(03-13-2019, 11:09 AM)jj82284 Wrote:

(03-12-2019, 07:13 PM)mikesez Wrote: Have you read anything by Edmund Burke or Montesquieu?
What do you think conservatism is?

In the US conservatism is the basic adherence to first principles, natural rights, limited government, enumerated powers and individual liberty.  

Yes, as a philosophy heavily influenced by the enlightenment there is an obvious commitment to empiricism and rational thought but your above rationale presents two problems: 1.) you discuss rationality within the context of administering central economic planning, 2.) you don't even follow your own stated principles of observation.  

To your 4th point, conservatism doesn't define the role of government based on what the government is or is not doing now or how it may or may not be perceived.  (1) It decides based on the concept of limited, enumerated powers.  And we should only expand those powers through constitutional processes with overwhelming bipartisan and cross regional support through the amendment process.  This leads to your first problem or contradiction with real conservative thought.  You describe conservatism as prudence in central administration of the economy.  That's measured statism, not conservatism. 

To your second and most glaring contradiction, you don't really take in observations.  You're a servant to whatever makes you FEEL GOOD at the time.  Ironically in this case both the minimum wage and AGCC are both linked in their application.  When Thomas Sowell was working for the department of labor he devised a series of tests to determine the efficacy of the minimum wage law and whether or not it caused unemployment.  When he presented this test to his superiors he expected to be congratulated or commended.  Instead he became a pariah.  Why?  Because over a third of the departments budget at that time was derived from enforcing the minimum wage laws!  There is no debate that they cause unemployment.  They only serve to eliminate jobs for those who don't have the skills to meet or exceed the economic productivity level necessary to justify the minimum wage.  But Facts don't matter.  We want to feel like we are protecting the little guy from the big bad corporations who only have employees because they stole children from their beds and forced them into involuntary economic arrangements.  As a conservative the only thought process should be, (2) "is it the role of the state to interfere in private voluntary economic arrangements that are no threat to the public at large" not "Well since the prevailing wage is orders of magnitude higher than the minimum wage it helps me sleep at night knowing that I am saving teenagers from afterschool jobs."  WHY?  Because we know that invariably, there will be those who will abuse that power!  We see it today in plain view.  

As to AGCC its the same story.  We live on a planet covered with liquid water and powered by a massive fusion engine at the center of our solar system.  Thereby, the energy on the planet is in direct correlation to the output of the fusion engine and (3) 95% of the greenhouse affect is based on water vapor that man has literally no control over.  of the 5% remaining, CO2 isn't even the most potent.  But let's be generous, let's say its 2.5% of that 2.5% our country only represents about 25% of global emitions.  So now your down to about 5/8 of 1%.  Of that....  only half is our technology, the other half is biological.  so now your down to 5/16 ths of 1%.  So if your fuel tax is effective at achieving a 10% reduction lets say, then you are now looking at a grand total of 1/32 of 1% of the total greenhouse affect at the cost of my business and the personal freedoms of hundreds of millions of Americans...  Ask the French how that system works out over time.  But why does this myth persist?  It's quite simple.  It employs thousands of employees at the EPA and billions of dollars to secondary education and to private companies that want government advantage.  Is that the role of the state?  Certainly not.  But it sure does feel good to watch captain planet in our pajamas and relive the old days!

1) The definition of conservatism should be broad enough to be meaningful in other nations.  Not all governments ever had a list of enumerated powers.  Ours did, and "de jure" still does, but we have agreed that in the 1930s, our Supreme Court decided to ignore this.  We have agreed that it would have been better, if more federal power was desirable, to add that power by Constitutional Amendment, but they circumvented this.  I hope you will agree that the way Roosevelt actually did it had extremely broad support in every single region of the country.  Undoing 80-90 years of jurisprudence over the economy would be revolutionary.  Whatever definition of "conservative" we settle on, "revolutionary" has to be its opposite.

2) I would add "defending the powerless" or the "little guy" to the proper role of government.  You may not like that, but you invoked "the public at large" and you have to see that this includes many, many "little guys".

3) You're right that water vapor is a greenhouse gas, but I hope no one mistakes the length of your paragraphs and the numerous figures cited for an actual holistic understanding of what the different gases in the atmosphere do.  You've cherrypicked the figures that make the problem seem small.  But you are ignoring the interactions.  Warmer air holds more water vapor.  The relationship is not linear.  A 1% rise in absolute air temperature can give a 20% rise in the carrying capacity for water vapor.  If some external force (like a comparatively small amount of CO2) causes a small increase in temperature, a much larger increase in atmospheric water vapor will occur right after that.  The water vapor, as you know, absorbs much more infrared heat from the sun than the nitrogen and oxygen. And it will continue to do so for hours or days, up until the point that the vapor condenses into a cloud.  So the total heat stored by the atmosphere increases much more than 1%, and the average size of clouds and storms also increases much more than 1%.

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