The Rants of Issachar

I've been reading one of Mike Todd's blogs, Waving or Drowning, for a while now. It makes interesting reading. Incidentally, I can't remember how I found that blog, so if anyone else has read it before, let me know. You might help me figure that out. :)

He made a comment about how Christians approach justice & mercy issues today. I made a brief comment and he sent me an e-mail asking me to expand on that. This is what I wrote:

It seems we all hate the liberal/conservative labels, but we continue to use them because they're all we've got.

Actually a good deal of my thinking on the subject comes from domestic Canadian politics, and that carries over into the international. What do we do about poverty in the downtown east-side? In Wally? What do we do to provide medical care to everyone? What do we do about drug addiction?

The "liberal" response as articulated by the NDP is full of compassion. Poverty: Welfare. Medical Care: More money for the health care system. Addiction: Legalization, Regulation and/or safe injection. But then there's the consequences: Welfare: Welfare trap. More money for health care: Our flat-out inability to keep up with the rising cost of late-life care. Legalization etc.: Increasing drug use.

Bringing up these objections gets me dismissed by some as lacking compassion, but I'm not satisfied with solutions that don't work. At the same time it seems like "Conservatives" dismiss the problem as unsolvable. I don't buy that. There are solutions. They're just not simple. And like surgery, they're not always pretty.

For the international scene I think that we need to accept that compassion without results is not particularly valuable. Thinking about the situation in Darfur for the moment. How do we stop genocide? Words won't do it. They might make us feel better, but the fact remains that some people really do want to rape & murder other people. The only thing that can stop them is superior force. We have that. But if we use it we need to realize that we're going to have casualties and we will accidentally kill innocents. So what should we do? For Darfur, I really have no idea.

What about poverty? I believe that debt relief & aid are good, but they're merely band-aid solutions. The only thing that will solve the problem is if they have the same thing that makes the west rich. Working & productive economies. So how do we help them get that? By helping them start industries that can succeed in an international marketplace. Global trade maximizes production, so we need to help them succeed there. One such industry is agriculture. It has relatively low barriers to entry and they have the skills to do it. So where do we come in? We need to eliminate our protectionist subsidies on farming. I don't mean reduce, I mean eliminate. We're richer so we can undercut them easily and we need to stop doing it. Canada needs to get rid of them and import restrictions. The US has subsidies that make ours look small and Europe has subsidies that make the American ones look tiny. I think we should start by getting rid of ours and then putting pressure on other countries to get rid of theirs. This will hurt. Our farmers will suffer and we need to help them. There's no reason to have all the burden of this land on farmers. We spread the pain evenly. Agriculture is not the only industry we need to look at.

So that's just one thought for now. As I said, I don't know how to make a "Conservative" position work, but since "Conservative" economics seem to work, I want to find a way to make them work from Christian principles.

This is in the same vein as something I wrote before, but apparently never got around to posting. Guess I'll have to write it again sometime. Basically I feel the need to explain why I'm a Conservative. It's not because I don't have compassion. It's because I do.

Posted by:  westcoastloon

I was reminded again just now of what a teeny-tiny world it is. I followed the link from your post to the waving and drowning blog and found a link there to someone who's on the IECG list I was telling you about. Small world indeed.

I think it's interesting that that the response you're getting to holding conservative position is the accusation that you lack compassion. Sounds pretty school-yard-ish to me.

Liberal or conservative, I wonder if we'll ever get past our NIMBY- thinking or the idea that it hurts less if it's their pain and not mine. I would like to think that I would vote in favour of a government that planned to raise the cost of my groceries to provide sweeping and effective aid to Africa. But would I really? Would I do it without grumbling? I can't say for sure.