“Any man who is not a progressive at twenty has no heart, and any man who is not a conservative at forty has no head.” Attributed to A.E. Housman.

That’s a bogus quote of course, as are most quotes that fit current events a little too neatly. But it sums up my predicament exactly. I am a reluctant liberal.



I don’t believe in the massive redistribution of wealth. I believe people are lazy, and that given a choice, many will not work. I am passionate about work. People are not lions. We were not engineered to lay around 22 hours a day. We are built to do stuff, and feel better when we do it. I believe that the greatest positive of the Great Society is that we have essentially eliminated extreme poverty—at least in the sense that people were poor in South Carolina in the fifties, living in unheated shacks without electricity or running water, and eating dirt to eliminate stomach cramps when food was short. I believe the greatest negatives of those same social programs are that they create multi-generational welfare, and young people of all colors who do not know how to get a job, how to keep a job, or the delightful feelings of accomplishment and freedom that work provides.

I don’t believe in government intervention in the economy. I believe markets are by far the most effective way to allocate resources. I think that every example of government intervention, from Japan’s MITI to the extraordinary levels of protectionism and subsidies we currently afford our farm sector, has produced disastrous unintended results. Bureaucrats moving around someone else’s money simply do not do as well as greedy entrepreneurs moving around their own. While there are a few problems that do not lend themselves to market solutions, like environmental protection, care of the mentally ill and universal telecommunications, they are the exception not the rule.

I believe business has gotten a bad and unfair rap. I secretly both look down and feel pity for those who work in academia and government, and complete disdain for those who hide in not-for-profits rather than getting a “real job.” I think we are over-taxed in some areas, and that many of our institutions are bloated and should be gutted, like state universities.

I believe in fiscal soundness. I do not think accelerating future consumption through the use of debt is a good idea. I believe unions have outlived their usefulness. I believe in marriage and the family as a central unit of society. I don’t do drugs. I don’t care about animal rights. I don’t want America to be like Europe, in any way shape or form. I think we need to give up on gun control. I think most, if not all, affirmative action programs should be phased out over time. I believe that racism and bigotry is just as prevalent in minorities as it is in white people, and wish Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton would just shut the fuck up.

I think policies to protect people from themselves are paternalistic and obnoxious. I believe liberals are patronizing, meddlesome, pessimistic, and naïve. Much of their logic is woolly minded nonsense, Kumbaya writ large. I believe many liberal policies, like carbon emissions markets, would simply result in shipping toxins to poor third world countries, at best, and would create a worldwide depression at worst. I have a lot more in common with Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul than I ever will with Barack Obama.

And I will never vote Republican as long as I live.

The reason is simple. I believe the solutions espoused by conservatives are worse. And what’s more, conservatives themselves are mean-spirited hypocrites.

While conservatives pay lip service to believing in market principles, in practice they are quick to reach for bail outs when their policies don’t work, whether it is banks in 2008 or auto makers in 1979. They are also quick to finagle subsidies, both overt (the nuclear industry) and discreet (the aerospace industry,) and to lobby for tax loopholes so they do not pay anything like their fair share.

In the same way, conservatives argue against affirmative action and for merit, merit defined as starting life on an equal footing except for the advantages provided by education, health and diet, an inheritance and access to legacy admissions at the best colleges. If conservatives really believe in merit, why don’t they argue for a 100% inheritance tax, so we all start at exactly the same place? Then we can see just how good the little Murdochs would be without the benefit of a family fortune built up over ten generations.

Conservatives argue against deficit spending, but not for cuts in defense or higher taxes, both of which are essential to achieving a balanced budget. (Indeed, it is hypocrisy to even call the multiple expeditionary wars in which we are now engaged defense. They are hybrid religious crusades and freebooting expeditions for oil.)

Conservatives are against government intervention in people’s lives, except for telling them what to read and listen to, how to think, how to live, who to have sex with and how to raise their children. Conservatives portray themselves as logical, fact-based, and eminently practical, in contrast to those silly liberals with their foolish pie-in-the-sky economic ideas. That’s hypocritical nonsense. Liberals are little wobbly on economics, yes, but conservatives are downright batty on science. Tennessee is about to pass a law allowing science teachers to tell students that evolution, climate change and the like aren’t true.

Yes, liberals over-complicate things. But conservatives over-simplify.

Most of all, liberalism is based on concern for one’s fellow humans. Sometimes that concern is patronizing and misplaced. Often it is meddlesome. Sometimes the math doesn’t quite work. But it is well-intended. Conservatism is based on concern for one’s own and a nasty antipathy to all who are different. I realize it is a basic human instinct to be tribal, to want to protect our own and eradicate those unlike us. Liberals recognize and fight that instinct. Conservatives revel in it, passing horrible laws like Stand Your Ground, which allows open season on kids like Trayvon Martin.

Extreme liberalism takes societies to a bad place. Liberal economics create inefficiencies and decrease productivity. Conservative economies create giant games of Monopoly, where a few families end up with all the wealth, which they use to create unfair rules to concentrate even more wealth in the family. Liberal economies end up like England in the sixties: Stagnant, frayed around the edges, and suffering brain drain. But conservatism, taken to its extreme, makes countries end up like Paraguay, fearful police states with crony capitalism and endemic poverty and pollution. Yes, Cuba is bad, but it’s certainly no worse than Paraguay.

I am a six one WASP male with a blue chip education. Most people assume I am a conservative. But they are wrong.

Because at the end of the day, I would rather be well-intended and imperfect than a nasty and imperfect.