\t\t\t\tComments from Democrats on the Keith Thompson essay lead me to believe that they see themselves as more virtuous than Republicans. Isn’t it odd that the political process, which is first and foremost a discussion of policy alternatives to meet common ends, would degenerate into an opportunity for assertions of personal moral virtue? <\/p>\n
I don’t think there’s a great difference in moral values between Democrats and Republicans, because we all believe in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Where we disagree is over the tactics and policies that make these desirable ends available to the greatest number of people. Democrats (and others on the left) want to soak successful individuals and corporations and transfer their wealth to the less successful. They want to impose heavy regulations on business based on a “precautionary principle” that makes it hard to accumulate capital. They want quotas or preferences to create the illusion of equality of talent and motivation where it may not actually exist. They’re more concerned about the size of the gap between rich and poor than they are with the objective state of the poor.<\/p>\n
Republicans see these policies as punishing virtuous behavior and rewarding indolence, ignorance, and jealousy. <\/p>\n
So who has the moral high ground? \t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Comments from Democrats on the Keith Thompson essay lead me to believe that they see themselves as more virtuous than Republicans. Isn’t it odd that the political process, which is first and foremost a discussion of policy alternatives to meet common ends, would degenerate into an opportunity for assertions of personal moral virtue? I don’t … Continue reading “The virtuous people”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbifyw-Rg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3302"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3302\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}