The nature of the difference between Liberals and Conservatives often comes down to how the two interpret ideas and the world at large. The paragraph that follows, written by by Dr Adrian Rogers, provides an opportunity to illustrate that
difference. It was posted on a ultra-right Conservative Facebook page
as a "profound little paragraph" about why Conservatives think
Socialists and Liberals are crazy or stupid or both.
But if we go through it, sentence by sentence, we can see how a Liberal could have written the very same paragraph yet intended something very different. It is an example, in other words, of two people looking at the same thing but seeing two very different things, thanks to the different bias they use to interpret it. Here is the paragraph:
So now let us unpack what I think Dr Rogers means with each sentence, and how that is different from what a Liberal would think or mean by the same sentence.
(1)"You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom.”
CON: Meaning, you cannot make the poor wealthy by taxing the wealthy into poverty. Although not always, in this sentence, the Conservative generally equates "freedom” with “money.”
LIB: Then what the hell was the 13th Amendment all about? After all, the Civil War was fought to deprive "wealthy" plantation owners of their "freedom" to make fortunes from their slaves.
(2) What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.
LIB: Meaning, to allow the rich live the life of leisure (read Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class) while accumulating unprecedented wealth from the work of those they employ, is to agree that the lions share of the fortunes accumulated by the work of enslaved mice, belongs first and foremost to the fat cat who either thought up the idea or funded it’s development. It just so happens that, much of the time, both the inventor and the funding came initially from the public sector (i.e. the taxes imposed on the mice), as is the case with a lot of pharmaceuticals, the internet and all of the components of the iPhone, to name just a few examples.
In this respect, the "free market" amounts to selling those publicly funded and developed technologies to the private sector for pennies on the dollar, so that the mice pay to develop what the fat cat buys on the cheap and sells back to them at a profit. And all because only the private sector can be trusted to sell an Apple better than a serpent.
(3)The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government cannot first take from somebody else.
CON: Meaning, government can only give assistance to people who don't work, by legally robbing those that do, through taxation.
As is the case in all of these sentences, the CON sees them self as the victim of the poor, whom the government only enables out of a misplaced sense of altruism, by endeavoring to assist. That assistance, as the CON sees it, only encourages the unemployed to be increasingly more indolent. Hence, this perspective casts employment as the highest virtue while unemployment is seen as the greatest vice, even though the wealthiest of all are all "unemployed" as well, living instead off of the investments and the sweat of others.
LIB: This is true, since the government is what gave slave owners their slaves, by first taking away from Africans who had been kidnapped their humanity (which only encouraged all the more kidnapping), and took from Native Americans the land it demands Americans today must pay it taxes to occupy.
(4) When half of the people get the idea that they do not need to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because
somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation.
CON: For Cons, this claim means that a nation is moribund when the half of the population that doesn't work thinks it can depend for its subsistence on the half that does, by simply getting gov't to redistribute income via taxation and welfare programs. It also means that those who do work will eventually decide to stop working, since their pockets are being picked by gov't to take care of all those who are too lazy to have a job.
LIB: When Jay Gould said he could hire half of the working class to murder the other half, he was evincing just how much this sentence is used to divide and control, by convincing people they always belong to that "half" of the population that has the political power to rob the other half of their hard earned income.
But if we go through it, sentence by sentence, we can see how a Liberal could have written the very same paragraph yet intended something very different. It is an example, in other words, of two people looking at the same thing but seeing two very different things, thanks to the different bias they use to interpret it. Here is the paragraph:
You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy our
of freedom What one persons receives without working for, another person must
work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that
the government cannot first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not need to work
because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half
gets the idea that it does no go to work because somebody else is going to get
what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it."
So now let us unpack what I think Dr Rogers means with each sentence, and how that is different from what a Liberal would think or mean by the same sentence.
(1)"You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom.”
CON: Meaning, you cannot make the poor wealthy by taxing the wealthy into poverty. Although not always, in this sentence, the Conservative generally equates "freedom” with “money.”
LIB: Then what the hell was the 13th Amendment all about? After all, the Civil War was fought to deprive "wealthy" plantation owners of their "freedom" to make fortunes from their slaves.
(2) What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.
CON:
Meaning, to provide the poor with welfare is to rob the hard working middle
class of the wages they worked so hard for.
LIB: Meaning, to allow the rich live the life of leisure (read Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class) while accumulating unprecedented wealth from the work of those they employ, is to agree that the lions share of the fortunes accumulated by the work of enslaved mice, belongs first and foremost to the fat cat who either thought up the idea or funded it’s development. It just so happens that, much of the time, both the inventor and the funding came initially from the public sector (i.e. the taxes imposed on the mice), as is the case with a lot of pharmaceuticals, the internet and all of the components of the iPhone, to name just a few examples.
In this respect, the "free market" amounts to selling those publicly funded and developed technologies to the private sector for pennies on the dollar, so that the mice pay to develop what the fat cat buys on the cheap and sells back to them at a profit. And all because only the private sector can be trusted to sell an Apple better than a serpent.
(3)The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government cannot first take from somebody else.
CON: Meaning, government can only give assistance to people who don't work, by legally robbing those that do, through taxation.
As is the case in all of these sentences, the CON sees them self as the victim of the poor, whom the government only enables out of a misplaced sense of altruism, by endeavoring to assist. That assistance, as the CON sees it, only encourages the unemployed to be increasingly more indolent. Hence, this perspective casts employment as the highest virtue while unemployment is seen as the greatest vice, even though the wealthiest of all are all "unemployed" as well, living instead off of the investments and the sweat of others.
LIB: This is true, since the government is what gave slave owners their slaves, by first taking away from Africans who had been kidnapped their humanity (which only encouraged all the more kidnapping), and took from Native Americans the land it demands Americans today must pay it taxes to occupy.
(4) When half of the people get the idea that they do not need to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because
somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation.
CON: For Cons, this claim means that a nation is moribund when the half of the population that doesn't work thinks it can depend for its subsistence on the half that does, by simply getting gov't to redistribute income via taxation and welfare programs. It also means that those who do work will eventually decide to stop working, since their pockets are being picked by gov't to take care of all those who are too lazy to have a job.
LIB: When Jay Gould said he could hire half of the working class to murder the other half, he was evincing just how much this sentence is used to divide and control, by convincing people they always belong to that "half" of the population that has the political power to rob the other half of their hard earned income.
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