Greed and Materialism: Don’t Let the Liberals Fool You
The on-going liberal response to the origins of the current financial crisis and political opposition to Obama’s ham-handed response to said crisis is that conservatives are a bunch of greedy money-grubbers willing to sacrifice the well-being of their fellow citizens on the altar of Mammon. At best this is an overbroad paint smear—perhaps avarice is a motivator for many who pretend to be conservatives—but the philosophical point could not be further from the truth; in fact it is a displacement of the truth by means of deception. The reality of the matter is that liberals are the greedy faction willing to oppress and deprive their neighbors for the sake of their own material gain.
Conservatism, by its own definition, is the belief that history—ever threatening repetition—teaches that self-reliance and personal responsibility are ethical imperatives. It is the student’s responsibility to learn his daily lessons in language and math. Once that student becomes an adult it is his responsibility to find his trade, be productive, prove his worth, provide for his family and live at peace with his neighbors. In exchange for this self-reliance conservatives subscribe to the notion that those who conduct themselves by this formula should be left to enjoy the fruits of their labor so long as those rewards were gained without force or fraud. According to conservative ethos it is no coincidence that the good student and hard worker excel. Certainly there are those beset by misfortune but charity is not reflexively anathema to self-reliance (though it is often hoisted as a strawman) and conservatives—often guided by religious creeds—will rush forward with their surpluses to aid a friend in trouble even if that friend is faceless and nameless half a nation away. Yet neither will scoundrels seeking to prey upon the charitably minded be long tolerated since conservative forms of charity must be exchanged face-to-face and not a distributed by some mechanized bureaucracy. Thus, the materialistic reward of conservatism is simply a by-product, not an end in and of itself.
Liberals, by contrast measure social rightness or wrongness by how much of any given commodity one segment of the population enjoys in relation to its neighbors. Even in America, where obesity is the number one health concern of those labeled as “poor†liberals consider America unjust because there are differences in healthcare, education, wages, diet and pensions to name a few. But notice that all of these things are money-centered. In their zeal to (re)distribute these benefits the liberal very seldom requires effort from the recipient, only sacrifice from the benefactor…even if the benefactor has not consented to his charity but had his charity extracted from him by the power of the state while being maligned in the press by the very same politicians and activists that speak of noble intentions. The liberal will demand more money for education but will never allow into the conversation the responsibility of the student to study and show self-discipline. On the contrary, the more undisciplined the student becomes the more money the liberal will demand even more money for tutors, birth control, special programs, interventions, etc., etc., etc. In other words: the material benefit of the education comes before the ethic demand of studying hard, refraining from illicit drug use, pre-marital sex and all the other foolishness of youth. Liberals want all children to have the superlative material benefits of a conservative education but they are repulsed by the idea that imperative conservative ideals are the requisite foundation.
So when we hear lectures about “the immoral and greedy stealing from their fellow Americans†we must pause to ask: which party in this lecture eschews self-reliance, self-discipline and personal responsibility? And which party wants the reward first with the work considered as an afterthought, if it is even considered at all? And which party, in seeking material reward will claim that reward as the retention of payment for goods and services rendered but as a levy, tax and fee extracted by the force of government?
Liberalism is the politics of greed, envy and malice.
