So Conservative I had to become a Liberal Socialist.

[hootinholler]

I was raised to be conservative and grew up in SW Pa. I turned 12 about the time the effects of the Clean Water Act were starting to kick in.


The Point, in Pittsburg 1968, the Monongehela River (foreground, to right) and the Allegheny River (upframe) form the Ohio River

Note the Allegheny is a tad cleaner than the Mon. I watched the color improving and fish species and grasses improve on this river. The brown is not farm runoff, but mine tailing and dewatering runoff. I can attest that if you didn't have your well set into a limestone water vein, you had sulfurous nasty drinking water.

I don't know if there ever was a study of the excess deaths this caused, or if the effects pollution on that scale can be properly quantified, but the beneficiaries of not having to clean up their mess were Big Coal and Big Steel.

From Maine to California, the cost of cleanup of the pollution of industry is paid by future generations. The currency is not only in superfund tax dollars to remediate places like Love Canal, but also in the health effects (insured and uninsured alike) on the local populations. There could be books written listing the sites across the nation where the risks and costs have been pushed off to the public.

The conservative thing to do is to make these polluters pay for the cleanup and the health care, rather than burden the public with it. If the industries as a whole can't or won't conduct their business in a way that doesn't harm others, then they should be taxed and regulated to reduce or even remove the pollution and to cover the impact of the industry on the public's well being. But, gasp, that would be socialism! I say bring it on!

Can anyone answer what is so conservative about today's GOP? Why is it that today's captains of industry can not only continue the practices that led to the conditions of the '60s, but far exceed them when measured in damage?

How is it conservative to exempt the gas industry from the Clean Water Act? Who will bear the cost of that disastrous victory for the T Boone Pickens clean gas crowd? How about the mountaintop removal crowd?

What exactly are today's conservatives actually conserving?

-Hoot

[Snotcicles]

1. To answer your question, wealth for the rich. nt

[hootinholler]

5. But it doesn't conserve their wealth in the long term.

Even during the years of the heaviest taxation of the highest incomes, the wealthy still could accumulate great amounts of wealth. Howard Hughes ring a bell?

-Hoot

[renegade000]

2. I have the same feeling.

When it comes to the government's role in regulating the economic playing field, I always feel that I'm defending the traditional role of the modern liberal democracy against these radical suggestions that we don't need any form of intervention (no matter how seemingly common sense and slight). Unfortunately, I don't think all the anarcho-libertarians realize how much freedom suffers if they weaken and advocate against popular checks against the concentrations of power/wealth in the hands of the very few.

It's like they're so afraid of some perceived slippery-slopes to communism or authoritarian socialism, that they are completely blind to the slippery-slopes back to feudalism that it took humanity thousands of years to climb up and out of.

[hootinholler]

3. Feudalism

Why it's the perfect word for it.

-Hoot

[hootinholler]

4. oops

Edit Grr, wrong place.

[stillwaiting]

6. They conserve the tracks for the runaway train that's carrying wealth straight to the top!!

That's about it.