and two generations) of criminal sperm donors and their criminal children who -- mercilessly -- destroy their neighborhoods and their lives.

Your friend was right, and you were wrong. There is no Constitutional mandate to provide equality of outcomes. There is a name for people who think there is: they are called "liberals." As a polity, if we decide there is an acceptable reason as a general good to create a law which makes money more usable by people with various disabilities, that's one thing; to claim it is part of a God-given right which no temporal power may presume upon itself the authority to deny is something else altogether.

If this position were drawn out to its ultimate degree,

Any position drawn to its ultimate degree which doesn't end in either God or nothingness is absurd. Reductio Ad Absurdum is not an argument that serious people make.

Blacks would still be considered as three-fifths of a human being

Rubbish like this is a consequence of blogging while ignorant.

Please learn a little history before you post again.

Now, go to the blackboard, and write 1000 times: "The 3/5 compromise was not a statement about the worth of blacks, and was a victory for the slaves." Had the slaveholders had their way, their "property" would have been counted as a full person for the purposes of representation, while receiving no representation at all. By inserting the 3/5 compromise into the Constitution, Northerners opposed to slavery were able to partially dilute the congressional power of the slaveholding states. If you want people to take your opinions seriously, please do not post this ridiculous nonsense again.

and American Indians would not be considered human beings at all.

Again, I'd advise you to learn a little history. American Indians considered themselves to be people, and generally they did not consider whites to be people; frequently they did not even consider members of the tribes next door to be people. In many of their treaties they were duplicitous: claiming property they did not own at the expense of other tribes who did, or believing they could swindle whites out of their durable goods in trade because it was impossible in their conception for a person to "own" the land. The American Indians were -- like white Europeans -- human beings, subject to exactly the same prejudices and imperfections. Most white Europeans believed they should be treated with respect and dignity. Had they not viewed them "as human beings at all" there would have been no concern to make treaties, provide for their sovereignty, or for their conversion to Christianity.

Liberals say conservatives lack compassion

Liberals are emoters who are incapable of real thinking. You shouldn't be the least bit concerned about the nonsense that comes out of their mouths, except to the extent that their idiotic feelings and putative "ideas" are not harmless.

And that’s exactly what I was getting at. You rationally (and IMO accurately) address the core issue of why this is a political issue to be addressed by government policy.