I guess we're very close politically, then. Most of your political points are about where I am. I haven't found a label, though. I don't consider myself a moderate, though, because I'm too much of an extremist. It's not that I'm middle-of-the-road, it's that I'm all over the map.
I generally call myself a "liberal with libertarian leanings."
I think part of the problem is that some of the identifying debates are intrinsically stupid. More technically, they're false or meaningless dichotomies. The classic example is "big government vs. small government". Personally, I think we should pick what we want our government to do, and the minimum amount of government necessary to achieve that aim to the specified levels of adequacy is how much government we should have! I think that becoming attached to a vague and relative idea like "big" or "small", as opposed to a more pragmatic standard of "enough to do the job and no more", is foolishness. And even more important than how much our government spends is whether we're maximizing the value of our tax dollars. I don't mind paying taxes that are well used to get maximum value for citizenry (I don't even have to be the direct beneficiary); but I don't like seeing my money squandered.
That's a very "conservative" viewpoint, theoretically, but it leads me away from standard conservative positions to more classically liberal positions. For instance, I think money spent on recidivism prevention is money well spent to the extent it succeed. It costs enough to capture, arrest, try, and punish a criminal once; heaven forfend we spend that money again. I find it so weird that that's considered a "bleeding-heart liberal" position. I don't support rehabilitation because I think it's nice or some high-fallutin' moral sentiment; I support it because crime is enormously expensive to society!
Perhaps I'm out of step with the norms here, but I've always understood "big government vs. small government" to be about the question of how much stuff the government should be administering. I think even most of the "big government" folks would agree that you want that government to be efficient (unless, y'know, it's your job that might get eliminated :-) ).
The problem there is that most people who invoke "small government" do so terribly insincerely -- nowadays, it's usually code for "the government should stop doing this thing I don't approve of". It's a perrennial tactic of the hard right these days, using the rhetoric of genuine Goldwater-school conservatism to accomplish very different goals.
Really, "small government" has mostly passed its prime as an organizing meme politically. It made sense when it was being contrasted with a relatively extreme 70s-Democrat statism, but only the most utterly hardcore leftists espouse that sort of thing nowadays. So without something real to balance against, the "small government" movement has largely been subverted. You have to read the code carefully.
To be fair, there are people are genuinely believe in Small Government Dammit. But they're almost all hardcore Libertarians at this point, not Republicans, and they're a fairly small fraction of the people using the rhetoric...
I generally call myself a "liberal with libertarian leanings."
Similarly, I could probably best be described as "conservative with libertarian leanings", but only in the traditional sense of "conservative", not the modern one. Socially I'm to the left of most Democrats; economically, I'm to the right of most Republicans. Unfortunately, I don't trust extremism in politics, and I find the Libertarian Party to mostly be loons.
Half the time I think this is a terribly lonely place to be. The other half, I suspect that most of the country is closer to where I'm standing than to either of the Big Name Parties...
(no subject)
I generally call myself a "liberal with libertarian leanings."
I think part of the problem is that some of the identifying debates are intrinsically stupid. More technically, they're false or meaningless dichotomies. The classic example is "big government vs. small government". Personally, I think we should pick what we want our government to do, and the minimum amount of government necessary to achieve that aim to the specified levels of adequacy is how much government we should have! I think that becoming attached to a vague and relative idea like "big" or "small", as opposed to a more pragmatic standard of "enough to do the job and no more", is foolishness. And even more important than how much our government spends is whether we're maximizing the value of our tax dollars. I don't mind paying taxes that are well used to get maximum value for citizenry (I don't even have to be the direct beneficiary); but I don't like seeing my money squandered.
That's a very "conservative" viewpoint, theoretically, but it leads me away from standard conservative positions to more classically liberal positions. For instance, I think money spent on recidivism prevention is money well spent to the extent it succeed. It costs enough to capture, arrest, try, and punish a criminal once; heaven forfend we spend that money again. I find it so weird that that's considered a "bleeding-heart liberal" position. I don't support rehabilitation because I think it's nice or some high-fallutin' moral sentiment; I support it because crime is enormously expensive to society!
(no subject)
(no subject)
Really, "small government" has mostly passed its prime as an organizing meme politically. It made sense when it was being contrasted with a relatively extreme 70s-Democrat statism, but only the most utterly hardcore leftists espouse that sort of thing nowadays. So without something real to balance against, the "small government" movement has largely been subverted. You have to read the code carefully.
To be fair, there are people are genuinely believe in Small Government Dammit. But they're almost all hardcore Libertarians at this point, not Republicans, and they're a fairly small fraction of the people using the rhetoric...
(no subject)
Similarly, I could probably best be described as "conservative with libertarian leanings", but only in the traditional sense of "conservative", not the modern one. Socially I'm to the left of most Democrats; economically, I'm to the right of most Republicans. Unfortunately, I don't trust extremism in politics, and I find the Libertarian Party to mostly be loons.
Half the time I think this is a terribly lonely place to be. The other half, I suspect that most of the country is closer to where I'm standing than to either of the Big Name Parties...