AMERICAN CONSERVATISM IN 2008 AND BEYOND

Sleep well. I am sorry I don't think what liberals and conservatives eat or drink is particularly funny, Jack. By the way, was I supposed to be impressed that liberals more often drink beer and wine?

No. Are you? Why?

What an utterly silly crock of ****.

Do you really believe this tripe?

1.) One night A's?
2.) How she managed to "hold" a degree in a subject (journalism) she never seems to have taken a course in?

The media is not liberal.

Continuing from your 24 July post:

I have never known a politically conservative woman who bakes bread. About 85% of the liberal women I have known bake bread in a range from occasionally to full-time.

The more conservative a woman, the more apt she is to rely on canned goods.

This is clearly true. Have you ever met a media figure who baked bread?

I used to know a disc jockey that raised and harvested his own wheat. I think he made a muffin out of it.

This is conservatism in America:

http://www.care2.com/causes/cain-if-you-arent-rich-you-have-yourself-to-blame.html

Well, whaddaya know?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/21/fox-news-viewers-less-informed-people-fairleigh-dickinson_n_1106305.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000009

http://watch.pair.com/rockefeller.html

Has mitt lost it?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=AR4uMW84GkY

Researching Friedrich Hayek, whose book The Road to Serfdom, inspired Margaret Thatcher:

The Road to Serfdom (from wiki)

Hayek was concerned about the general view in Britain's academia that fascism was a capitalist reaction against socialism and The Road to Serfdom arose from those concerns. It was written between 1940 and 1943. The title was inspired by the French classical liberal thinker Alexis de Tocqueville's writings on the "road to servitude".

It was first published in Britain by Routledge in March 1944 and was quite popular, leading Hayek to call it "that unobtainable book," also due in part to wartime paper rationing. When it was published in the United States by the University of Chicago in September of that year, it achieved greater popularity than in Britain.

At the arrangement of editor Max Eastman, the American magazine Reader's Digest also published an abridged version in April 1945, enabling The Road to Serfdom to reach a far wider audience than academics.

The libertarian economist Walter Block has observed critically that while The Road to Serfdom is "a war cry against central planning," it offers lukewarm support for a free market system and laissez-faire capitalism, with Hayek even going so far as to say that "probably nothing has done so much harm to the liberal cause as the wooden insistence of some liberals on certain rules of thumb, above all of the principle of laissez-faire capitalism".

In the book, Hayek writes that the government has a role to play in the economy through the monetary system, work-hours regulation, and institutions for the flow of proper information. These are contentions associated with the point of view of ordoliberalism. Through analysis of this and many other of Hayek's works, Block asserts that: "in making the case against socialism, Hayek was led into making all sort of compromises with what otherwise appeared to be his own philosophical perspective—so much so, that if a system was erected on the basis of them, it would not differ too sharply from what this author explicitly opposed."

A focus on the effect his book had on Thatcher, then through Reagan, on the US:

n February 1975 Margaret Thatcher was elected leader of the British Conservative Party. The Institute of Economic Affairs arranged a meeting between Hayek and Thatcher in London soon after. During Thatcher's only visit to the Conservative Research Department in the summer of 1975, a speaker had prepared a paper on why the "middle way" was the pragmatic path the Conservative Party should take, avoiding the extremes of left and right. Before he had finished, Thatcher "reached into her briefcase and took out a book. It was Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty. Interrupting our pragmatist, she held the book up for all of us to see. 'This', she said sternly, 'is what we believe', and banged Hayek down on the table".

In 1977 Hayek was critical of the Lib-Lab pact, in which the British Liberal Party agreed to keep the British Labour government in office. Writing to The Times, Hayek said: "May one who has devoted a large part of his life to the study of the history and the principles of liberalism point out that a party that keeps a socialist government in power has lost all title to the name 'Liberal'. Certainly no liberal can in future vote 'Liberal'."

Hayek was criticised by Liberal politicians Lord Gladwyn and Andrew Phillips, who both claimed that the purpose of the pact was to discourage socialist legislation. Lord Gladwyn pointed out that the German Free Democrats were in coalition with the German Social Democrats.

Hayek was defended by Professor Antony Flew who stated that the German Social Democrats, unlike the British Labour Party, had since the late 1950s abandoned public ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange and had instead embraced the social market economy.

In 1978 Hayek came into conflict with the Liberal Party leader David Steel who claimed that liberty was only possible with "social justice and an equitable distribution of wealth and power, which in turn require a degree of active government intervention" and that the Conservative Party were more concerned with the connection between liberty and private enterprise than between liberty and democracy. Hayek claimed that a limited democracy might be better than other forms of limited government at protecting liberty but that an unlimited democracy was worse than other forms of unlimited government because "its government loses the power even to do what it thinks right if any group on which its majority depends thinks otherwise". Hayek stated that if the Conservative leader had said "that free choice is to be exercised more in the market place than in the ballot box, she has merely uttered the truism that the first is indispensable for individual freedom while the second is not: free choice can at least exist under a dictatorship that can limit itself but not under the government of an unlimited democracy which cannot".


Ronald Reagan at his time listed Hayek as among the 2 or 3 people who most influenced his philosophy, and welcomed Hayek to the White House as a special guest.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the writings of Hayek were also a major influence on many of the leaders of the "velvet" revolution in Central Europe during the collapse of the old Soviet Empire.

Here are some supporting examples:
There is no figure who had more of an influence, no person had more of an influence on the intellectuals behind the Iron Curtain than Friedrich Hayek. His books were translated and published by the underground and black market editions, read widely, and undoubtedly influenced the climate of opinion that ultimately brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union.
—Milton Friedman* (Hoover Institution)

The most interesting among the courageous dissenters of the 1980s were the classical liberals, disciples of F. A. Hayek, from whom they had learned about the crucial importance of economic freedom and about the often-ignored conceptual difference between liberalism and democracy.
—Andrzej Walicki (History, Notre Dame)

Estonian Prime Minister Mart Laar came to my office the other day to recount his country’s remarkable transformation. He described a nation of people who are harder-working, more virtuous — yes, more virtuous, because the market punishes immorality — and more hopeful about the future than they’ve ever been in their history. I asked Mr. Laar where his government got the idea for these reforms. Do you know what he replied? He said, "We read Milton Friedman and F. A. Hayek."
—U.S. Representative Dick Armey

I was 25 years old and pursuing my doctorate in economics when I was allowed to spend six months of post-graduate studies in Naples, Italy. I read the Western economic textbooks and also the more general work of people like Hayek. By the time I returned to Czechoslovakia, I had an understanding of the principles of the market. In 1968, I was glad at the political liberalism of the Dubcek Prague Spring, but was very critical of the Third Way they pursued in economics.
—Vaclav Klaus (President of the Czech Republic)


Plainoldme's notes:

Hayek was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics which he shared with Gunnar Myrdal. It was Hayek's belief that the Nobel committee wanted to balance Hayek's politcs with Myrdal's.

I chuckle over the quote Dick Armey supplied. The market AWARDS immorality, as we have seen here in the US.

Thank you for sharing.

He seems quite fond of Obama.

Yeah, the dubbing is almost perfect.

How many freaking years do I have to keep hearing about the fictitious "War on Christmas?" This **** all started during the Bush years because we elected a retarded evangelical Christian and suddenly the super religious minority became very loud and very powerful. The same people who made "liberal" a dirty word have made "political correctness" akin to murdering babies. Being PC means not being an asshole to others, something conservatives actively reject out of "tradition."

http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/742938/gop_eager_to_squelch_student_voters/#paragraph3