Why Informed Conservative?

How did I come up with the name? Well I hope your not expecting a good answer, I mean have you ever tried to name a blog? It isn’t as easy as it sounds. Eventually I settled on something that I believe has meaning.

 

Conservatism is one of the few movements that can be traced back in history and found to have a start date.

In 1790 the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (British Spelling) wrote Reflections on the Revolution In France which was a criticism of the French Revolutions uprooting of traditionally stabilizing elements in French society and thereby ignoring the general human condition. Anyone with a basic knowledge of European history (or has used a guillotine style paper cutter) knows that he was correct.

So the Informed Conservative name does its best to recall that conservatism was originally a small intellectual movement. It is not, as some people believe, an endorsement by me of the Republican party (of which I am not registered to). A lot of my writing is a response, to what I feel, has become the generally uninformed or misinformed status of the general population as represented in their extremes by the Tea party and Occupy. Often they are unaware of the true facts beyond idealized facts, manipulated statements and general misinformed.

To the Tea party and their hate for the federal government: You don’t seem so upset when some of the pork barrel spending comes to you town. Perhaps you also weren’t aware that state, local and municipality governments spend considerably more then the federal government when you don’t factor in entitlement programs?

To the Occupy protesters and their anti-capitalist views: Is that $4 Starbucks latte (actually saw this one happen) and Patagonia tent keeping you warm so far?

The mainstream media often only propagates this problem with lack of resources and careless, often incorrect, statement of facts as it is (generally) what their viewer base demands (otherwise explain Glen Beck, I dare you to try).

 

Here are some examples:

Facts:

America has little major manufacturing left.

China owns the majority of US Treasury Debt.

 

The Truth?

While the US has lost its middle skilled manufacturing base (the one that Germany so covets) it still has a large highly skilled (Boeing, defense companies) and low skilled base. The loss of the middle is probably partly responsible for our skewed income distributions, but that is a different issue. The United States still produces a very large amount of items, this is declining not because of corporate greed but because of laws that make domestic manufacturing incredibly uncompetitive (Sorry GM, more healthcare then steel dollars in a car is not a good thing. Remember who went bankrupt when they were the number one car seller in the world? That’s right, you).

On the second issue, the facts are just misleading. While China owns a large chunk of U.S. Debt, it is no means the majority and is near the amount that Japan owns. Could China use this as leverage? Maybe, but it certainly isn’t a weapon. What would they do, sell them all the crash the U.S. bond yield? I’m sure that would annoy a lot of people, but it certainly would not majorly harm the United States (especially when you factor in the proceeds from all the coffee that the people at the Fed would have to drink over the months it took them to fix the problem).

The problems come when our lawmakers believe such fallacies or people elect lawmakers who do not truly know the facts. It is with this in mind that the blog has been named Informed Conservative. It is not here to represent conservatism based on traditional values or old ideas, but caution and clarity in moving the country forward by making more informed decisions and take the facts into consideration. Do you really see the way forward being ten thousand page bills in legal language?