I look forward to the days when Jonah Goldberg gets his groove on. A lot of the time he's kinda forgettable, but once in a while, like with this piece and in his duel with Jonathan Chait, he's a really brilliant read. He raises a lot of very good issues with this piece.
I would LOVE to see this thread really develop, and hammer out some of the ideas that he suggests. The potential for this thread is tremendous, especially given some of the finer conservative minds on this forum.
Since part of the point of the essay is that there's so many different flavors of conservatism, it would be useful for each poster to identify what flavor of conservatism they favor.
Me? I'm a limited government free-marketer (anti-monopoly laws are about the only market regulation I can see as justifiable) and social conservative. Agnostic, but generally inclined to side with Christians (and particularly conservative Catholics) in the culture wars.
Okay, now that that's out of the way...
I think Jonah is absolutely right about how liberals are unable to acknowledge the concept of tradeoffs. Liberals seem to be congenitally incapable of cost/benefit analysis. Attempting to justify liberal ideology consistently consist of engaging in single sided bookkeeping.
It manifests itself in some really hilarious ways. There's nothing easier than to find a liberal screed against Halliburton that purports to demonstrate that they are unconscionable war profiteers by citing Halliburton's -revenue- in Iraq. Look at this - they had $500 gajillion dollars in revenue in 2003 - they're making money hand over fist! But revenue is utterly meaningless - it's one sided bookkeeping. They don't even register that Halliburton has -costs- over there too, and when you actually look at their -profit- margin, the idea that they orchestrated this war to "profiteer" from it is laughable. They could get a far better profit margin fixing potholes on the NJ Turnpike than they get in Iraq, and with better opportunities to finagle kickbacks from a corrupt local government.
Then there's the environment. "Why not adopt Kyoto? If there's even a chance that global warming exists, and if you care -at all- about the environment, then you have to be for it!" They can't even perceive that there's a downside to it, and if you mention the obvious fiscal downsides, the impact of regulatory compliance on the prices of goods, etc., they just assume that you're part of the "pollution lobby" and you're just making excuses in order to justify your real, evil, nefarious motives. There's no such thing as too much environmental regulation. This only makes sense if you believe that the attendant cost can never be greater than 0.
It's a major difference in the worldviews. I would almost describe conservatism as "the ability to engage in cost/benefit analysis". Liberals completely lack this ability.
One further point for now: The biggest monstrosities of the Left are a direct result of this inability to acknowledge that X can only come at the expense of Y. Sometimes, reality makes the tradeoff so blatant and so undeniable that the only way liberals can reconcile their one-sided bookkeeping is to irrationally completely devalue Y, no matter how obvious a value Y has in reality. Abortion is a perfect example. X is a woman's "right to choose". Y is a viable unborn human being in it's 8th month of gestation. A tradeoff is obviously unavoidable. Liberals negate the tradeoff in their minds by simply erasing the value of Y altogether - and thus you can get excuses for something as monstrous as partial birth abortion. The value of Y - the human being in the womb - MUST be devalued to 0 - otherwise they'd have to engage in a cost/benefit analysis, and it's a ground they simply cannot engage in. That's how you can get absurd concepts like "Life begins at birth", as if the existence of a human life is dependent upon it's physical location.
Anyways. That's my thoughts for now, but I suspect I'll have more to come. I know, I know, you'll all be just hanging on the edge of your seats waiting, pffffft :P :)
Qwinn
Unfortunately this criticism cannot just be limited to those who get labeled as "liberal".
Well said.