{"id":2375,"date":"2007-05-31T14:18:22","date_gmt":"2007-05-31T19:18:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/2007\/05\/31\/the-case-for-conservatism\/"},"modified":"2007-05-31T14:18:22","modified_gmt":"2007-05-31T19:18:22","slug":"the-case-for-conservatism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/2007\/05\/the-case-for-conservatism\/","title":{"rendered":"The Case for Conservatism"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-dyn\/content\/article\/2007\/05\/30\/AR2007053002026_pf.html\">Washington Post<\/a> | George Will | May 31, 2007<\/p>\n<p>Conservatism&#8217;s recovery of its intellectual equilibrium requires a confident explanation of why America has two parties and why the conservative one is preferable. Today&#8217;s political argument involves perennial themes that give it more seriousness than many participants understand. The argument, like Western political philosophy generally, is about the meaning of, and the proper adjustment of the tension between, two important political goals &#8212; freedom and equality.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Today conservatives tend to favor freedom, and consequently are inclined to be somewhat sanguine about inequalities of outcomes. Liberals are more concerned with equality, understood, they insist, primarily as equality of opportunity, not of outcome.<\/p>\n<p>Liberals tend, however, to infer unequal opportunities from the fact of unequal outcomes. Hence liberalism&#8217;s goal of achieving greater equality of condition leads to a larger scope for interventionist government to circumscribe the market&#8217;s role in allocating wealth and opportunity. Liberalism increasingly seeks to deliver equality in the form of equal dependence of more and more people for more and more things on government.<\/p>\n<p>Hence liberals&#8217; hostility to school choice programs that challenge public education&#8217;s semimonopoly. Hence hostility to private accounts funded by a portion of each individual&#8217;s Social Security taxes. Hence their fear of health savings accounts (individuals who buy high-deductible health insurance become eligible for tax-preferred savings accounts from which they pay their routine medical expenses &#8212; just as car owners do not buy insurance to cover oil changes). Hence liberals&#8217; advocacy of government responsibility for &#8212; and, inevitably, rationing of &#8212; health care, which is 16 percent of the economy and rising.<\/p>\n<p>. . . <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-dyn\/content\/article\/2007\/05\/30\/AR2007053002026_pf.html\">more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Washington Post | George Will | May 31, 2007 Conservatism&#8217;s recovery of its intellectual equilibrium requires a confident explanation of why America has two parties and why the conservative one is preferable. Today&#8217;s political argument involves perennial themes that give it more seriousness than many participants understand. The argument, like Western political philosophy generally, is &#8230; <a title=\"The Case for Conservatism\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/2007\/05\/the-case-for-conservatism\/\" aria-label=\"Read more about The Case for Conservatism\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1319,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"generate_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2375","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2375","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1319"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2375"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2375\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.orthodoxytoday.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}