Amerika

Over the years, conservatives have missed many opportunities to reach a wider audience by addressing real-world problems. They have focused on avoiding controversial issues and seeking symbolic ones, like prayer in schools or anti-abortion, which seem popular but lose out on non-fanatics.

A few ideas pop up immediately:

• Cost of living. The traditional conservative approach involves eschewing handouts in favor of lowered cost of living, since the taxes for the free stuff drive up the cost of everything. This includes property taxes, which raise the cost of land ownership and are passed on to renters as well as homeowners, amounting to a “second mortgage” that one must pay for housing. These primarily fund schools, which since they are obligated to educate illegal aliens, serve as a government entitlement. End public education for illegals and problem kids, including those with “special” issues, and get schools back to the 3Rs instead of lots of counseling and disciplinarian activity, and these can go down. Even better yet: abolish public schooling.
• Antiwork. Jobs are jails and made miserable by a maze of regulations, women in the workforce, affirmative action, high mobility of the workforce which in turn causes employers to demand replaceable cogs instead of individuals, and the sheer size required of companies today to stay ahead of taxes and demands. Only big firms with huge staffs selling wide margin products are doing well. This makes jobs into meaningless repetitive chores where social and political demands exceed actual application of skills. Some are beginning to see the importance of less time at work:
  

  Marin, who floated the idea of a six-hour day before becoming prime minister, would need to convince the other four parties in her coalition to push through a reduction in the working day amid rising unemployment due to COVID-19.

  “We need to create a clear vision and concrete steps as to how Finland can proceed towards shorter working hours and Finnish employees towards better working life,” the 34-year-old leader told her party members, who had elected her chairwoman of the Social Democrats on Sunday.

  Conservatives can get ahead of this by suggesting that we make cultural changes that emphasize a higher work/life balance while removing all of the quota systems and bureaucracy that we can.

• National parks. If we want to ride out the coming ecocide and environmental crisis, the best way to do it is to set aside natural land in its natural form so that creatures, plants, and ecosystems can survive. Expansion of national parks provides jobs and income to those who live around them as well.
• Bust unions. Unions represent monopolies on labor that extract value from the consumer by raising prices. Currently, they have legal protection that allows them to do this but if that went away, so would the unions, to be replaced by voluntary worker co-ops as we have seen succeed in many areas.
• Lower bureaucracy. Too many jobs in America require certifications for things that are not that difficult, raising costs and delaying supply when these people are needed; there is too much red tape involved with having a business, paying taxes, getting permits, and so on. This country was better when anyone could open a liquor stand and caveat emptor was the rule.

The trouble with conservatism is that no one understands it, mistaking it for “preserve the past” instead of “conserve the best.”

If we want to conserve the best of our civilization, we have to fight back against the time, energy, and money vampires installed by modernity. These are many, but we could start with the daily experiences of conservatives and making life a better experience generally.

Tags: antiwork, bureaucracy, national parks, unions