COnservativism

Why has the UK’s economy grown so slowly under the Tories?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora.

lol… but not lol

It’s sad.

It’s frustrating.

It’s maddening.

It’s a bang your head against the wall to relieve the pain of blind ignorance kind of thing.

It seems that no matter where one travels on this tiny blue pearl adrift in a lightless ocean, one universal constant that science does not accommodate is the obliviousness demonstrated toward a long and less than venerated history of fiscal incompetence by those branding themselves as fiscally competent by virtue of their propensity for preservation.

As the old adage goes, “It takes money to make money,” while the CONs among us lack the spine to explore beyond their survival instincts, which favour hoarding among the favoured class.

It’s always the little people who get stuck with the honourable burden of austerity, never the luxury recliner class. They deserve their effetes, after all, because they are superior to the little people. That’s why they’re considered “royalty,” and by God’s good graces, they have a divine Reich to rule.

They should not be expected to lift heavy fingers to make manifest a reality catering to their sensibilities. That’s what the little people are for.

The little people are the beasts of burden by divine decree, and no one should ever question that wizdumb.

Conservatives are fiscally conservative, and that makes them better money managers than the swarthy class, which demands to be paid for the value they contribute to society and the luxuries of the pampered class.

If the uncouth class manages power, then debts and deficits will be deemed horrendous failures in leadership. If they hold the keys to the halls of power, then debts and deficits are a feature, not a bug.

If the tree-hugging barbarians wish to spread the wealth around to their peers, that’s a grievous violation of overreach for which they must be punished. The trillions in wealth generated by the sweat of hundreds of millions of brows rightfully belongs to their natural rulers.

When they Reichfully sit upon their thrones, then they are empowered by the lard almighty to share it with their peers, and if it so happens that one of them over-indulges, they are permitted to trickle down the excess to the wanton waifs beneath them. They must be careful, however, not to release too much of a flood because that would embarrass their peers by revealing the extent of their gluttonous obscenities.

They cannot afford that sort of smear to their optics because that would incite the little people into another of their tizzies to make heads literally roll.

No one wants any more cake. It’s too disruptive to their digestion.

At any rate, their inability to peer past their navels and acknowledge themselves as members of the same species as the rabble they exploit into early graves makes it impossible for them to notice opportunity when it knocks on their over-filled bladders.

They would rather piss into their chamber pots than allow any of their precious golden treasure to be used to elevate the lot of humanity.

If they did that, they would soon run out of heads to trod upon and lose track of who was a worthy peer by birth or an anomaly by self-made fortune.

If this seems a bit cynical, it’s because it is quite cynical toward a movement that has steadily reversed the course of capitalism to raise a world out of poverty by weaponizing it as a means of establishing power. The economy belongs to everyone while our systems undergo a consolidation of power that has historically been the cause of systemic collapse and widespread chaos.

In the words of economist Dean Baker,

The market is just a tool, and in fact a very useful one. It makes no more sense to lash out against markets than to lash out against the wheel. The reality is that conservatives have been quite actively using the power of the government to shape market outcomes in ways that redistribute income upward. However, conservatives have been clever enough to not own up to their role in this process, pretending all along that everything is just the natural working of the market. And, progressives have been foolish enough to go along with this view.

The economy should serve the social contract, not subjugate it while Conservative politics the world around have never quite accepted the reality that we are, all of us, in this together. A successful and prosperous future requires a mindset that accommodates all needs, not just those one can personally benefit from. The fundamental difference between the conservative “me” mentality versus the liberal “we” mentality is the cause of poor economic performance. It always has been and it always will be because it constitutes myopic and self-serving thinking favouring power to the few, and not the people at large.

Why Conservatives Conserve Old American Values

The world is changing ever faster by the year. The natural reaction many people have toward circumstances changing in ways they haven’t been able to process is to resist that change. A large part of the problem contributing toward resistance to change is the perception that things were okay before the proposed changes had been introduced and “pushed onto them”. (People in general, regardless of their political ideology, don’t appreciate feeling like they’ve had their lives dictated to them.)

In the case of gay marriage, for example, many people seemed quite comfortable with their many generations of heterosexual marriage. They didn’t want to see their status quo change because that represents a change to something everyone believes is fundamental to society — family. The notion that a family is not a genetically controlled environment just doesn’t factor into sensibilities which still believe in the “Ozzie and Harriet illusion of family” (even though that symbol hasn’t existed for decades — if ever it did beyond a small segment of society). Changing that image is difficult for some people on a fundamental level because it means changing much about how they perceive the world around them.

Conservatives have the greatest difficulties with such changes because they are naturally predisposed toward conservation — (hence their designation as conservatives). There is certainly some value in preserving aspects of tradition and ideology to facilitate the cultivation of a consistent set of values to strengthen a community. We are at a point in our history where diverse communities across the globe that have been evolving for centuries are now transforming into a singular and global community. Many traditional values are forced into being discarded quickly without permitting conservatives their luxuries of taking the natural amount of time they would otherwise take toward adjusting to change.

Some conservatives can still support notions of slavery and misogyny. It seems clear that some of these views have been entrenched so deeply within the human psyche that we have many centuries of effort ahead of us to cure our society of such destructive attitudes… and because the changes which are occurring across this globe involve cultures which are still currently living in what the developed world regards as barbaric conditions; we have an enormous amount of work to do to resolve the conflicts arising out of the differences in perspectives as expressed by groups whose affiliations range the gamut of the spectrum of ideological concerns.

I don’t believe conservative values are fundamentally any different than liberal values; only the comprehension each group has on how to achieve those values differs between them. For example, both dislike the fact that unwanted children are forced into this world, and both would like to see the elimination of abortions as a means of preventing those children from being born into deplorable conditions. The conservative mind rationalizes that the best way to eliminate abortions is by imposing conditions and laws which govern behaviour. The liberal mind rationalizes education and support as the best solution toward reducing abortions to their minimal requirement. In the case of this issue, it seems clear to me in my biased mind that the liberal mindset is more capable of acknowledging the reality that people will respond far better toward receiving support than they would in being dictated to. This introduces an aspect of conservative thinking, highlighting a degree of hypocrisy in their efforts. No one likes to be dictated to, and it seems conservatives are the most vocal complainants of appearances of being dictated to. They seem incapable, however, of recognizing how their solutions are often impositions of their will upon others. They want their cake and to eat it, too. (This is speaking in generalities, of course, but that’s the nature of this topic.)

I think conservatives do sincerely believe they are helping our society to preserve values, but that often, they don’t seem altogether self-aware enough to recognize how many of their “proposed solutions” are not only not solutions but are often approaches which exacerbate the problems they claim to want to solve; but even worse is that they are approaches which contradict their values.

(A case in point would be the sheer number of laws they have introduced for controlling a woman’s reproductive rights while completely dismissing how those laws contradict their desire for a small government and greater freedoms as individuals… and under the auspices that they are protecting an unborn life while demonstrating no capacity for supporting initiatives to help already born and suffering children. They claim to possess superior morality arising from their religious beliefs, yet also complain about supporting those with the greatest need in society while lavishing riches upon those already wealthy.)

A conservative ideology and mindset may contribute some value toward establishing some framework for consistency within the development of a stable social structure, but it seems clear that the conservative mindset has lost all touch with what it means to be conservative in the first place and that it now is merely a caricature of an obstinate child who simply wants the world to capitulate to its own selfishly myopic views without having to give anything back in return for the luxuries they enjoy because of the sacrifices of those who came before us.