Differentiate between librealism and conservatism?
Answers
Conservatives:
Conservatives think that people should be free to succeed and fail according to their own actions and choices. They think with free schooling, subsidized housing, college scholarships, medicaid, and the many other services provided by the government that anybody can become successful if they work hard enough. Furthermore, they think successful people have mostly earned their success and should reap the benefits without being overly burdened by taxes. They are huge proponents of personal responsibility, and that irresponsible people deserve whatever comes to them.
Conservatives are also hesitant to upend what they see as many millennia of human beings living a certain way. Some (not all) see transgenderism, homosexuality, and an increase of alternative lifestyles and atheism as threatening to rapidly alter what society looks like in just a few generations. They ask for more time to understand the impact of uncertain social experiments, such as putting supposed transgendered children on puberty blockers.
Finally, conservatives believe that the greatest good we can do for future generations is to ensure that they have a stable and solvent government. They are aggressive about reducing spending wherever possible in order to minimize deficits. They are very wary of big government programs like guaranteed healthcare and college education, because they know that those are like worms you can’t put back into the can. Once you give people a government service, it becomes political suicide to take away (see the political posturing about repealing Obamacare). Because of this, they are in favor of implementing (or at least test-driving) new initiatives on the communal, local, or state levels before giving even more power to an already massive federal bureaucracy.
Liberals :-
Liberals believe that there are societal forces at work that make opportunities fundamentally unequal for certain classes of people. For instance, a student who has to work a job to support his family and goes hungry every night can’t reasonably be expected to make the grades to get into an Ivy league school. Yes, it is physically possible, but he has fundamentally different opportunities than a student in a stable middle-class family. Liberals strive for equality of opportunity for all people. Some (not all) strive for equality of results as well in an attempt to accelerate societal change (see the debate about affirmative action).
Liberals push for the free exercise of rights for all people. They define many rights that they see as self-evident even if they are not explicitly written out in the founding documents of the US. In fact, this was one of the primary debates about the Bill of Rights in the late 1700’s: if we tell people what rights they have, are we presuming that they don’t have additional rights? For liberals, people should be free to live their lives and do with their bodies whatever they want, regardless of greater societal impacts. Any suppression of these rights is a form of tyranny.
Liberals believe that the free market is insufficient for providing certain needs. National defense, obviously, should not be privatized, but liberals also believe that education, incarceration, roads, and environmental protections are incompatible with market competition and need to be handled by the government. They believe that basic healthcare, basic education, and a baseline standard of living should be guaranteed in a modern 1st world nation.
