my conservative side

I am a liberal, ex-Socialist in fact, but I have always had a number of opinions that could better be described as conservative. Like most people, I have an individualistic mix of opinions that change over time.

I've been amused in the past few years at how many of my conservative ideas have become liberal. I believe in a balanced budget. Not each and every year, of course. I'm enough of a Keynesian (and was even as a Socialist) to know that counter-cyclical spending works both ways. You run a deficit to prime the pump in a recession, and you run a surplus in a boom, but if it doesn't balance out in the long run you have to print money to cover the defecit, and that causes inflation, or worse, stagflation. And I'm old enough to remember the curse of stagflation in the 1970's, and the misery index.

I believe in a strong defense, and I've always been anti-Communist (if you don't understand how a Socialist could be anti-Communist, please read about the Socialist International).

Now I find that the conservative Republican party activists don't believe in a balanced budget and think we can borrow money from the Red Chinese Communists finance their tax cuts. Think about this. Self-styled conservatives are mortgaging their own country to the Red Chinese Communists to buy votes. Well, some of these conservatives are really neo-Confederates who make little secret of their hatred for the United States, but most of them loudly criticize the patriotism of anyone who questions their suicidal fiscal and monetary policies, and their friendship with Communists who make no secret of the fact that they hate our system and our way of life. When Reagan was mortgaging the country to buy votes he at least borrowed the money from the Germans and the Japanese, democratic countries who are our friends.

And don't even get me started on how this Bush administration ignored the threat from bin Ladin, bungled (at best) the search for him and instead focused American anger and our military on an unrelated dictator who was no threat to us. But I've already written about that. And I'll write about it again. I just wanted to write about something else.