CanadianJeff wrote:
You know I really miss the days when you could be a conservative that cared about fiscal responsibility, smaller less beaucratic government, free market and low unemployment as priorites.
Nowadays if you are running on any of those platforms you also have to be pro-life, anti-gay rights and Pro Israel or your "unelectable".
Agreed -- they seem to be mixing and matching "fiscal conservative" (ie. small gov't, balanced budgets, etc.) and "social conversatism" (people who do things that aren't what I do are immoral). I'd like governments to be run fiscally conservative in that they should be something like a non-profit -- try not to overspend or overtax. Obviously, in troubled economic times (like now), the tax base decreases and the government will spend more than it takes in. Hopefully, this can be balanced by the good economic times, so the overall debt sine waves around 0. This is apparently quite hard to do in practice. Otherwise, let people do what they want socially -- laws should protect one's life, liberty and property. Transactions between consenting adults should not be regulated.
As JJ alluded to, there's something less absolute and more relative about the terms nowadays -- to the staunch Christian-right conservative, anyone considering legalizing gay marriage is "liberal", and thus gets tarred with all the other affliations that term brings (ie. big government, tax and spend, etc.). Which is sort of odd, since I would consider social conservatives that want less social liberality to be proponents *of* big government, in that they want laws to restrict certain behaviours. Some people who are self-label themselves "conservative" aren't really, and are less so (in the traditional sense) than others they call "liberal". It's all rather confusing.
Maybe we need to throw out all the terms currently in use, and then define new ones to describe precisely what we mean. Let's see if that gains any traction.
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