(Part 2) Top products from r/Conservative

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It's very rare that I get stupefied like this. Seriously, upvote for your density. You knocked me for not picking up your sarcasm before, but you totally miss not only my own sarcasm but the fact that what I stated is not a conservative argument but the epitome of a liberal argument?

Before I get into the rest of my argument, let me remind you of something. Sure, the top 20% may own 85% but in 2008 the top 25% paid 86% of the taxes. The bottom 75% paid only 14%, the bottom 50% only paid 2.7%. Is that not fair enough? Apparently not.

Back to what stupefied me, you asked (formatted to get to the point of the question):
> Whatever amount the haves have at the moment are we anywhere near taxing them at the amount that we should be to have a fair and equitable society?

And I answered:

> But to placate you a moment, in order to tax the haves enough to have any shot at a 'fair and equitable' society, the tax rate would have to be 100% of everyone earning even a cent, followed by a gracious rebate from the government so that everyone receives the same amount of money. From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs, right? Show me a large society where Karl Marx's ideals have taken good hold without requiring genocide and the stomping out of man's God given rights.

That answer is not my position on what would help this country. It is not a conservative opinion or argument. If you want to force a truly equitable society, that's the option you're looking for. Not me, I personally despise that option, because it forces everyone at zero. That's what you're really looking for, in case you don't realize it, to try and force a fair and equitable society. The problem is that no society will ever truly be completely fair and equitable. I just gave you Karl Marx's idea of a fair and equitable society, which is what many liberals and the left lean towards without even knowing it.


Now, allow me to state my opinion as a Conservative clearly since you obviously mistook what I was saying before. It may be complicated but I'll break it down for you so you can follow. Pay attention, you might learn something or even see something that you like.

• In any society you will have the haves and the have nots. Not everyone will become a have no matter what sort of bonus or help you give them. Anyone can become a have not if they don't give a damn. You have to realize this.
  
  
• In any society you will have people who game the system, for good or for ill depending on how you look at it. Human beings will look for any chance to get ahead in any way that they can, in ways both legal and illegal. Once you get these two top points, you'll understand that no matter what you do in trying to make society fair and equal, it will in part fail because some people will not look to be just a fair and equal part of society. They may remain in their status quo position or try and get more than they presently have. It is a fact of life.
  
  
• As a Conservative, I support and would push for anything that gets unnecessary government regulation out of your house, business, and life. A government that can tell you what lightbulb and what toilet you must use is a powerful government indeed. You get rid of the excess and largesse of the government and keep it limited (a basic tenet of Conservative thought) and keep what is necessary and what it does well. That includes basic things that include but are not limited to a military, infrastructure, international relations, domestic policy, and protecting its citizens. It does not include building bridges to nowhere, nor putting a boot on the neck of industries that are the victim of the day, industries that would hire hundreds and thousands of workers and put an economy to work if not for the fact that the government has made them the "bad guy" because executives might make some money in the process of hiring those employees.
  
  
• As a Conservative, I support and would push for government to stop messing around unnecessarily with the financial sector insofar as it has told banks that they HAVE to lend money or be called racist. You can see the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 and the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act of 1975. The problem is in part that banks were told to lend to persons who had no business owning a home, but because the lies, damn lies and statistics showed they were "really" (note: this is sarcasm) not lending to them because of their race, and forced banks to make bad loans. They then decided to pad their earnings any way they could, see securities and derivatives.
  
  
• As a Conservative, I support and would push for a firm enforcement of the Constitution and our Constitutional laws. The Constitution is the basic contract the government has with the states and its citizens. If that contract is not enforced in its totality, what good is it? If one part of it is considered old, outdated and ignored, then any part of it can be considered old, outdated and ignored. At this point your rights are no longer God given and respected by your government but can be given and taken away by your government at their pleasure. Also the laws of the land must be universal, everyone must be equal under the laws. This means your average citizen and your biggest corporations must comply with the laws of the land, and if they break said laws they get punished. This also means that if there isn't a law, not just that there is a law and you're not enforcing it but that there actually is no law regarding a subject, you learn from it and you push to make a law.
  
  
• As a Conservative, I support and would push for bad businesses failing. If you ran your business like crap, if you caused a financial meltdown by making bad bets, if you ran a failing model and couldn't keep your labor costs within your company's means, you have no business being IN business. Boiled down, NO BAILOUTS. Doesn't matter whether you're a financial institution, a government sponsored enterprise, or an automotive corporation. I'm sure most people would get this, but you always have some snarky fool calling Conservatives inhuman monsters with no compassion for the people who would be unemployed by letting these businesses fail. You let one business fail, another will rise up in its stead.
  
  
• As a Conservative, I support and would push for a complete dismantling of the IRS and ALL the taxes presently collected in the US (including but not limited to personal income tax, corporate income tax, capital gains tax, inheritance tax, social security and medicare taxes, death tax, payroll tax, workman's comp tax, et al.) and the setting up for a flat 20% consumption tax on all new goods and services sold at the consumer level within the United States, coupled with a monthly "pre-bate," or rebate at the beginning of the month, for what a poverty level family would spend in taxes for that month. This way, the poorest don't even pay for the basic bare necessities of what they need, and anything a person spends in excess of that 20% becomes taxed regardless of where they stand on their income. The tax is levied on all new goods and services, regardless of who buys it (citizen or non-citizen) and how they buy it (cash or credit). This means that even a drug dealer who doesn't declare any of his income will pay taxes on the bling bling brand new Benz he buys in cash, and the tourist from Kazakhstan who bought a Statue of Liberty souvenir is actually contributing to your Social Security. It also means that since all the levels of production aren't taxed on their materials, the cost of products would drop. The added bonus of this is essentially a clear cut pool of funds for the government and who takes what. Even better, as you see how much money government takes, and where you can trim the fat of the government, you can more easily adjust the tax rate to save everyone some of their hard earned money. Not just tax cuts for the rich, but tax cuts for everyone. That's a fair and equitable proposition. Now, of course it's not a perfect system because you can live on second hand goods off of eBay for the rest of your life, but as I said before, there's always SOMEONE who will game the system. You find the game, you adjust it and close it, and you go from there. If you would like to learn more about this, you can read The Fair Tax Book: Saying Goodbye to the Income Tax and the IRS by Neil Boortz.
  
  
• As a Conservative, I support and would push for a reform of Social Security such that the people who have lived their lives and planned for Social Security will be guaranteed to have it, and offer alternatives for retirement planning . Personally, I'd say any citizen over the age of 40 or 45 should be guaranteed their Social Security benefits. All funds for Social
  
  
• As a Conservative, I support and would push for massive immigration reform. I am totally for anyone who wants to come to this country and become part of the civil society being welcomed with open arms, given a road to become a resident alien or full fledged citizen, and entering the melting pot of American Society. However, if you decide that you're above the system and you should be able to wander in at your leisure undocumented and unnoticed over open borders, I fully support you getting kicked the hell out of my country. Come here to help and be part of the civil society or stay out. Because of this, I fully support a nice big wall across the Mexican border because it is unsustainably porous.
  
  
  Maybe you'll still think that conservative ideals are idiotic, and you're more than welcome to have your opinion. This is as clear cut as I can make my positions as a Conservative. What's your beef with them?
  
  edit: Unless you're just going to say "TL:DR, you're still a conservative asshole."

I'm currently reading Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind which I was introduced to on a similar thread on /r/conservative.

Haidt is a social psychologist who is researching the psychological foundations of morality and how those foundations influence politics. He himself is very liberal though in the course of his research you can see him becoming more and more sympathetic to conservative ideas and coming to share many of their concerns.

His theory is that there are (at least) six basic foundations of morality: care, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority, sanctity and that these foundations are an innate part of human psychology. In his research he found that liberals are concerned with care above the other five foundations. Fairness & liberty still rank fairly high, but loyalty, authority and sanctity rank very low for liberals. As you move to the right on the political spectrum care trends slightly down while all other moral foundations trend up until all six are of roughly equal concern to conservatives. It's not so much that conservatives care less than liberals (though they do... but just a little) It's more that conservatives balance care against several other moral concerns.

Haidt thinks this gives conservatives a political advantage since liberals in their fixation on care end up violating people's moral sensibilities on the other five foundations. More than that he sees the social benefits of those other foundations and that they are all required for a healthy society. Even though he remains extremely liberal himself he concedes that conservatives are right about the value they place on those other competing moral foundations. Haidt advocates that liberals start to value some of the other moral foundations more though I'm not sure how that is any different from saying they should become more conservative (or maybe neo-conservative in the original sense of that word).

If anyone is interested in this topic Bernie Goldberg, a 30 year vet of CBS Evening News, wrote a fantastic book called Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News it's entertaining book that goes down easy, a great beach read.

>In his nearly thirty years at CBS News, Emmy Award winner Bernard Goldberg earned a reputation as one of the preeminent reporters in the television news business. When he looked at his own industry, however, he saw that the media far too often ignored their primary mission: to provide objective, disinterested reporting. Again and again he saw that the news slanted to the left. For years, Goldberg appealed to reporters, producers, and network executives for more balanced reporting, but no one listened. The liberal bias continued.

>Now, breaking ranks and naming names, he reveals a corporate news culture in which the closed-mindedness is breathtaking and in which entertainment wins over hard news every time.

Free to Choose

Also, Friedman did several hour long documentaries based on this book that are all available on YouTube. Just search "free to choose milton friedman." He takes an issue, examines it over the first 30 minutes, and the second half is all discussion with various prominent people. There's some great debate between folks like Friedman and a young Thomas Sowell and their pro-union, pro-big government counterparts. Outstanding work. I've watched them all.

"no scientific consensus that black people are genetically predisposed to lower intelligence"

The report is by the APA from 1996. The APA in 96 to even acknowledge that there was a gap was a huge thing, considering its bias. Discoveries have ramped up in the last few years so I don't know why wikipedia is relying on sources from 94 & 96 considering the human genome mapping wasn't completed until 2003. Discoveries since then have been one after another.

It's no surprise wikipedia comes to the PC conclusion, but it suffers from problems. It acknowledges that the black-white test gap exists. Either it is genetic, or environmental. There has been decades of money, and time thrown at fixing the environment by rich billionaires like Gates, and others. Dozens upon dozens of education, nutrition, parent swapping (giving black babies to whites), and other experiments, and they all failed. There is not a single study in the world that can claim lasting gains in the IQ gap. This bit of evidence would point to a genetic basis right? That and the fact that twin studies (the only proper studies that can control for genes) shows intelligence, among other dispositions, are highly heritable. In that wikipedia page, they link to the actual numbers from the APA study: "A 1996 statement by the American Psychological Association gave about .45 for children and about .75 during and after adolescence."

Finally, does that statement even pass the laugh test? "Science" doesn't work by consensus, but if it did, wouldn't it be relevant to ask the actual scientists involved in intelligence research?

There are people with very high intelligence, very low IQ, and everyone between. Most people can recognize that height is highly heritable, but it isn't a guarantee, sometimes you are taller than your tallest parent, sometimes you are shorter than the shortest parents. Most times you regress towards the mean. The idea that the brain is a blank slate has been discredited by Steven Pinker, Noam Chomsky, and others. The brain comes with innate abilities, abilities that are partly inherited from your parents genes.

If you are actually concerned with finding the truth you can read Nicholas Wade, who writes for the NYTimes. The 10,000 Year Explosion. Or Gene Expression1. Or Gene Expression2. Rather than having your views filtered by whoever happens to be editing one of the many wikipedia pages.

But our oil IS priced differently. And the price of oil is not "global". It would seem you lack understanding of how prices work. Is the price of bread global? Certainly, every country consumes some amount of bread. How much bread is produced in the U.S. and what cost? How about Singapore? It's not about "having enough oil", which I disagree with, by the way. But if we can produce oil and other energy here cheaply, then the "global" price becomes irrelevant for American consumers and American industry. If the "global" price of bringing oil to the U.S. is $140/barrel, but I can purchase the same amount of oil/energy LOCALLY for $120/barrel, then I will.

You need to discard this notion of a "global" price. Prices are not determined by the "globe". Prices are determined by the people willing to buy the particular good.

I strongly suggest a little reading on the subject.

Believe it or not, The Fair Tax book is actually an interesting read. The amount of money spent dealing with taxation and the amount of money not collected because of our current tax (due to things like the black market) is absolutely staggering.

https://www.socialismgame.com/

I think this might be a similar game. Maybe I’m not looking in the right places but cant find hasbro’s version.

Edit: Hasbro Monopoly Socialism Board Game Parody Adult Party Game https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07VPRNZJB/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_wSiyDbQEWC8Z9

Here's a conservative favorite of mine: http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Times-Revised-Twenties-Perennial/dp/0060935502?ie=UTF8&keywords=modern%20times&qid=1463701601&ref_=sr_1_2&sr=8-2

http://www.amazon.com/Reverence-Renewing-Forgotten-Paul-Woodruff/dp/0195157958

:)

From the same company that also made a jab at Socialism in another version lol https://www.amazon.com/Hasbro-Monopoly-Socialism-Board-Parody/dp/B07VPRNZJB/

Beliefnet mentions the book and the research, so I linked to it.

Would you be happier with just an Amazon link to the book and no detail?

Here's a direct link to the 1996 General Social Survey also mentioned.

The US should have the lowest rates in the world, not just in the OECD (which is full of sickened, overtaxed economies anyway)! I'm not sure who prepared this data, but measuring tax burdens in the US is extremely complicated, because of so many jurisdictions that cross over, and I would have to see their analysis. They may not, for example, have included Social Security "contributions," which of course are a tax, even if politicians and their minions do not wish to call them that.

Additionally, this does not take into account the costs associated with regulation and trade barriers, which are embedded in costs and reduce our standard of living.

If you actually are willing to consider the expansion of government in US history, I encourage you to read "Crisis and Leviathan" by Robert Higgs. Alternatively, you can listen to the related lectures here.

http://www.amazon.com/Inside-American-Education-Thomas-Sowell/dp/0029303303/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

And that is a lie. And you know it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/21/opinion/21kristof.html?_r=0

http://rt.com/usa/193952-charity-conservatives-religion-utah/

http://news.rice.edu/2012/05/31/liberals-versus-conservatives-how-politics-affects-charitable-giving/

http://www.amazon.com/Who-Really-Cares-Compassionate-Conservatism/dp/0465008232

http://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=2682730

reed

https://www.amazon.com/Black-Book-Communism-Crimes-Repression/dp/0674076087

A History of The Jews

sigh

I'll just leave this here. Enjoy.

http://www.amazon.com/Why-Evolution-True-Jerry-Coyne/dp/0143116649/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1348352250&sr=8-1&keywords=jerry+coyne+why+evolution+is+true

http://www.amazon.com/Greatest-Show-Earth-Evidence-Evolution/dp/1416594795/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1348352282&sr=1-1&keywords=the+greatest+show+on+earth

>Especially when you consider its closest competitor at least tries to give both sides of each debate, even during editorial segments

You obviously don't watch FoxNews and, instead, get all your info about them from other people. Given that, it's understandable why most of what you said above is wrong.

I'm not going to go through it all again, point by point. Read the experts. They make the case far better than I could anyway. They're everywhere.

Hey, just for this comment, I recommend reading the book 'The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion' - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0052FF7YM/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?ie=UTF8&btkr=1). It is written by a liberal, but he gains respect for the conservatives by trying to actually understand WHY they think how they think how they do. To give you a brief description, he thinks there are multiple moral 'axis' which people think on. One of the main one used used by the left is the 'harm principle', which states that actions are wrong if, and only if they harm others. He has other axis, such as 'cleanliness', which explore other interesting moral questions (is it "wrong" to have sexual intercourse with a chicken's carcass?). I found it an invaluable tool, especially for understanding the religious right.

Think about how unbridled immigration from third-world countries and open-arms refugee policies affects a nation's law, culture, traditions, and political philosophy. Just go take a peek at Europe's cultural suicide.

And I challenge you to think critically about the related issues independent of ethnicity! Resist the leftist impulse to view everything through the lens of race, and you'll gain some harrowing insights about what is happening in the world.

***

Read one of these books:

• The Death of the West
  
  
• Slouching Towards Gomorrah
  
  
  
  Observe the destruction of the family and the increasing infidelity, glorification of casual sex, and out-of-wedlock child births (which is one of the major predictors of criminality). The media normalizes so much of this.
  
  
  
  Consider the growth of the government and the ever-increasing dependence on government by citizens.
  
  ***
  
  I could go on.
  
  
  

This UBI crap was posted to /r/Futurology a while back as Canada is dabbling with the idea. They act like Marxist redistribution of wealth is some new groundbreaking idea never considered before rather than the century old debunked economic model based on Marx; whose government model is responsible for more poverty and mass murder than any ideology in history before it. The author of that article seems to believe that adopting Marxism will reduce the size, scope, and cost of government. That's rich.

Over 100 million murdered by their own government detailed in the Black Book of Communism.

Buy the book here:
https://www.amazon.com/Black-Book-Communism-Crimes-Repression/dp/0674076087

Or download it here:
http://www.jrbooksonline.com/PDF_Books/blackbookcommunism.pdf

It's not the 19th century anymore. The scientific community's understanding of the relevant phenomena has progressed to such an extent that it's not reasonable to compare modern climate scientists to some medieval plague doctor who thinks that diseases are caused by imbalances of the humors or something equally wacky.

They've understood the greenhouse gas effect, they've learned how to analyze the isotopes of a sample of atmospheric carbon to determine if it came from an older or younger, organic or inorganic source of carbon, they can measure the temperatures of the past by proxy using elements frozen in ice cores extracted from Earth's ice sheets. They know for a fact that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have increased dramatically since the Industrial Revolution, that the burning of fossil fuels is primarily responsible for that increase, that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that traps heat inside Earth's atmosphere, and that Earth's temperature has increased at an unusually rapid pace in recent decades. You know what's bad for the economy? Rising sea levels caused by melting polar ice sheets, increased frequency and severity of natural disasters like drought and tropical storms, the desertification of semi-arid regions of the world including the American Southwest, and the resulting disruptions to agricultural production.

Burying our heads in the ground because the steps that we need to take to slow or stop climate change would be economically costly isn't going to make the problem go away; if anything it will make the problem more costly because the impacts of climate change will be even more severe.

These are widely accepted, mainstream predictions on the logical consequences of climate change. Whether climate change is going to result in considerable consequences for human civilization is not a subject of controversy among most scientists; what is a matter of debate is how severe those consequences will be.

Sources:

https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/education/

Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know by physicist Joseph Romm

Thank you. A lot of people just resort to insults and Gish Gallop in the global warming argument.
I truly am not worried about the consequences of global climate change. Some things will be bad and some things will be good. But change is inevitable, to me it makes a lot more sense to adapt to your environment instead of trying to change it.

When you got educated people like Stephen Hawking spewing absolute drivel that the Earth could turn in to Venus or insanity like reporters wanting to criminalize dissenting ideas you realize that they are desperate to advance their agenda.

Climate change has been politicized in order to push an agenda.

Now before you say 'you are talking conspiracy, it can't be a conspiracy because too many people would have to be in on it', think about this.

That is the beauty of it, it is not some globally coordinated conspiracy, There is NO ONE at the top of this conspiracy.

The scientists fudge the data and focus on the worse possible interpretations of the data because that is what keeps the grant money flowing.

The politicians focus on the negatives and scare tactics because it is very easy to manipulate people with fear. This insures a frightened voting block that they can count on to deliver them votes. Fear means votes


The media focuses on the worse possible outcome because sensationalism sells. Have you ever heard the news term "If it bleeds it Leads"?


And finally the globalists see it as an excellent way to redistribute wealth from the rich countries to the poorer ones, a form of world socialism.

No, all of these groups did not get together and conspire to invent a global warming hoax.

But each and every one of the groups above see global climate change as a means to an end. And people just gobble it up while failing to realize that there have always been doomsday prophets who have predicted the end of the world.

The difference is today's instant global communications has given them a voice that they would not have had a hundred years ago.

Edit added link