- No insignificant person has ever been born.
- Economic liberalism needs social conservatism (and, 5pm addition, Iain Murray emails me to say and vice versa)
- The presumption should always be in favour of life
- Government should be as small as possible but as large as necessary
- Multilateral organisations transfer power from people to politicians
- Private choices have public consequences/ Policymakers have an interest in 'private choices', at least so long as they have consequences for taxpayers
- Conservatism is a creative coalition between security, economic and cultural conservatives
- A welfare state that feeds-and-forgets isn't compassionate
- Politics is less important than ideas, culture and religion
- Free enterprise and big business are not the same
- Taxation has dynamic effects
- Pre-emption is the best response to many of today's security threats
- There is such thing as society, it's just not the state
- Man is a fallen creature
- Decision-making powers should be as close as possible to those affected by those decisions
- Private ownership is nearly always preferable to common ownership
- A strong society is built upon the vigorous virtues of courage, ambition, creativity, self-sufficiency and enterprise.
- Love of country is fundamental to all conservatism.
- Social liberalism can be destructive of social justice.
- Conservative reform is usually preferable to radical revolution. Conservatism must deal with its own enemies within.
I especially like his point that free enterprise does not necessarily equal big business, in light of our government's inability to distinguish between the two. Bush's attempts to save big business are in danger of seriously hurting free enterprise. I fear that will only get worse under the Obama administration.
Forget "conservatism," please. It has been Godless and therefore irrelevant. Secular conservatism will not defeat secular liberalism because to God both are two atheistic peas-in-a-pod and thus predestined to failure. As Stonewall Jackson's Chief of Staff R.L. Dabney said of such a humanistic belief more than 100 years ago:
ReplyDelete"[Secular conservatism] is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today .one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution; to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt bath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it be salted? Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It .is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth."
Our country is collapsing because we have turned our back on God (Psalm 9:17) and refused to kiss His Son (Psalm 2).
John Lofton, Editor, TheAmericanView.com
Recovering Republican
JLof@aol.com