OddThoughts

Lately, I’ve decided to look a little into politics and trying to figure it out. In particular I am becoming confused with some economic theories and political views.

First I had to learn about some basic ideas regarding ideas around equality.

Equality of Opportunity (Equal Opportunity) -> This is the situation in which every person in a society is considered to have an equal chance. This might be equal access to education, employment, income. Economically speaking, it means that everyone has an equal chance to earn a wage. Those that earn more then others are considered to take better advantage of their opportunity then others.

Equality of Outcome -> This is a situation in which every person in a society is gaurteened a ‘bare minimum’. Economically speaking, this is the idea of a bare minimum income level upon which to survive. Typically this is done by setting different tax levels to different income levels and re-distributing wealth. This type of taxation is known as progressive taxation.

Now let’s define the political parties:

Liberal (Democrat) -> The economic policy of a liberal is to strike a reasonable balance between Equality Of Opportunity and Equality of Outcome. In general, one would expect a liberal platform to include more spending in areas of social welfare to increase the well being of everyone in the society.

Conservative (Republican)-> The economic policy favors Equality of Opportunity over Equality of Outcome. From an economic point of view, one would expect conservator policies to move away from taking taxes to pay for social activates and possible including reducing (or cutting out altogether) spending tax money on social programs.

But here is where things start to get complicated, it’s not a black and white thing. Conservatives have many other views then economic ideologies. For example, a conservative would favor preservation of culture, heritage, religion. Though the specific questions of what things we should preserve and what things should be “thrown out” would differ from conservative to conservative making a defection hard to define.

From an economic point of view, there is a another term known as “Libertarianism“. Although it shares the same “liberal” root word. It is in fact, closer to a conservative economic point of view. At the far end of the spectrum, the libertarian view states that the only taxes that should be collected are for protection (e.g.: Military & Police). Taxes for social programs are ‘unjust’ because they basically force people to make charitable donations against their will.

So this is why I’m confused, conserviates are liberatrian? shouldn’t the liberals be liberatarian?