The difference between the parties: Intentions v. Results
Posted by Clyde Middleton
on Sep 30 2009 Filed under Politics.
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Neither party can claim a monopoly on achieving results from legislation or public policy – however, a significant distinction can be seen between liberals and conservatives: Liberals legislate theory, hoping it will work (because their peer-reviewed research says it will); Conservatives look to past practices to try to learn, and craft legislation in a continuum of applied theories.
PR Friend Track-a-’crat explores this distinction. Here’s the first half of his post – go here to read the rest.
With the fusing of political parties everywhere into one hideous amorphous mass (a process that’s reaching its apogee in Europe, where party names have long since ceased to provide anything but the merest hint as to that party’s alleged values), the choice facing the electorate increasingly appears to be that between big and bigger government, high and higher taxes, and little or no accountability. The traditional dividing lines have softened and blurred, leading to the rise of the independents and their king-making capacity. The decisions of voters are less than ever based on how much they agree with a given party’s platform, but rather on how little they disagree with it.
With one exception, that is.
One lonely boundary still splits the Left from the Right, and it has not only remained constant, but has strengthened with each passing day of the Obama administration: the division between intentions and results.
A central tenet of the Left is its slavish devotion to the tyranny of intentions. Whereas those on the Right characteristically rely more on empirical and tangible observations and logic, the void of reason at the heart of Left-wing ideology has been replaced by emotions and intentions. For them, results are mere side-effects of a stated policy: it is the intentions underlying any given policy that reveal its true worth.
Which is exactly the type of anti-logic to be expected of the Democratic Party. Intentions and results are not mutually exclusive concepts, unable to coexist simultaneously. The difference then becomes one of interpretation – Democrats are largely contented by the lingering warm thoughts that motivated the legislation in the first place, whereas conservatives are far more likely to turn to concrete results as proof (hopefully) of the new law’s worth.
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Short URL: http://libertypundits.net/?p=7039
I beg to differ with the author’s assertion that liberals legislate theory. As evidenced by the notoriously confusing Stimulus Package and Obamacare legislation, liberals deliberately make laws unreadable, fooling people into thinking their meaningless laws will cultivate a utopian society. And the reason that they make their laws unreadable is the following, IMO.
Unreadable laws give liberal, law-ignoring judges the license to interpret such laws in any way that they want to. In other words, liberal justices can easily cater to minority interests by simply interpreting unreadable laws in ways that promote minority interest agendas.
B. Johnson – good point, although there is a simpler explanation behind the Democrats’ collective addiction to spewing out meaningless laws: stupidity.
That, taken with what you say, makes for a truly wonderful combination every time…