Why you assume that you’ll get banned for disagreeing?

Maybe you should have spent more time observing how things around here go before shooting off about how us conservatives seek to stifle dissent… or is that just because you’re used to spending time on liberal sites, where dissent actually ISN’T allowed.

Keep in mind that every transaction has two sides. In the absence of monopolies, and where the right to decline the transaction exists, the individual has considerable say in the matter. (And the government is a monopoly.)

Could there be a worse time in recent history to lead with

Please explain for me why you are more afraid of a democratically elected government, which ostensibly has your interests at heart, than you are afraid of big business, which does not even claim to have any altruistic motivation, and which (as the experience of the coal camps shows) can easily surpass government in its level of control over our day to day lives? We have long ago reached the point that the only entity which is sufficiently powerful to restrain the oligarchic tendencies of multi-national corporations is our federal government.

The government is altruistic? Show me a poor congressmen. And do you really believe in the notion that government and Big Business are at odds with one another? Tell that to the lobbyists. Regulation often benefits Big Business by creating barriers to entry (while costs get passed to consumers) or by creating demand where there would otherwise be none (e.g. GE).

I am simply suggesting that we need to set rules, to set limits, on what is acceptable conduct. The “market” won’t, as the “market” is concerned with increasing profits. Without rules…

We are not anarchists. No one is suggesting that we should do away with all rules. But as in a football game, rules should set the framework. All to often our governmental rules also dictate which plays must be called. (E.g. everyone has to buy insurance.) Of course rules where they create a common framework, promote transparency, prevent the transfer of risk to third parties, and prevent fraud have there place.

But picking winners, such as through the backstopping of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which passed the default risk onto the taxpayer and was one of the main culprits of the housing bubble, does more harm than good.

to state that my concern is FEAR of big government OR of big business. What is you know about Conservatives that makes you believe this is our argument. It is simply a false choice you give.

Big government is certainly not what I “fear” it is what was to be prevented by our Constitutionally limited form of government, that being a Republic; government BY the people FOR the people. The power federal that is currently being expanded by the Obama administration was never meant to happen and defies our Constitution.

As a nation, we live by the rule of law, not the rule of man. We do this by adhering to the established laws – especially the SUPREME law of the land, the Constitution – instead of willfully ignoring and circumventing it.

As far as your concern about what is or is not acceptable conduct, why don’t you just worry about your own instead of everyone else’s. What are you so afraid of?

1) Government as neutral referee is (usually) not a problem. Problems arise when government writes the rules to favor certain teams (lobbyists), when government unfairly enforces the rules (favoritism), or worst when it actually becomes a player as well as a referee (c.f. GM) or expels all the teams and decides it’s going to be the only team allow to play.

2) There’s nothing wrong with profit in a comptitive market – in fact, profit is what produces efficiency which benefit the people. Most cases of a structurally noncompetitive market (as opposed to temporary market dominance due to technical innovation) arise from collusion between Big Business and Big Government to rig the rule to prevent competition.

3) Or to put it another way, big government draws big money to influence the legislators, which produces corruption and diminishes freedom. This is why as today’s conservatives (former known as classical liberalism) we are distrustful of big government, because of the positive feedback towards tyranny once you cross a certain concentration of power point – in that small governmental units diffuses corruption and rigging and gives the mammals the space to outcompete the dinosaurs.

4) A major reason that I am on the conservative side of the divide is that the enormous complexity of our modern world and the almost unfathomable amount of information the needs to be exchanged to run society is best handled by having many decisions maker operating in free markets rather than a few decision-makers in charge – because 1) the information is too vast and 2) bad decisions are better mitigated when there are many to provide correction rather than few or no corrective mechanisms because you’ve centralize to a handful of frail humans.

So in brief, the cutthroat competition that you critique is the vast majority of times not the productive competition arising from free markets, but rather the destructive practices arising from a corrupt government tilting the playing field.

And as an aside, I think if your fairly look at the history of organized labor, you can see that as similar collusion with government has developed such that the unions are less involved with correcting injustice and more concerned with exercising political power and restricting access to jobs by those seeking to work.

So I think that there is some common ground in that we are distrustful of BIG. The disagreement comes from your demonizing “big business” while having a touching naivity towards the beneficience of “big government” (or “big labor”) whereas conservatives find refuge in the wisdom of many.

And I won’t waste your time or mine by repeating them. I will, however, add to them.

First, there is no such thing as institutionalized altruism. Adam Smith’s quote (“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest.”) is universally applicable, particularly in large-scale enterprises like federal and state government, and large corporations. This is particularly true when one considers that the government’s monopoly on force makes any action that it takes using that power, at best, morally ambiguous.

With that said, most conservatives and libertarians would concede the necessity (or at least, the utility) of regulation in an industrial society. What, then, separates classical liberals from their modern counterparts? Three things stand out: first, conservatives are much more confident in markets’ resiliency, and in some cases, don’t see the need to fix said externalities (see the transfat ban proposed by many progressives). The evolution of consumer desires over the past 200 years, the innovation that has occurred in free market systems, and the matching up of consumers’ desires and innovators concerning products as varied as automobiles, the internet, and the hundreds of thousands of products that are currently under the purview of the free market all indicate that this belief is not without foundation. Second, conservatives see regulation as a means to control for rent-seeking, assist in the dispersal of public goods, and a way to correct for (some) externalities. Liberals, OTOH, see it as a way to favor some market processes over others. a means to assert certain moral preferences, and in some cases, as a substitute for direct government control. Third (and of particular importance to American classical libs), conservatives believe that the majority of regulation should take place at the state and local levels.

In practice, it is common to see government officials use the power of regulation to reward friends and punish enemies. Because “friends” is more accurately defined as special interests who can aid in re-election, it follows that regulation tends to benefit the powerful and entrenched. That is why conservatives sometimes reflexively oppose regulation: it (as well as the tax code’s many special exemptions) is more often than not used for nefarious or problematic purposes, and oftentimes, the regulation that should be on the books isn’t there because of political unpopularity.