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Monday, June 02, 2008

Why Would Conservatives Be More Honest?

Peter Schweizer has an interesting piece in the Examiner today. I'm sure it won't come as a surprise to conservatives, but it's sure to infuriate liberals.

He points out an "honesty gap" between conservatives and liberals:

Is it OK to cheat on your taxes? A total of 57 percent of those who described themselves as “very liberal” said yes in response to the World Values Survey, compared with only 20 percent of those who are “very conservative.” When Pew Research asked whether it was “morally wrong” to cheat Uncle Sam, 86 percent of conservatives agreed, compared with only 68 percent of liberals.

If it was a purely ideological thing, you'd expect the conservatives to be okay with cheating Uncle Sam to get out of paying the unfair, confiscatory, Big-Government-feeding taxes. But the honesty factor stays the same, even with something conservatives don't like doing.

Schweizer says this isn't the only survey to come up with these results.
Ponder this scenario, offered by the National Cultural Values Survey: “You lose your job. Your friend’s company is looking for someone to do temporary work. They are willing to pay the person in cash to avoid taxes and allow the person to still collect unemployment. What would you do?”

Almost half, or 49 percent, of self-described progressives would go along with the scheme, but only 21 percent of conservatives said they would.

He says this holds true in a variety of scenarios, from receiving stolen goods to stealing a can of soda to receiving welfare benefits you don't deserve.

None of us likes liars around us in our personal lives. Liars in public office (in charge of the public purse strings, and the guardians of our freedoms) are even more dangerous.

Remember when even Senator Bob Kerrey admitted that fellow Democrat Bill Clinton was "an unusually good liar?" Could there have been a correlation between the depth of Clinton's liberalism and his propensity to lie almost with every breath?

Some of us may be short-sighted enough to like liars when they're lying to our benefit. But the thing about people who make a lifestyle of lying is that you never know when you're going to end up on the short end of their lies.

So is it just a case of all the bad people become liberals and all the good people become conservatives? Hardly. Despite the trend, it certainly isn't universally true. And such a conclusion almost certainly is not looking deeper, at root causes.

Here is Schweizer's conclusion, and I agree with him:
In my mind, a more likely explanation is bad ideas. Modern liberalism is infused with idea that truth is relative. Surveys consistently show this. And if truth is relative, it also must follow that honesty is subjective.

Sixties organizer Saul Alinsky, who both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton say inspired and influenced them, once said the effective political advocate “doesn’t have a fixed truth; truth to him is relative and changing, everything to him is relative and changing. He is a political relativist.”

Conservatives are typically more aligned toward objective truth, while, as Schweizer says, liberals tend to embrace relativism with almost religious fervor.

The thing about a political (or moral) relativist is that while he might be your buddy today, you can never know when he might decide to stab you in the back tomorrow.

People who are guided by higher principles will usually act according to those principles even when doing so is to their disadvantage. With friends and leaders like this, you can usually trust that as long as you're doing the right thing, you're going to be treated well.

But with the relativist, as soon as he reckons he's better off throwing you under the bus--or to the wolves--you're road kill or mincemeat.

Isn't it better to elect leaders and select friends of principle who are loyal to objective truth?


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