While there may be a nicer way to say it, I’m bothered by the downvotes you’re getting. Fiscal conservatism is the motivated reasoning that bridges or abstracts values and logical steps people often cannot even consciously admit to themselves.
It’s like how moralizing homelessness and feelings of disgust toward them protect oneself from the fear of becoming homeless, by manufacturing a distinction.
Nobody doesn’t believe in spending money wisely and sustainably.
I never thought of it that way before. Yeah, it’s not like democrats believe money should be pissed away, but conservatives will tell you that spending money on things like human rights is “pissing it away”. Gross.
However, I follow that up very quickly with the fact that investing in health, education, science, and affordable housing is net profit and any true fiscal conservative would want to direct as much of our money as needed into these programs, because penny for penny the returns on such investments are huge
A homeless person ending up in a hospital bed or dying costs us substantially more money than housing them, and once they get treated, fed, upskilled, and a roof over their head they very often proceed to turn into another taxpaying citizen which in turn converts red numbers into green numbers.
Anyone who just looks at the numbers can clearly see its basically just free money for taxpayers, you’d have to either be a complete idiot to not invest in it… or purposefully hateful and want people to suffer
I assume most “conservative” people are the latter, they genuinely cant wrap their head around the fact that making marginalized groups suffer costs taxpayers a lot of money
Police cost money, city cleanup costs money, hospitals and doctors cost money, handling corpses costs money, and of course you lose all the opportunity cost of -1 fellow taxpayer.
“Conservatives” tend to just not grok the fact that a large chunk of homeless people could easily be more taxpayers, but they just would rather demonize them and spend more money hurting them, thinking somehow that will magically make the issue go away, and ignore the fact it makes it worse, its so dumb.
Same goes for things like allowing abortion, at its core abortion rights inherently save such enormous magnitudes of money long term, and net profit. Forcing mothers to conceive doesnt fuckin help anyone and instead just costs us huge amounts of money, all just to inflict suffering on others. It’s hateful and petty and extremely wasteful.
Same goes for trans rights, the most cost effective and safest way to treat trans folks is just provide them with medical intervention to align their body with their gender. It’s by far the most cost effective solution, but for some fuckin reason “conservatives” would rather people suffer than save money
“Conservatives” straight up would rather spend billions of dollars hurting people than actually save money. Very stupid, and I hate how when I talk about actually being truly fiscally conservative, I get associated with such idiots.
any true fiscal conservative would want to direct as much of our money as needed into these programs
You simply aren’t a fiscal conservative. All your points are directly against fiscal conservatism.
From the wiki, which sums it up nicely:
In American political theory, fiscal conservatism or economic conservatism is a political and economic philosophy regarding fiscal policy and fiscal responsibility with an ideological basis in capitalism, individualism, limited government, and laissez-faire economics. Fiscal conservatives advocate tax cuts, reduced government spending, free markets, deregulation, privatization, free trade, and minimal government debt. Fiscal conservatism follows the same philosophical outlook as classical liberalism. This concept is derived from economic liberalism.
Who would you say is more fiscally conservative, a person who wisely invests their money in the future, or a person who wastes it all on bricks to throw at their neighbours windows.
The latter is what current “Conservative” parties are.
Fiscal Conservativism is about wisely investing your money and avoiding wasting it on stupid shit.
Conservative parties rely on “lalala I cant hear you” tactics. Theyre the sort of person who gets a small weird lump and ignores it and then 15 years later die to cancer they could’ve gotten treated a decade ago.
Thats not fiscally conservative, thats just being fucking stupid. Sometimes you do need to spend money on basic human needs because it net benefits everyone, even on pure paper number balancing.
Im conservative in the “hey we can save a lot of money if we do x/y/z” sort of way, like a person who clips out a bunch of coupons and ends up getting 90% off on their groceries.
Thats also being conservative, you are conserving your resources wisely by allocating them in ways that pay back well.
And turns out… those ways coincidentally are pro human rights.
No, it’s not the important part. Everyone believes in financial responsibility. Literally every coherent ideology. The only people who don’t are those who are outright stealing from the public purse, kleptocrats and the like. The important part is how financial conservatives go about their ideas of financial responsibility.
A homeless person ending up in a hospital bed or dying costs us substantially more money than housing them
Same goes for things like allowing abortion, at its core abortion rights inherently save such enormous magnitudes of money long term,
Same goes for trans rights, the most cost effective and safest way to treat trans folks is just provide them with medical intervention to align their body with their gender.
To me Conservatism is literally lack of empathy. These are all arguments to convince someone without empathy to accidentally do the right thing.
Do you need a fiscal reason to support e.g. trans rights or housing as a human right? If not, then why even consider yourself a fiscal conservative?
In my experience, people with empathy who identify as ‘Fiscally Conservative’ just want the government to be efficient. That’s great. Everyone wants the government to be efficient. Leftists want the government to be efficient too.
Edit: a sibling comment said it well I think:
Nobody doesn’t believe in spending money wisely and sustainably.
If you’re truly conservative then you’d also support a deregulated free market that allows extreme wealth disparity.
These are all arguments to convince someone without empathy to accidentally do the right thing.
Well thats the thing, fiscal conservatism is effectively the trolley problem zoomed out to the size of an entire country.
At its core, we dont have infinite money and it is a zero sum game.
Fiscal Conservativism should be the process of balancing out to figure out “we only have finite money, how do we maximize our yield spending it to save as many people as possible”
So, yes, you have to discard emotion and indeed accept that you just cant save everyone. There’s starving kids in africa and etc etc, you don’t have infinite money and cant save em all.
So you gotta assess which investments give you the best bang for your buck, and theres tonnes of really really good ones that for very little money produce extremely good yields on people saved per dollar.
If you’re truly conservative then you’d also support a deregulated free market that allows extreme wealth disparity.
Only a short sighted conservative believes that. Once you zoom out you have to accept the market simply cannot be unregulated, it always naturally becomes regulated.
The question is, who gets to regulate it. Do you want to place protections now to prevent bad actors from gaining control, or plug your ears and pretend it’ll never happen.
Captured markets are largely inevitable, all you can do is put protections in place to slow it down for as many decades as possible.
That’s still just fiscal responsibility (which also gets used as a code phrase, but that’s hard to escape entirely). Given that “fiscal conservative” is an established term widely understood to represent a certain specific set of beliefs and principles, I don’t know why you’d want to identify with that term based on something else that only matches the general, apolitical meaning of the label and in an incredibly generic manner that offers no real distinction from anything else.
It kind of plays right into the the doublespeak that right-leaning movements love so much – and this is exactly why they do. It’s to trick people into believing they are aligned and and then represent that alignment to others. You make them look good.
Before going too far down a moralizing path, I think it’s also worth pointing out that empathy is an individually developed skill, but one whose value is ultimately based on higher order reasoning and rooted in amoral pragmatism/evolutionary biology. It is not actually an ability to distinguish good from bad.
Empathy and selfishness could be considered contrasting drives, and the former is more valuable than the latter only in so far as it involves broader understanding and perspective. Both are ultimately emotional biases. Just like selfish people are liable to justify exploiting others, empathetic people are liable to justify unfair or even destructive levels of self-sacrifice.
So there’s no moral distinction between being “tricked” into accidentally doing the right social thing and having empathy that helps find the same answer independently. Empathy can as easily be tricked into causing great harm through short-sightedness or failure to recognize the true cost of alleviating whatever pain is currently perceived.
For example: is adopting a large volume of war refugees the good action if it leads to public backlash that ultimately brings fascism to power and then starts a bigger war? It looks like that’s a consequence we’re only going to avert narrowly and by a considerable amount of luck. So far I’m still glad we did – but boy are we cutting it close. (And to be clear I realize that for the sake of my point I’m simplifying away other factors that could have reduced the political cost and had more to do with selfishness than empathy.)
In my experience, people with empathy who identify as ‘Fiscally Conservative’ just want the government to be efficient.
Actual left, true left, is when you start spending money at the cost of efficiency to further improve quality of life past the point of getting good returns on it, when the point is no longer saving money, but improving life just for the sake of improving life.
Fiscal Conservative should be “spend money only when it saves money”
It’s just that a lot of so called “conservative” people cannot wrap their head around the super crazy concept of an investment where, as wild as it sounds, spending money to improve quality of life genuinely yields paybacks down the line at a really good rate
The problem is a huge amount of current folks have been heavily indoctrinated into the us vs them mentality that being Conservative and Liberal are mutually exclusive.
The reality is… its not, you can simultaneously want the government to invest money wisely while also being pro human choice, and the cool part is the science and numbers even indicate these two are the same thing.
The whole “us vs them” mentality is the entire reason so many conservative folks think you have to be anti-liberal, because they inherently as well think its mutually exclusive, so they fundamentally cannot understand how spending money saves money
Breaking down that assumption is step 1 to fixing things, you have to abandon the concept to fully realize that truly being actually fiscally conservative is synonymous with being pro human rights, pro abortion, pro lgbtq, pro immigration, pro science, pro education, pro healthcare.
Actual left, true left, is when you start spending money at the cost of efficiency to further improve quality of life…
On that point, you’re falling for right-wing propaganda. The extreme ends of any spectrum have some pretty asinine views held by profoundly stupid radicalized people; absolute collectivism gets just as ugly and destructive as absolute individualism. Neither represents “true” anything. Heck, even centrism has no pure form, because there is no middle, no single point that marks the right balance for all contexts.
I do agree that we have a big problem with false dichotomies and pseudo-absolutism being used to divide us. The real “them” puts great effort into minimizing and misrepresenting the values and interests that are actually widely shared. And even they would be one of us if better raised or rehabilitated away from the wealth that has captured and corrupted them into such extreme individualism.
Breaking down that assumption is step 1 to fixing things, you have to abandon the concept to fully realize that truly being actually fiscally conservative is synonymous with being pro human rights, pro abortion, pro lgbtq, pro immigration, pro science, pro education, pro healthcare.
In general sure. But you make it sound like there are never hard choices nor compromises to be made. Sometimes we genuinely cannot afford to do right by someone or something. When it comes to new problems, the frontiers of medicine and science, etc. we very often don’t know what is economically efficient or even viable. But I think that’s a little off topic. I don’t think anyone is honestly confused by sometimes needing to spend money to save money.
Individualists love the idea of spending money to either save or make money, which is why they like starting businesses, investing, building passive income, building self-sustaining non-financial supports (a personal favorite), and any grift ready to unburden them of the means to exercise that greed to which it appeals. They just can’t be up front about what it is they really don’t understand: spending money on other people (without a direct personal connection). It is their concept of society itself that is limited/constrained in scope, and that has nothing to do with money.
A Conservative is a Conservative, and voting for a bigot makes one a bigot. If you actually believed a word of that salad you would vote Liberal, and if you had any sense you would give the NDP or Greens a vote instead.
There is no such thing as a “Fiscal Conservative”. They all hold the same values, the smart ones just know not to say it out loud.
While there may be a nicer way to say it, I’m bothered by the downvotes you’re getting. Fiscal conservatism is the motivated reasoning that bridges or abstracts values and logical steps people often cannot even consciously admit to themselves.
It’s like how moralizing homelessness and feelings of disgust toward them protect oneself from the fear of becoming homeless, by manufacturing a distinction.
Nobody doesn’t believe in spending money wisely and sustainably.
I never thought of it that way before. Yeah, it’s not like democrats believe money should be pissed away, but conservatives will tell you that spending money on things like human rights is “pissing it away”. Gross.
I classify myself as Fiscally Conservative.
However, I follow that up very quickly with the fact that investing in health, education, science, and affordable housing is net profit and any true fiscal conservative would want to direct as much of our money as needed into these programs, because penny for penny the returns on such investments are huge
A homeless person ending up in a hospital bed or dying costs us substantially more money than housing them, and once they get treated, fed, upskilled, and a roof over their head they very often proceed to turn into another taxpaying citizen which in turn converts red numbers into green numbers.
Anyone who just looks at the numbers can clearly see its basically just free money for taxpayers, you’d have to either be a complete idiot to not invest in it… or purposefully hateful and want people to suffer
I assume most “conservative” people are the latter, they genuinely cant wrap their head around the fact that making marginalized groups suffer costs taxpayers a lot of money
Police cost money, city cleanup costs money, hospitals and doctors cost money, handling corpses costs money, and of course you lose all the opportunity cost of -1 fellow taxpayer.
“Conservatives” tend to just not grok the fact that a large chunk of homeless people could easily be more taxpayers, but they just would rather demonize them and spend more money hurting them, thinking somehow that will magically make the issue go away, and ignore the fact it makes it worse, its so dumb.
Same goes for things like allowing abortion, at its core abortion rights inherently save such enormous magnitudes of money long term, and net profit. Forcing mothers to conceive doesnt fuckin help anyone and instead just costs us huge amounts of money, all just to inflict suffering on others. It’s hateful and petty and extremely wasteful.
Same goes for trans rights, the most cost effective and safest way to treat trans folks is just provide them with medical intervention to align their body with their gender. It’s by far the most cost effective solution, but for some fuckin reason “conservatives” would rather people suffer than save money
“Conservatives” straight up would rather spend billions of dollars hurting people than actually save money. Very stupid, and I hate how when I talk about actually being truly fiscally conservative, I get associated with such idiots.
You simply aren’t a fiscal conservative. All your points are directly against fiscal conservatism.
From the wiki, which sums it up nicely:
Thats the important part
Who would you say is more fiscally conservative, a person who wisely invests their money in the future, or a person who wastes it all on bricks to throw at their neighbours windows.
The latter is what current “Conservative” parties are.
Fiscal Conservativism is about wisely investing your money and avoiding wasting it on stupid shit.
Conservative parties rely on “lalala I cant hear you” tactics. Theyre the sort of person who gets a small weird lump and ignores it and then 15 years later die to cancer they could’ve gotten treated a decade ago.
Thats not fiscally conservative, thats just being fucking stupid. Sometimes you do need to spend money on basic human needs because it net benefits everyone, even on pure paper number balancing.
Im conservative in the “hey we can save a lot of money if we do x/y/z” sort of way, like a person who clips out a bunch of coupons and ends up getting 90% off on their groceries.
Thats also being conservative, you are conserving your resources wisely by allocating them in ways that pay back well.
And turns out… those ways coincidentally are pro human rights.
No, it’s not the important part. Everyone believes in financial responsibility. Literally every coherent ideology. The only people who don’t are those who are outright stealing from the public purse, kleptocrats and the like. The important part is how financial conservatives go about their ideas of financial responsibility.
To me Conservatism is literally lack of empathy. These are all arguments to convince someone without empathy to accidentally do the right thing.
Do you need a fiscal reason to support e.g. trans rights or housing as a human right? If not, then why even consider yourself a fiscal conservative?
In my experience, people with empathy who identify as ‘Fiscally Conservative’ just want the government to be efficient. That’s great. Everyone wants the government to be efficient. Leftists want the government to be efficient too.
Edit: a sibling comment said it well I think:
If you’re truly conservative then you’d also support a deregulated free market that allows extreme wealth disparity.
Well thats the thing, fiscal conservatism is effectively the trolley problem zoomed out to the size of an entire country.
At its core, we dont have infinite money and it is a zero sum game.
Fiscal Conservativism should be the process of balancing out to figure out “we only have finite money, how do we maximize our yield spending it to save as many people as possible”
So, yes, you have to discard emotion and indeed accept that you just cant save everyone. There’s starving kids in africa and etc etc, you don’t have infinite money and cant save em all.
So you gotta assess which investments give you the best bang for your buck, and theres tonnes of really really good ones that for very little money produce extremely good yields on people saved per dollar.
Only a short sighted conservative believes that. Once you zoom out you have to accept the market simply cannot be unregulated, it always naturally becomes regulated.
The question is, who gets to regulate it. Do you want to place protections now to prevent bad actors from gaining control, or plug your ears and pretend it’ll never happen.
Captured markets are largely inevitable, all you can do is put protections in place to slow it down for as many decades as possible.
That’s still just fiscal responsibility (which also gets used as a code phrase, but that’s hard to escape entirely). Given that “fiscal conservative” is an established term widely understood to represent a certain specific set of beliefs and principles, I don’t know why you’d want to identify with that term based on something else that only matches the general, apolitical meaning of the label and in an incredibly generic manner that offers no real distinction from anything else.
It kind of plays right into the the doublespeak that right-leaning movements love so much – and this is exactly why they do. It’s to trick people into believing they are aligned and and then represent that alignment to others. You make them look good.
Before going too far down a moralizing path, I think it’s also worth pointing out that empathy is an individually developed skill, but one whose value is ultimately based on higher order reasoning and rooted in amoral pragmatism/evolutionary biology. It is not actually an ability to distinguish good from bad.
Empathy and selfishness could be considered contrasting drives, and the former is more valuable than the latter only in so far as it involves broader understanding and perspective. Both are ultimately emotional biases. Just like selfish people are liable to justify exploiting others, empathetic people are liable to justify unfair or even destructive levels of self-sacrifice.
So there’s no moral distinction between being “tricked” into accidentally doing the
rightsocial thing and having empathy that helps find the same answer independently. Empathy can as easily be tricked into causing great harm through short-sightedness or failure to recognize the true cost of alleviating whatever pain is currently perceived.For example: is adopting a large volume of war refugees the good action if it leads to public backlash that ultimately brings fascism to power and then starts a bigger war? It looks like that’s a consequence we’re only going to avert narrowly and by a considerable amount of luck. So far I’m still glad we did – but boy are we cutting it close. (And to be clear I realize that for the sake of my point I’m simplifying away other factors that could have reduced the political cost and had more to do with selfishness than empathy.)
Actual left, true left, is when you start spending money at the cost of efficiency to further improve quality of life past the point of getting good returns on it, when the point is no longer saving money, but improving life just for the sake of improving life.
Fiscal Conservative should be “spend money only when it saves money”
It’s just that a lot of so called “conservative” people cannot wrap their head around the super crazy concept of an investment where, as wild as it sounds, spending money to improve quality of life genuinely yields paybacks down the line at a really good rate
The problem is a huge amount of current folks have been heavily indoctrinated into the us vs them mentality that being Conservative and Liberal are mutually exclusive.
The reality is… its not, you can simultaneously want the government to invest money wisely while also being pro human choice, and the cool part is the science and numbers even indicate these two are the same thing.
The whole “us vs them” mentality is the entire reason so many conservative folks think you have to be anti-liberal, because they inherently as well think its mutually exclusive, so they fundamentally cannot understand how spending money saves money
Breaking down that assumption is step 1 to fixing things, you have to abandon the concept to fully realize that truly being actually fiscally conservative is synonymous with being pro human rights, pro abortion, pro lgbtq, pro immigration, pro science, pro education, pro healthcare.
On that point, you’re falling for right-wing propaganda. The extreme ends of any spectrum have some pretty asinine views held by profoundly stupid radicalized people; absolute collectivism gets just as ugly and destructive as absolute individualism. Neither represents “true” anything. Heck, even centrism has no pure form, because there is no middle, no single point that marks the right balance for all contexts.
I do agree that we have a big problem with false dichotomies and pseudo-absolutism being used to divide us. The real “them” puts great effort into minimizing and misrepresenting the values and interests that are actually widely shared. And even they would be one of us if better raised or rehabilitated away from the wealth that has captured and corrupted them into such extreme individualism.
In general sure. But you make it sound like there are never hard choices nor compromises to be made. Sometimes we genuinely cannot afford to do right by someone or something. When it comes to new problems, the frontiers of medicine and science, etc. we very often don’t know what is economically efficient or even viable. But I think that’s a little off topic. I don’t think anyone is honestly confused by sometimes needing to spend money to save money.
Individualists love the idea of spending money to either save or make money, which is why they like starting businesses, investing, building passive income, building self-sustaining non-financial supports (a personal favorite), and any grift ready to unburden them of the means to exercise that greed to which it appeals. They just can’t be up front about what it is they really don’t understand: spending money on other people (without a direct personal connection). It is their concept of society itself that is limited/constrained in scope, and that has nothing to do with money.
Nope.
A Conservative is a Conservative, and voting for a bigot makes one a bigot. If you actually believed a word of that salad you would vote Liberal, and if you had any sense you would give the NDP or Greens a vote instead.
I do, because despite its name our liberal party is conservative lol
The NDP are Liberal, the Liberals are Conservative, and the Conservatives are fucking batshit insane fascists.
You post this to the wrong place or what?
No? I replied to you.
Nice edit, fuck off.
Cool your jets kid, it was just a formatting issue >_>
Lemmy just annoyingly includes the next line in a quote as if its part of the quote
Note how “And then this is the next line” gets included in the quote, even though it looks like this on my screen
Instead
https://i.imgur.com/nGJgFSG.png