The mind of a liberal

I have often pondered why opponents of my political views, namely liberals, think the way they think.  I am only considering opponents within the U.S.  Of course there are opposing external viewpoints from my own that come from dictators, communists, fascists, and all form of tyrants and potentates, but I am only concerned here with those who oppose me at the ballot box.

My frame of political reasoning is primarily conservative; a small government that acts as a defender of individual rights, protects its citizens from foreign threats, promotes commerce, and fairly administers justice to those who would use unjust force in society.  And that would be all that I would want my ideal government to do, and nothing more.  Just the stuff that the U.S. Constitution empowered the government to do.  

My political opponents, the liberals, want almost the exact opposite from the government.  Liberals desire a large, all powerful government that controls with regulations, rewards and punishment any activity within the U.S. that can be gamed, or otherwise unfairly manipulated in order to profit or unfairly advance a participant's interests.  Liberals want a completely level playing field for everyone in every endeavor, regardless of circumstance. They desire as small a national defense posture as possible, and divert the vast resources needed for a strong defense  to social concerns instead. 

On the surface, most of the liberal position seems reasonable.  Who wants people gaming the system?  Nobody, right?  Who wants an un-level playing field?  That's just not right, is it?  Who wants to put up with pollution of our air and water?  Only idiots and rotten people, right?

But on most issues of how best to manage the limited resources of the U.S. citizen, these 'reasonable' positions start becoming impractical, and often are contradictory to other liberal philosophies.  On occasion, I conclude that many if not most liberals are just plain evil, when they vote in droves to take the money from one American by brute force from a ham-fisted federal government and give it away to other Americans who have not done anything to earn it.

But liberal behavior defined as simply being evil doesn't explain things so well.  I can't imagine that 150,000,000 Democrat voters cast their ballots the way they do because they are all evil.  The math just doesn't support the 'liberals are evil' theory, although the immorality of taking one man's resources away and giving them to another who did nothing to earn them is nothing short of evil in itself.

No, most liberals are not evil.  But why do they support political party that punishes some Americans at the expense of other Americans?  

The only answer I can come up with is that the liberal mind is one of a perfectionist: if something is not perfect, then take steps to make it so.  Most conservatives understand that nothing is perfect, and structure practical arguments to the issues of the day that make the best of an imperfect situation.

Not good enough for liberals, however.  As the old saying goes, the perfect is the enemy of the good.  Back in the early days of LBJ, Lyndon Johnson attended a single room classroom when he was four years old.  That little classroom in Stonewall, Texas was about as spartan as things got back in the day: 20 wooden desks, a chalk board, and a wood stove to heat the place in the winter.  That's it.  

And LBJ figured that people just didn't care enough about education to make little kids sit in those little shacks, so he did something about the situation.  He started the U.S. down the road to profligate spending by everybody that owned property in the form of property taxes to be committed to public education, and now nobody has to go to school in a one room classroom anymore.

Every citizen now has access to publicly funded mansion-like school properties that have lunchrooms, libraries, school nurses, school psychologists,  and enough administrators to populate an army battalion.  All at the mandated public expense.  

That little one room school was good.  But not perfect.  And LBJ made our education system perfect.  Right?  Wrong.  His goal was to perfect the outdated education system, by simply overwhelming the system with money.  Other people's money, of course, but we got to where we are today in our horrible public school system as a result of the good intentions of a one time little four year old boy sitting at a rickety old wooden desk in a stark, barren one room school house.  

And so it goes with all liberal causes.  A wheel chair bound lady can't get into a public facility to buy a jar of pickles because there are two steps to deal with.  Is this any way to treat our crippled folks?  No siree Bob.  Let's mandate that every public access facility across the Fruited Plains have wheel chair access.  And we as a nation spent perhaps a trillion dollars doing so, and now that lady can access that store and buy her jar of pickles.  

But why don't liberals, in doing their good deeds, ever consider the costs?  Money is no object in seeking perfection in most liberal minds.  

It should be an object, however, because money doesn't grow on trees.  This is something I haven't a clue as to why liberals don't consider the costs in achieving their perfect solutions to many problems, as well as solutions to problems that aren't even problems.

Maybe somebody will give me a hint one of these days as to why liberals think the way they do.