Source: St. Louis debate Oct 17, 2000

Gore was in favor of no child to the point it was said Bush stole their idea.

Nation build happened under Clinton as well. Anyone remember Bosnia?

KERRY: “No Child Left Behind Act, I voted for it. I support it. I support the goals.”

And for Medicare, Mr. Kerry wants to expand the new prescription drug benefit by eliminating the “donut hole” in insurance coverage. Do you remember that phrase? He wanted to expand Medicare much more than Bush.

Kerry supported Clinton on nation building.

I’m no fan on spending, but the records of Gore and Kerry suggest that they would have done far more damage.

Sounds like you subscribe to Pragmatism which, of course, is a “philosophy or school of thought.”

You are right about the need for incrementalism, but are wrong about the source of it. I believe change should occur organically, through the slow modification of custom and tradition, not through an intelligent design (for a lack of a better term) of the Legislature.

The Founders understood that legislation is not a magic wand. Instead, the best we can hope for is to set up simple rules applicable to all that protect life, liberty, and property. After that, the natural abilities of individuals will determine their place in life.

So long as one person does not take advantage of others, then government should stay out of the daily affairs of its citizens; it has no place in determining winners and losers in our society. If we let it be otherwise, success in life will determined purely by power. I’ll leave it to you to pick out contemporary examples illustrating the preceeding sentence.

How Bush more conservative than Gore or Kerry? BTW I did vote for Bush the first time and the second time I left it blank.

No Child Left Behind

Medicare

Nation Building

11 trillion in the red

And there are definitely a lot of folks out here (fanbois? I like that) who fall into the “my philosophy is never wrong” worldview.

And our government was designed to support incremental change and not broad reform… which is a good thing (otherwise, you could just as easily reverse a broad change and give the country whiplash). So you may want to rethink whether what you’re seeing now is really broad reform or just incrementalism in a direction you disapprove.

And, no, I don’t need a civics lesson. In fact, your response shows your complete blindness to political philosophy. I thought I was making an obvious reference to the age-old market vs. experts debate over how resources should be allocated in society. I guess I gave you too much credit. If you’d like to catch up, search for Hayek’s “The Use of Knowledge in Society.”

But what troubles me the most is that you apparently think that since we have a government with elected officials, then these officials have carte blanche to enact any law they see fit. Is there any area that you consider unproper for government to regulate? Or is everything fair game?

You seem like a rather intelligent person, from what I can tell from reading your posts the past couple of months. But you don’t seem well acquainted with any of the philosophical arguments for limited government. You do well when you debate the Limbaugh-Beck-Hannity ditto heads, but seem utterly flummoxed when someone like Deal makes a case for limited government. Do you ever read anything serious that does not comport with your worldview? And, no, the fanbois here at Peach Pundit are not considered “serious.”

But this is too good to pass up:
To whom do we delegate this decision?

You need a civics lesson now?

Ah, you get to my implicit point. So, to WHOM do we delegate this decision? Do we rely on the outcomes of 300 million people all acting in their self-interest, or do we turn over decision-making to a “panel of experts” who will decide what’s good for us, including everything from what food we put in our bodies to how often we exercise?

And again, you’re making the assumption that these experts have enough knowledge to accurately allocate resources to provide for the well-being of 300 million people. Yes, you make a good point that our overall well-being suffers as a nation (or as a world) because of injury and disease. But you take it as granted that your preferred policy proposals are the cure-all for the problem.

I’m going to state this as explicitly as I can: we have to accept inefficiencies. You can’t escape them. People will get sick; people will die. Yes, you may help the overall commons in some way if you seek to provide universal access to health care. But what other inefficienies are you introducing by having such an all-encompassing approach? What unintended consequences are you not foreseeing?

That’s my entire point. There’s so much that we don’t know, and the sooner we admit this the sooner we can craft much narrower policies that will actually do a little good, instead of crafting comprehensive policies that shoot for the moon but ultimately fail.

Strawman… and not at all what I wrote, but it’s your perception of what I wrote.

Example: There is a cost in lost human capital and forced money transfers for not having an affordable effective healthcare system. There’s a real cost that’s not in the dollars you personally spend, but the economic and social losses endured by society as a whole. You either believe in the commons or you don’t, but a society with 300 million people does indeed have a commons and it’s real and it costs money to maintain it effectively.

And sometimes we have to make a trade-off that expands the commons for the common good.

Only if you grant the assumption that government must step in and correct any and all perceived wrongs in the world.

People who believe in a meddling, activist government use the phrase “Don’t just stand there, do something” as their reason for passing legislation. They see any problem as a means for social engineering, ignorant of the fact that most problems tend to go away on their own, and that government interference often makes things worse, turning problems into crises.

Conservatives used to understand this. That’s why they often embraced the phrase “Don’t just do something, stand there.” They recognized that we don’t have the capability to iron out the contradictions in life, that it’s sometimes inevitable that we have to just muddle through any unpleasantness in life, that there’s not a silver-bullet solution for every perceived problem.

But as Doug notes above, the label “conservative” doesn’t mean quite as much anymore when you have right-wing progressives like Mike Huckabee and George W. Bush leading the movement. So we get a right-wing version that promises to “leave no child behind” and to “bring God’s gift of democracy” to backward parts of the world. It’s a fool’s errand when we grant the assumption that such things can be done, because, in fact, they cannot. Indeed, it only turns things that were once problems into full-blown crises.

Somewhat related: Dustup in Nashville:

http://politics.nashvillepost.com/2009/10/28/davidson-county-gop-moves-to-oust-ron-paul-supporting-vice-chair/

The problem is that sometimes not doing a socially “liberal” program also has a price tag. Unfortunately, the whole “socialism” boogieman we have going gets this confused.

I think people who call themselves “social conservative” and generally big government socialists. They want the government to dictate behavior in a nanny like fashion, just as the left does. They just have a different goal.

It’s all about control, one way or another. I want no part of that.

But I thought Mark Steyn made a good point in a column a few weeks ago: there really is no such thing as a “fiscally conservative but socially liberal” politician.

Steyn wrote: “The problem with being ‘socially liberal, fiscally conservative’ is that most of the social liberalism comes with quite a price tag — just have a ten-minute riffle through the non-stimulus bill. … But the reality is that almost every ‘socially liberal, fiscally conservative’ politician turns out to be fiscally liberal — in the same way that, if you mix half a pint of vanilla ice cream with half a pint of horse manure, it’s not hard to figure which taste will predominate. ”

I tend to agree with this. Unless a politician is explicitly an ideological libertarian, the “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” label doesn’t make sense because so much of what we think of as social liberalism really is just government-funding of the left’s preferred position in the culture war.

For example, take abortion. If it was only about respecting a woman’s right to choose abortion, ok, fine. But, no, the left believes it’s a “positive” right that requires the government to subsidize it if a woman can’t afford one. Same thing with drugs, immigration, or any other cultural issue. It’s not enough to be left alone; in the left’s view, if the government isn’t funding a program for it, then it’s not a right that’s being respected.

Have dogs and cats been seen sleeping together?

So which one of us is the stopped clock?