You Might Be a Conservative If...

When I have had conversations with many, many liberals, one thing usually strikes me. Many of them don't really truly understand what conservatives believe in and stand for, and many of them agree more with conservative stances than disagree with them.

One word you often notice I use is perspective. And it is a pretty important thing to have since it allows you to see a bit beyond a simple talking point.

It has been said that one big difference between a conservative and a liberal is that a liberal only requires a bumper sticker to get his point across while a conservative actually thinks things through and requires a longer explanation.

When one can expand on a thought or idea, many times it tends to make a bit more sense and allows one to better see problems within a blanket statement.

Take one example. A liberal might say, "An employee should be paid a living wage." The simple fact is that while conservatives are against a minimum wage, we are actually for a living wage. We just have different ideas about how you accomplish these things so that everyone benefits from it.

Employee and employer.

As such, in having this discussion I thought it might be a little fun to incorporate a play on "You might be a redneck if," made famous by comedian Jeff Foxworthy and use it to expand on simple conservative values that many liberals probably actually would agree with.

...you believe in progress and change.

Contrary to popular belief, while conservatives are indeed more traditional than liberals, conservatives are not opposed to progress and change. The difference is really in how conservatives tackle these things compared to liberals.

In other words, change by itself is not necessarily good. It has to be change that is carefully thought through and carried out. Otherwise, it serves no one and can actually muck things up.

Change for the better requires a discussion and a meeting of the minds to consider all of the impacts of a simple idea. Thinking things through is vitally important to making change that actually works and that will have a successful and meaningful outcome.

Both a liberal and a conservative might have a simple idea for example. "Kill the enemy." How one kills the enemy, though, determines the outcome of accomplishing that goal successfully and with the least amount of impact on the troops.

A liberal might say, "Just start shooting," assuming that the more bullets flying through the air means more dead enemies and a successful attack. On the flip side a conservative will discuss a potential problem with this idea. "If we just start shooting, we will give up our location and provide an advantage to the enemy."

This question of the simple idea offers a deeper sense of what the impact might be of simply going in with guns blazing. And when we think the idea through, what we come up with is a better plan that saves troop's lives and kills more enemies and actually achieves the goal.

Wanting for change is the same on both sides. But it absolutely depends on how you go about that change that determines whether or not that change does anyone any good.

...you want everyone to achieve a living wage.

Again, it is a misnomer that conservatives do not want people to earn a living wage. The difference is in the discussion of how we accomplish it, just like it was in the discussion of how we kill more enemies and lose less troops in the process.

Conservatives, of course, believe in the free market. And that principle applies as well to the jobs market. In the free market principle, competition is good. Competition is also good when it comes to jobs. Competition makes people work harder to achieve something positive and good that everyone benefits from.

In order to lift wages all a liberal considers is forcing an employer to adhere to a number they decide. They do not consider the impact of that simple idea. On the flip side, the conservative wants to achieve the same goal. But they ask a question to determine how best to actually achieve this.

"How can we create an environment wherein wages are lifted naturally, which is caused by the success that environment affords?"

This is where many tenets of conservative thought come into play here. Lower taxes and less regulation for example, which frees businesses up to conduct business according to what is best for the business, rather than having them focus on compliance and raising their costs of conducting business.

The freer a business is to operate, the more business they will be able to generate, the more people they will need to get the job done which creates more competition in the workforce to hire and retain quality employees—when businesses are competing for manpower, they will naturally offer more benefits and wages to sweeten the deal and keep the business growing and successful.

Everyone succeeds together. The employee and the employer.

When a business is forced to pay a wage that is determined outside of their natural processes, it forces them to make decisions to accommodate the wage instead of making decisions that are best for the business, and often times this simply results in businesses having to pull back from expansion and thereby require less employees.

Again, both conservatives and liberals want the same thing. We just don't want to go in with guns blazing and give up our position. Raising wages through the free market and by creating competition and fostering an environment conducive to higher wages will employ more people and leave less people on the bread line to make up the difference between higher wages paid because the success of the business warrants it vs. being forced to pay what someone tells them they must pay regardless of the success of the business.

...in conclusion.

I could cite many examples, but in doing so this could get rather long and I would more likely lose your attention than accomplish my goal of expanding your perspective on these concepts and issues.

As a conservative I have thought through my simple idea of promoting an idea and how to best achieve that.

Again, thinking things through is what is important. It is something often times liberals simply miss the boat on. And that is not meant to be a diss on liberals, but rather a simple observation.

In a final example I will remind everyone of another simple idea. "Everyone should have the opportunity to own a home." And of course, to anyone this sounds like a wonderful idea. Why shouldn't everyone be able to own a home?

The problem is that not everyone can actually afford to own a home. The recent housing crash of 2008 taught us that. Liberals ran with that simple idea with guns blazing and opened the floodgates for people to achieve that goal. The entire idea came crashing down, destroying lives, leaving more people homeless and wreaking havoc on the entire financial markets and lead to a deep recession that impacted even more lives following it.

Had more thought been put into it to determine how we could create an environment for people to achieve this goal through natural processes, perhaps the entire idea would have actually worked and more people would have, as a result, actually been able to afford their homes.

We all want the same things. Liberal? Conservative? We really do. Granted, there are greater schisms on different issues. Pro-life vs. pro-choice for example. But when it comes to the basic social order of things, we are really not all that much different.

Between liberals and conservatives, the goal should be to sit down and talk about things and be able to process a plan that actually works. A plan that is centered on the same idea, but that is thought through in a way that the idea can actually become a reality and be successful.

Imagine a world in which we have great ideas that serve the better good for all people, but that are not simply executed on the idea. But rather, executed on a plan that makes them actually possible.

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