When I was in Middle School, one of my teachers explained the liberal vs. conservative dichotomy this way:  conservatives want to "conserve" things from the past, while liberals want to change things.  My feeling at the time was, gee, since the world changes all the time, don't you have to be "liberal," just to keep up?  Conservatives must be schtoopid!

I was young.   As I grew older, I realized that there are things that you want to conserve, and the trick lies in figuring out which things those are, and which things you should, well, just jettison because they don't work, or they're holding you back, or it turns out they were stupid ideas to begin with (e.g., slavery), or for some other good reason.  Child labor.  Letting old people die of starvation after a lifetime of work.  Working in death traps.  Stuff like that.  But I never lost that idea that the world changes, and you should change with it or you were just going to be left in the dust.  

(It might have helped being a Navy Brat, never living in one place more than a few months or, when lucky, a few years--hard to generate a sense of permanence when you've lived so many places that when someone asks you where you're from, you end up answering, "Originally?  Or most recently?")

Even later I learned that being "liberal" or "progressive" meant other things, too.  Like you were highly suspicious of big business; you were more open to things like gay marriage and socialized medicine; that you felt life choices that differed from yours weren't necessarily wrong, or inherently evil, or even a bad idea, and that maybe you should just let adults do whatever the heck they wanted so long as no one got hurt.  You know:  squishy, left-Coast, San Francisco kind of values.  

(Personally, I don't understand why "conservatives" get so worked up about things like gay marriage.  If a Conservative believes government should stay out of private lives, why would you want to tell someone who they can marry, so long as no one gets hurt?  No one is forcing your pastor or priest or rabbi or whoever to marry gays and lesbians--although I personally think they should--they're just wanting equal protection under the law.  Why is that problematic?  But then, homophobia confuses me in general.  But I digress.) 

A recent conversation with a "self-described conservative" got me thinking about all this again, particularly when it comes to Capitalism and governmental power.  My shorthand for the Conservative/Liberal spectrum in business is:  on the far right is complete trust in Big Business; on the far left is complete trust in Big Government.  In between is where most of us live.  The question is, who do you distrust the least?  Because let's face it:  very few people trust either one all that much.

For me, it's like this:  it is an inherent feature of Capitalism to not give a flying fuck about individuals.  The bottom line, the balance sheet, profit and loss, making money--that's the job of business, not  benificent treatment to their workers.  This is neither moral nor immoral; it's simply a feature of the system.  (I think it's a crappy system but, like Winston Churchill's opinion on democracy, it's better than all the other ones we've tried so far. )  Yes, sometimes businesses do things that are good for the worker, but only because they've decided it helps their bottom line.  I'm not passing judgement; that's just the way it is.

As such, if you want to help the individual schlub like yours truly, you can  either jettison that system and replace it with something that, so far as my readings of history tell me, is worse; or you can put some kind of check on it.  And the only thing powerful enough to put a check on Big Business is Big Government.  Unions can do it, too, in  a smaller way, but unions are only Some of The People Who Work at That Company; Federal Government is All The People in the Nation.  That's a lot of clout.  And even then, it's often not enough to use against multinationals, but it's all we have.

So when people start shouting about "less regulation", what I hear them shouting is, "Please let Big Business start screwing over workers more than they do now!"  And while I can understand that coming from management and the business owners, it absolutely baffles me coming from the workers themselves.  Do they really want to get rid of OSHA rules that keep them safe, go back to child labor and working in sweat shops and in building like the Triangle Shirt Company building?  Having no recourse when they think they're being ill treated?  (Letting big companies dump toxic effluvia into water without limit; pump crap into the sky with no checks; etc. etc.)  Because only big government has the clout to keep those folks in check; otherwise, we'd still be working 14 hour days, 6 days a week, with no paid vacations, no time-and-a-half for overtime, no job security, no ability to sue for wrongful termination.  

Business doesn't care if they, quite literally, work you to death.  Why should they?  There's plenty more where you came from, after all.  Your only protection against such behavior is the good will of the managers, or help from the government.  There's nothing else that can have your back.  Nothing.  If it's you against the Big Corporation, you're going to lose most of the time.  (Why do you think class action lawsuits are so hated by businesses?  More people in the lawsuit means more clout means more chance that they might actually lose.)

Or look at it this way: the sky in L.A. is less polluted now than when I was a little kid.  Catalytic converters, non-leaded fuels, and a ton of other regulations have made that happen, even though the population of (and number of cars in) LA has  more than doubled.  I have trouble seeing how this is a bad thing, and it wouldn't have happened if we hadn't followed "liberal" air and water pollution laws and had government regulate things like fuel, milage standards, and the like.  Following "conservative", "less regulation!" methods would have given us an LA at least twice as polluted as it was then.  Why would anyone want that?

So that's why I'm a liberal.  I don't trust big government, but against big business, it's pretty much the only friend I have, so I work with it.  And when a conservative tells me that "the market will work it out", I keep thinking of 70 year-olds dynig for lack of a pension, child labor, and the Triangle Shirt factory.  I don't want government listening to my phone conversations, but I definitely don't want arsenic in my drinking water.  It's a sucky trade-off, but it's all we've got.

Next time, maybe I'll talk about conservative vs. liberal social issues and really get flamed!