America In Transition: Moving from a Conservative to a Liberal Society
 

LINK checkout the timeline here:
http://www.futureswatch.org/Timeline.htm

Equal rights and individual choice for those people in control of government and social welfare programs. That about sums up liberal ideology, and reveals its flaw. You can't expand the powers of the government and increase personal liberty at the same time. Read the 9th Amendment to the Constitution, it basically says that the only rights you don't have are the ones the government restricts by law. Therefore new laws, taxes, and social programs can only reduce personal liberty. Is this really what we want to happen over the next twenty or thirty years?

Well said.

Expanding the power of Government at the expense of individual freedoms IS the liberal agenda. The end result is the destruction of the United States as a country. Pure and simple, it's communism - proven by history to be an ineffective form of government. In the end the government has everything and the people have little, and are completely dependent on the government for everyday life needs.

This is why I am a conservative Republican.

Nothing is perfect, but the conservative way at least can work whereas communism will never work.

both orthodox liberal and orthodox conservative ideology represent two extremes at each of the end of the political spectrum - seems to me that the kind of government that works for it's people would lie somewhere in the middle. obviously, the Great Society programs of the 60's and the resulting welfare state they created highlight the flaws in liberal ideology. but some judiciously applied government intervention can be enourmously beneficial to a society as well - the railroads of the 19th century and the Internet of the 20th century are prime examples. health care comes to mind as well - i've had government-controlled health care (Washington State Basic Health Care, back in the early 90's) and it worked a hell of a lot better than what i have now.

i would think you'd be more inclined to libertarianism, at this point - it's a lot closer to true conservatism than anything the Republicans have brought you. six years of a Republican administration, rubber-stamped by a Republican-led Congress have led to a massive expansion of the power of government - at the expense of both individual freedom and the Constitution.

I might be inclined to agree with you there, knife. Government spending is way up, and while most of it is going towards the military, which I don't mind, there's lots of room for some congressmen to tack on their own spending measures to completly unrelated spending bills and get them approved without objection. It might be happening under everyone's noses. And then you have the Patriot Act and the controversy it's stirring up. Government programs and spending are obviously necessary, but everything in moderation people. I've said it for years, we need fewer laws, not more. The U.S. Code could stand to loose a few thousand pages, especially where it concerns income taxes. Before making new laws, the fat needs to be trimmed from the lean.

No

Calling any political position that is left of centre communist is akin to calling any position right of centre fascist. Now, I don't believe you're a fascist, but framing the debate in such black and white terms regarding the cyclical swinging of the pendulum between left and right is disingenuous. FDR and the new deal didn't finish the US as a nation, they finished ww2 as the premier nation on the globe. That's just the best example I can find in your country's history, but none of the other left of centre major figures were communists either.

Also, many European allies of yours have left leaning governments, which are hardly communist. It's not pure and simple, the world is not black and white.

well put.

simplistic binary political thinking is not a strategy for good government; it's designed only for the accumulation and retention of political power.