Why Liberals Are Selfish By Kyle Becker

 

Why Liberals Are Selfish by Kyle Becker over at American Thinker

It is a constant refrain on the left that conservatives are "selfish."  Those who want to work and keep the fruits of their own labor are castigated as self-centered and greedy, while progressives are held out to be all-compassionate and kind for supporting government-run programs for every malady under the sun.

Enough of that rubbish.

The term "selfish" in various contexts implies that someone wrongfully holds onto or gains something at the expense of another.  While conservatives and most political moderates uses the term "selfish" to deride those who take things that do not belong to them -- in other words, what that person did not produce or receive voluntarily from another -- the modern left uses the term "selfish" to upbraid those who want to hold onto something of their own that is demanded by another.

The left therefore seems to assume that the life, labor, and property of any individual are the possession of "society."  This is a tribal, mystical, and frankly demeaning notion that is anything but concordant with civilized peoples.

If a person is born into the world and has the potential of leading his own life, which culminates in that person's death and no other's, then it is logical and moral to look at that living being as a totality.

In reality, a human being is not a cog in a machine, or a blob of protoplasm in a swamp of humanity, or whatever analogy reflects a part of a whole being subordinate to the whole.  He is a sentient being, alive within the cosmos, and should be afforded every opportunity to direct his own inseverable experience, so long as he does not impinge on others' right to do so.

It only follows, then, that choice and voluntarism should follow in every sphere of life and without artificial boundary.  As in society, as in economy, as in politics, as in private life.

So in the course of a person supporting his own life, as capitalist economies allow the overwhelming majority of humanity to do, it is wrong for another legally and morally co-equal human being to extract life and labor from him.  Coercive redistribution is a violation of the voluntary nature of the free economy; whether to work or to starve is a choice all people are capable of making.  Reality is not coercive; it is instructive. 

As the preconditions of voluntarism and choice vary in the economy, the definitions of "selfishness" tend to become altered in the language.  In a free economy, people trade their labor at their own discretion.  It thus becomes a moral affront akin to "selfishness" to take the fruit of another person's labor, since one is free to work hard himself and is expected to trade value in kind.

In a socialist economy, withholding labor is considered "selfishness."  Enslavement to the central managers and to one another follows of its own accord.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/06/why_liberals_are_selfish.html#ixzz1yKxntkt9