Party politics

Newspapers and mainstream media love polls which demonstrate the lack of political initiative in Canada. We are constantly being bombarded with studies demonstrating the political apathy of people. Why would that be? Is it that people don’t care if there country is free or not? Well of course they do. People are naturally political. What people are apathetic about is party politics. Why? Because party politics makes liars and hypocrites out of everyone and nobody wants to be either. Party politics lacks intellectual consistency. Intellectual consistency means principle and sometimes principles run contrary to the politically advantageous solutions. All parties being out for their own interests—that is to secure, makes their leadership and decision making impossible to predict..

A free individual can defend limited government, low taxes and liberty or a socialists can defend his principles of nationalization, enforced equality, and high taxes, because their logic makes abstraction easy, thus individual knows what his position is on every day issues. But what party politics does is make the individual defend a party’s stance. A party which disdains principles, thus the individual can never confidently predict their stance on any given subject.

An individual believing in liberty doesn’t want to have to defend limitations in freedom or increased government spending. Harper budget. Amidst party politics, the conservative spent the last year in his social circle proclaiming the need for a limited government and now he has to turn around and say “well in this one instance, higher taxes are good. This destroys his or her credibility as an independent thinker. It clearly paints him as a follower, or worse yet an opportunist that blindly defends the ruling party’s arbitrary whims. How does someone who believes in a limited government defend Harper’s decision to continually award Bombardier more money. How does a conservative defend Stelmach’s decision to abruptly raise royalty taxes on our most important export in Alberta, thereby threatening to bring the province to its knees? How does an exponent of freedom defend George Bush’s patriot act, or a bans on gay marriage. These all run contrary to the principles he most values.