Quick note on politics

Ok, so I've always tried desperately to to avoid talking politics on this blog. I used to have a political blog, and it just stopped being interesting to me.

However, in the post below, I got on a slightly political tangent, and now I think I need to clarify my political position, so here it is:

I consider myself to be a sort of conservative, but I feel the modern "conservative movement" has been nothing less than a national disaster.

1. The "religious conservatives" in the movement are radicals. They wish to rewrite American history and American law to build a fundamentalist state. It seems quite the opposite of "conservative" to make such radical changes.... Furthermore, it is far from libertarian and anti-governmental to have such government involvement in religion.

2. The Republicans have created the most aggressive redistribution of wealth in human history-- in the upward direction. Far from capitalism, the economic platform of the Republican party is Corporate Mercantilism, (better known as fascism, though that word is now defined as "not the US.") Capitalism is the absence of government involvemnt, corporations and monopoly. The Republican party favors a strong concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, and the government construction of strong corporations and monopolies as an instrument of stability and security. This is not capitalism and it is not conservative.

My earnestly conservative opinion would favor returning to a more capitalist model, getting the government out of peoples lives, eliminate deficit spending and avoid non-humanitarian "nation building" which is almost always simple exploitation. Here is a Libertarian party idea (VERY CONSERVATIVE!) that I love: Replace welfare and all non-education social programs with a $10,000/ year check for life for every citizen. This includes ending corporate welfare, right down to tax payer subsidies of the business costs. Corporations make bigger demands on our infrastructure, pollute more, use more resources and create fewer jobs than small business. If they were forced to pay the true costs of their business, they wouldn't be able to compete with small localized economies. Returning to a more capitalist model would create more jobs, keep wealth local, reduce tax payer burden, keep prices lower and clean up the environment in one shot. On the personal side, it would encourage people to act more responsibly and save their government checks or at least spend them wisely.

So in some ways I'm quite conservative. At the same time, I'm not an unseeing ideologue: For example, I believe in increasing education spending, as it's an important investment in our nations future. And though the conservative in me likes a strong military as a deterrent, our current military spending is mostly a wealth redistribution scheme- giving tax payer money to corporations with little practical return. How much firepower do we need to deter other nations from an unprovoked attack? Enough to destroy the whole world 100 times? 1000? What the heck? I think once you reach the whole "destroy the world 100 times over" line, there isn't a country on the planet that would attack us without there being a reason worth dying for. From that point, the best defense is a foreign policy that doesn't give people a cause to die for-- and right now we're losing on that point!

So current movement conservatives make me into a radical... but who are the real radicals? And that's where I stand.