A lot of my party members have seemed to lost their way when it comes to core Republican values. I thought it would be best if I list some of them here. Please note, I'm not a stereotypical Republican, so I imagine that I'll get some hate mail over this list. :)
Lesser Government: It's not the government's job to hand hold you through life. Republicans believe that America is a blank sheet of paper. You can make it whatever you'd like. Want to be rich? Work hard within the rules and you will be. Don't want to be rich or just want to be lazy? You can do that too, but you won't like it when your neighbor buys that new BMW.
Less Taxes: Republicans generally believe that we are taxed enough. Sales tax, Federal income tax, fees, all sorts of ways that the government takes more money from you isn't what Republicans want. Republicans want the money to be in your pocket so you stimulate the economy by buying houses, cars, college for your kids, plasma tv's, etc. All those things are taxed, which is why when Republicans push for a tax cut, you see an increase in revenue to the government.
Abortion: A lot of Republicans don't believe in abortion because of their religious views. That's ok. If they don't want abortions, they shouldn't have them. However, that directly contradicts the "Lesser Government" part of the core beliefs. If you believe in Lesser Government, how can you tell someone whether or not they should choose to abort or have a baby? Plainly put, it's not your business.
Gay marriage: Also something that Republicans don't believe in because of their religious views. However, you still go back to the Lesser Government belief and you're trying to shove your beliefs down the throat of someone who doesn't believe them.
Let's face it, gay people have been around forever, and there's not one good reason why they can't get married. In fact, I really hate it when gay people introduce me to their "partner". Don't do that. Introduce me to your "boyfriend, girlfriend, wife, or husband". I'm a big boy, I can handle that you're gay. I really don't care if you are gay as well. It's your business and I do believe in Lesser Government, and that means I don't have the right to tell you how to live your life. As a side note, I found out that I'm very big in the gay community. I didn't know I was that popular. :)
Gun Control: I'm for doing a background check to see if someone is a mental patient or a criminal, but that's it. Once those two things have been checked, I don't care what kind of weapon you own, even automatic ones. If you're a law abiding citizen, you should be able to own any weapon you'd like. The Second Amendment doesn't specify what kinds of weapons you can and can't own, so I'm taking the literal translation of that right.
Death Penalty: I think that there are just some people that deserve to die for the crimes they've committed. Jeffrey Dahmer, Westley Allan Dodd, Osama Bin Laden all committed crimes that were so heinous that the only appropriate punishment is a date with the needle.
Family: This is where most people tend to stray. They equate "family values" with straight and narrow thinking. No pornography, no gay people, no "offensive" material, in essence, no fun. Personally, I like porn. I don't care if you're gay. I think you have the right to say what you want, when you want, to who you want, as long as you're not committing a crime like say, threatening the President or crying out "fire" in a crowded theater.
To me, family is the people who you love and love you back. Family are people you'd die or kill for. To me, my friends are equally my family. My family, thus by definition, isn't restricted by race, color, or religion. If you're my friend, you're my family. I'd gladly give you every dime I had or work late into the evening on a work night to help you out. You can ask my wife about the "every dime" part. We've had numerous fights because I've loaned or given away thousands of dollars to friends and family when they were in need. Why? Because they are family and if it's in my means to help them, I'm helping them.
Wealth: If you earned it legally, it's yours. Hillary Clinton was famous for saying she wanted to "take excessive profits" from oil companies and give it to alternative fuel research. Oil companies are the only people that she could have gotten away with this with. Do you think it would have flown if she said she wanted to take the "excessive profits" from Toyota and given them to Ford? She would have been laughed at out of the building.
That means that the poor and the lazy have no right to complain about the services that they get or don't get. Why should someone who worked his/her ass off, invests wisely, and doesn't live above their means who makes say $200,000 a year, be forced to give the government more money because the poor and the lazy want universal health care, free public transit, or any number of welfare state programs?
If you're poor, and you can't get ahead in life, you need to take a good hard look at yourself and figure out how you're going to better your life so that you are no longer poor. If you can't get it together here, where do you suppose you're going to go to make a life for yourself? This is America, land of opportunity.
I grew up DIRT poor. Government cheese and peanut butter poor. Goulash with tomato paste poor. If you haven't been that poor, you don't know poor. What did I do to better my life? I went to college, paid attention, got a good paying job, invested wisely, didn't live above my means, worked hard, and didn't mouth off to my boss when I wanted to. Now, after all these years, my hard work and dedication is paying off and I'll be damned if I'm going to fork over more money in taxes because some lazy bastard doesn't want to get off his ass to either get a job or go to school to better themselves.
That being said, I have NO problem helping someone who wants to help themselves. If a person is poor and is willing to work hard to better themselves, I have no problem with giving them a monthly bus pass so they can get to and from school/work, subsidizing their rent for a short while, or even having them pay little to no taxes for a short while as well. However, after that "short while" then they need to stand on their own two feet. It builds character and makes them a better person and a better parent.
I'm sure I'm missing a ton of other values that people want to know about. So, I'll just cut it off here and make a new article about those that people write to me about in the near future.
Travis
travis@rightwinglunatic.com
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2 comments:
Great article! I don't think I have ever read a blog that so accurately reflected my views and why I consider myself to be a Republican in exile. If you would like to discuss these type of issues further you can contact me at bpadair.com.
Um... For a Republican, you sound a heck of a lot like a Libertarian.
I have one minor nit to pick, though. I've been dirt poor, and on disability. In British Columbia, Canada, disability and welfare are the same check from the same office, with the same workers, so I got a good exposure to people who were on welfare.
I've also met a lot of people here in Nevada who probably are, or should be eligible, at least. "Lazy" isn't the word for most of them.
Mostly, it's a complex combination of circumstances, lack of available and affordable opportunities.
Well, the simplest way to deal with that is plain old money plus as many opportunities to change your luck as possible.
In Canada, they had a simple rule of thumb - keep fraud below 15 percent. That's because they had a conservative government for a while, one that actually ran some numbers and checked to see what corporate practice was.
Well, somewhere below 10 to 15 percent, fraud prevention costs more than the money it saves, while slowing the entire enterprise to a crawl.
(Boy, you should have seen the glare I got for trying to report a non-recurring cheque for 20 bucks. Rule of thumb - don't make them do paperwork for any windfall under a hundred dollars.)
Anyway, I'd say that most of the people I knew, either on welfare or disability, had one or more mental or physical conditions (usually a complicated interaction) that rendered them unfit for work at a living wage either temporarily or permanently.
Not that they didn't work. Volunteerism is encouraged, part-time employment is encouraged and employers get a two buck an hour break for hiring someone off welfare.
Remember, they don't have to pay for health care benefits - employees do, but they don't - so they can afford to take chances.
Social workers kind of function as ass-kicking cheerleaders. They are generally clinical social workers or equivalent, and have a wide range of discretion.
For instance, as a disabled person unable to work a traditional job, I was encouraged to pursue work-from home opportunities, and when I took on responsibility for "hard to house" welfare/disabled recipients because I needed room-mates, to pay the rent, I was actually made responsible for their finances in two cases, so they were fed, housed and had some money left over for sundries.
Here, that's called "assisted living" and those doing what I was doing for free out of pure self-interest make thirty or forty grand a year, while bitching about how underpaid they are.
They are also very supportive of micro-enterprise, small business incubation, etc, where several broke people get together and, with help, learn the ropes of small business as they sequentially start small home businesses.
"If you have enough problems, they start solving one another." Or in other words, officially or unofficially, they encourage families of choice.
Oh, and one other Canadian common-sense innovation - a job board, free resume services, free job prep and interview skills prep, etc, right there in the welfare office, instead of in a different place entirely on the other side of town. Why not? Computers are cheap, staff is expensive.
Guess what? A fiscally conservative administration came up with that one. By the by, you don't have to be on welfare to use the facilities or get free resumes printed up. Neighborhood business folk drop by to get jobs put up - so now, nobody sneers at people going in and out of those doors.
Average time on welfare - just as in the US - 2 years.
Meanwhile, all that money goes right into the local economy, so you don't see either Ottawa or Victoria passing many huge economic stimulus packages.
Poor people can't afford to earmark for bridges to nowhere, and the opportunity for serious graft is pretty much eliminated. So, if you go to a Canadian city, you won't find slums, homeless people, or places that are obviously too dangerous to walk unarmed.
The whole of Canada has a murder rate lower than some US cities.
The US view toward people who need help is punitive, and it decreases dignity while increasing desperation. It tends to predispose people towards doing anti-social things, like setting up meth labs or selling moonshine brewed in lead-soldered stills.
(And those are the smart, organized, high-functioning poor. The less well-equipped will steal your car, mug you or join a Dominionist Church.)
Contempt from society in other words, breeds contempt of society.
Now, many people use the word "socialism" to discribe Canada's system of welfare and health care, but it's not.
I'm not conversant enough with the language of political science to put it in those terms, but it's much more small-business entreprenurial capitalism with robust but passive government support. Sort of a safety net designed to encourage economic high-wire acts, and it's my guess that it's been a key component in canada's successful transition from a purely resource-based economy to a serious player in high-tech, value added industry and international trade.
Nobody planned it, it simply evolved that way and the net result is actually a very open, free and libertarian society.
But at bottom, the key element is that it pays to give a damn and (as your wife will ruefully attest), not count the pennies when it comes to helping out a friend.
Even your loser friends. :)
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