I was just trying to nail down Mad Jack's position; personally I am a conservative who believes in limited government- especially at the federal level. I believe the safety net should be provided primarily by charities, and to some extent local government.
I err on the side of fiscal conservatism. The ultimate goal of everything I view as "good" is that what I view to be good policy is designed to turn people into responsible citizens. Nothing should be free. If you want welfare because you are unable to work, you have one to two years to acquire a skill that will allow you to work. After that, you're on your own. Medicare and social security should be personally managed accounts that you are forced to save, tax deferred, and not allowed to collect until you are of retirement age (or take the payout in substantially equal payments, as with 401k early retirement). This makes a retirement a very personal responsibility that the government only ensures you take part in. I view it as highly preferable to the current system, in which the government takes your money, invests it in poorly returning treasuries (then loots the account in the mean time), and then is on the hook to pay out the funds when you retire. Welfare should be a path to work, nothing more. SNAP should be abolished and replaced with a food bank, like it used to be. This would provide the poor with adequate nutrition and prevent misuse of SNAP funds. Because this food would be provided at cost, it would have a far better cost to benefit ratio. By limiting the choices available at the food bank, you could reduce unhealthy food choices and reduce obesity and other poor outcomes. The military should be largely cut. Putting our nose in the business of others does us few favors while making us few enemies. We spend far too much on our military, with almost one out of every two dollars of military spending in the world being spent by the United States at 44% of the world total. Russia and China each spend about 5%. If we cut back to say, double what Russia and China spend combined, we'd still be cutting back our military funding by more than half.
Sentencing reform and prison reforms are another big issue for me. We incarcerate far more people than we need to, ruining their lives and turning them from potentially productive citizens into criminals that are unemployable and damaged from their experience on the inside. We need to have a rehabilitative system for nonviolent offenders, and seriously curtail what we view as a crime worthy of doing time for. It is a waste of people's live sand taxpayer dollars the way we currently do things.
Ideally, charities could fill in the gaps. But the problem with this idea is that America used to be more homogenous, more about being a part of the great institution that is America. You would donate to lend a fellow American a hand, or a fellow Christian, or what have you. With the rise of our increasingly self-centered culture, we now view those not like us not as fellow Americans, but as leeches, or rich people that skim off the work of those less fortunate, or as radical leftists or hard right nutcases. Within the framework of our current fragmented society, making charity work for a large number of people that are in need would be difficult to impossible. However, were it possible, I would view it as preferable to government intervention.
Basically I don't really fit the left or the right, I just have a particular vision of what would work best for the country that sort of spans both sides. I'd certainly piss a lot of people on either end of the isle off if I were running things, but I would also save the taxpayers piles of money and -maybe- run things in a way that makes people a little bit better off overall.
