(Untitled)

[hebrewhammer777]

This is entry 2 of 3 for today. Jonah Goldberg's tribute to William F. Buckley, Jr. on the latter's 80th birthday and 50th anniversary of National Review proves to be an invaluable abbreviated history of the American conservative movement. I suggest reading the whole thing, but for those of you who want only the meat, I've extracted a few choice

Comments

[babzen]

Couldn't big business be a tiger that Conservatives like to tickle? But I guess we can trust Enron to do the right thing....

capitalism

[hebrewhammer777]

Conservatives don't believe that the market is perfect, only that capitalism the best of all economic systems (sort of like democracy is the worst form of government... except for every other kind). We don't trust every capitalist just because we trust the capitalist system to produce the most efficient economy possible. Even the most libertarian of conservatives believe that the government has the duty to protect its citizens from force and fraud. When jerks like the thieves at Enron cheat the system, the government must take every step to punish them and discourage others from doing the same.

Btw, National Review has recently been advocating the end of corporate welfare. In fact, they've never been in favor of it; they are recently advocating its end because the budget crisis is providing an opportunity to cut programs and that's an area where liberals and conservatives should agree.

[dessieoctavia]

Perhaps this dynamic is why liberalism took so long to manifest itself. Its most exuberant adherents kept getting eaten by tigers (which, by the way, is a metaphor for millennia of trial and error, mostly error).

Recently commonreader pointed out that modern childrearing, which involves a lot of leaving the baby in a crib or something, unattended, instead of being held by a human, was only possible because of "the lack of lions in the typical Western household".

This showed me the answer to the whole problem of civilization: We need more lions. And tigers too.