Conservatives champion people with money and corporations with money. Liberals champion people with little or no money.
Among the major areas of contention between conservatives and liberals are policies on taxes, regulation, campaign finance and globalization.
TAX POLICY
President Bush makes clear the conservative approach to tax policy: tax cuts. How can you get the economy moving again? Tax cuts. How do you reduce the huge American deficits? Tax cuts. How can you end the war in Iraq that is hemorrhaging $4 billion a month? Tax cuts.
Maybe he hasn't recommended the last item, but sometimes I get the feeling he may.
Conservatives believe in small government, the type of government that will allow business to do whatever it pleases - laissez faire. The old invisible hand will make sure that though businesses are run for selfish reasons, the net result would be good for everybody.
Ken Lay? Erratic situation. Bernie Ebbers? Not typical. Scams and frauds? Business can police itself. Conservatives are so inbued with their laissez faire philosophy, they do not see any of the problems that stem from it.
To maintain laissez faire, conservatives want to reduce taxes to a minimum. Liberals, however, want more services, especially for those hurt by the predatory actions of rich people and rich corporations. For such things, they recommend taxes.
Liberals recommend taxes to spend on services needed to protect citizens from criminals and terrorists, but also to build an egalitarian community where all citizens live peacefully and in harmony with other citizens.
Conservatives pick on programs to help the poor. They complain that they should not be forced to pay taxes as a form of charity. They believe the government is distributing money from the rich to those that are less well off.
They are wrong. There is no distribution of money. Programs are funded to help the sick and the powerless in order to make our society more just. A more just society reduces tensions and conflicts and helps all of us, the rich more than anyone else.
Taxes are needed to make our society better. Rich people and rich corporations should pay more than the poorer among us not because of a "progressive principle" but because of a "fairness principle": The rich receive more from government than the poor so they should pay more.
Compare the CEO of a multinational corporation to a poor wage earner. The CEO benefits from police services and the legal system. He uses various services of the Labor, Commerce and other departments of the federal government in his business. He depends on the Federal Reserve System. When his corporation sells overseas he depends on the IMF, World Bank, WTO and other international bodies. If his company's property is attacked in a foreign country, he has access to State and Defense Department services.
The poor worker does not need these services.
Rich people and rich corporations should pay more. But in reality they pay less. Why should capital gains, money earned without effort, be taxed less than wages for which people work hard? Why should the offspring of rich people escape the so-called death tax for money they had not done anything to earn? Why should corporations be allowed to move to tax havens to avoid paying taxes?
Conservatives claim the tax code is complicated. It is complicated by all the loopholes and special tax deduction deals business has gotten for itself. It has reached the point where the less well off are paying proportionately more in taxes than the well to do.
Liberals want tax paying fairness for all.
REGULATION POLICY
Conservatives are in favor of deregulation. They feel that regulation interferes with the "hidden hand" and interferes with business freedom. Liberals claim that when business has too much freedom it tramples on the freedoms of the rest of us. We need regulation in order to be free of corporate depredations.
Liberals insist that people are more important than corporations. Corporations are not persons. They are artificial entities built to do business, and are given limited liability for the purpose of serving society. Regulation is needed to assure at least 2 things: that there is fair competition and that the corporation serves the public good.
Fair competition is not possible when one corporation is huge and and all other companies in an industry are small. The big one has too much power. Look at Microsoft. It has so much power that our Justice Department could not impose its will on it.
Conventional wisdom says that it is not corporate size but the ability to reduce competition that is bad. I say that BIG IS BAD. The bigger the corporation as opposed to other businesses in the industry, the more economic power it has and the less competition there is.
Big corporations merge and fire thousands of employees. The CEOs and a few shareholders make out like bandits, but employees suffer. Money makes out better than people. As a liberal, I want to make sure people come out on top.
The public good rarely is considered by corporations. All they want to do is increase shareholder value. This is all that counts with conservatives. But liberals feel that rich people have hijacked the corporation to further enrich themselves.
According to a study issued by United for a Fair Economy and the Institute for Policy Studies and reported in L.A. Times of 8/26/03:
"Chief executives of companies that had the largest layoffs and most underfunded pensions and that move operations offshore to avoid U.S. taxes were rewarded with the biggest pay hikes in 2002, on average."
Liberals want to stop this sort of thing. They want to assure less conflict between CEOs and employees. They want to assure that corporations work for the common good. If not, their charters should be abolished.
CAMPAIGN FINANCE POLICY
Conservatives believe that giving money to political campaigns is the same as exercising free speech; campaign contributions should not be limited. Liberals believe that campaign money is being used to destroy the democratic process; they want to limit money contributions to candidates.
In theory, all of us believe in the principle of one person one vote. But how could we possibly achieve this if we think of money as free speech? As a millionaire, a person can contribute more money than I can. This means he has more free speech than I do. I thought we got rid of in the 1850s the requirement of having property or wealth to qualify to vote.
Evidently not. Today, fatcats contribute thousands of dollars to campaigns. Big corporations have PACs that contribute to campaigns. What about the poor worker? He has no money to contribute. His free speech is limited.
Money talks. Those who have it make it talk loudly and clearly. Those who have money have more than one vote. They drown out the rest of us.
Money today is being used to buy candidates, to alter stringent laws and to obtain special treatment that brings more money. Financing campaigns is a form of investment that produces by far more lucrative returns than any capital or other company investment.
Who suffers from this emphasis on money? People. This is why I am for public financing of campaigns. No one running for office should be forced to go fund-raising and thus become beholden to special interests. All candidates should receive money from the public purse to finance their campaigns.
I am against all forms of matching. A candidate need not raise a certain amount of money in order to get matching funds. Instead of money, the candidate should submit a petition with a certain number of signatures.
Matching funds shows a candidate has money behind him. Petitions show he has people behind him.
People count for more than money.
GLOBALIZATION POLICY
Conservatives say that corporations should have free rein to exploit all business opportunities across the globe; through business operations we spread our values. Liberals say that the process should be controlled to assure more harmonious relations among nations; our values are spread through our helpful actions.
Conservatives advocate GLOBALIZATION. Through our advanced research, production, finance and marketing, we can teach the world how to gain wealth while our our own wealth grows. Thus they encourage mergers, acquisitions and hostile takeovers. They encourage the growth of huge multinationals, some of which have larger budgets than many nation-states. They push for bodies like the IMF, World Bank and the WTO (World Trade Organization, that polices trade treates like NAFTA).
Liberals are not against world trade, but against the kind of GLOBALIZATION that may be characterized as free trade for rich countries and coercive trade for poor countries. Poor countries should not be dictated to. They should be allowed to pursue economic development in their own way.
Also, in all these bodies the talk is about money. Liberals want these international organizations to be modified to include representatives of labor and environmentalists.
In short, instead of having an active GLOBALIZATION of poor countries by rich countries of the world, liberals would like to advance GLOBALISM, where each country pursues its interests in its own way while working together to achieve world harmony and peace.
SUMMARY
As a liberal, I am in favor of improving the lot of people and not so much of money. I favor taxation, regulation, public financing of campaigns and a GLOBALISM that increases the friendliness and interdependence among nations.
