Inkless Press

"If you are not a liberal when you are young,

then you have no heart.

If you are not a conservative when you are old,

then you have no brain."

Mark Twain

The Liberal Mind

I feel somewhat competent to write about the liberal mind because I used to be one. When I was young and immature and smoking a lot of weed, I used to be as liberal as anyone alive today. I rebelled against my parents, authorities, and the status quo. I believed that corporations and rich people were all greedy and corrupt. Like every liberal, I hated injustice and thought there should be no poverty or wars. The problem, to me, was other peoples greed. The problem was always in "other people". It was only decades later, after much personal research and the suffering of life, I realized that the problem was in me. I discovered that liberalism does not work. And for many reasons, moral and psychological, it can never work.

It does not take much intelligence or perception to see what is wrong with the world. Even a child can sense injustice. Being able to see the problem does not mean you have the ability to know the solution. So, before you start to impose your solutions on everyone else, you had better make sure they actually work. The liberal mind is so impatient to fix everything, it does not take this essential first step.

The liberal mind has settled on two main solutions to all our problems—taxes and laws. First, they try to find a way to get someone else to pay to solve our problems. No matter how much you give liberals, they always want more. When you give the government a dollar in tax money it keeps two-thirds of it to pay the paper pushers and bureaucrats that redistribute it. So only about a third goes in the intended direction. And most of that has proven to be totally ineffective in solving our problems. After more than fifty years of liberals and Democrats voting for every tax increase, have they solved one single problem? Have they solved poverty or bigotry or greed? Have they eliminated suffering or war? All of the available evidence shows that the tax solution has solved nothing.

Their second favorite liberal solution is to pass new laws. Liberals are now trying to do what their parents and authorities did to them. They are trying to impose their version of the good on everyone else by passing new laws. I would ask all liberals—who are honest enough to admit that they are liberals—a simple question. Is what you are demanding of me, what you do, or is it just something you want everyone else to do? Does it not bother you that you are forcefully taking from me my money and using it to impose your morality on me? Every year of my working life my taxes have gone up. Even in years when I lived close to the poverty level. Every day, you are making me more of a tax slave in order to fund your moral beliefs which are opposed to mine. How can you, who hate it when anyone attempts to impose their sense of morality on you, be this hypocritical?

The liberal mind tries to force its agenda on others by inventing non-existent rights. Nobody is born with the right to free health care, housing, or a free lunch. There is not enough money on earth to pay for it. No matter how greedy or selfish, rich people or big business may sometimes be, their money is money that liberals didn’t earn and don’t deserve. This phony belief in the right to spend other peoples money on a liberal agenda, is just greed masquerading as generosity. We have no right to another’s work. Work is life and breath. To take another’s money by endlessly increasing taxes, is to steal heartbeats. Generosity is something we can personally choose to give. It is not a right we can demand. If you like, you can be an example of the generous, you can even encourage it. But, when you force someone to be generous in a way you define, it is no longer generosity. It has totally different results that are often destructive. Trying to force people to do your version of the good is not goodness.

In recent times, a million women marched in the streets in favor of "pro- choice". Why have these women never marched against the Taliban, a true evil that did not allow women even basic human rights? Why have they never marched against Saddam Hussein who raped and killed women and children by the thousands? Or why not march against Al-Qaida, terrorists whose stated goal is kill every man, women, or child who does not believe as they believe? Instead, these women marched for the right to kill unborn babies.

If a woman is pregnant and wants it, she will put your hand on her stomach and gleefully say: " Oh, feel the baby kick". If she doesn’t want it, she calls it a fetus. She is not even honest enough to call it an unborn baby. Such an admission would be too painful. To a liberal women it is just "unviable tissue"—a useless thing inside her that wants to ruin her life. It is a parasitic, cancerous growth that must be removed. The liberal mind has more concern and compassion for an old tree, a snail darter fish, or a spotted owl than it does for an unborn baby.

These pro-choice women do not believe in freedom of choice. They do not promote all the other legitimate choices such as abstinence, non-promiscuity, or adoption. They promote just one choice, the selfish choice to kill the baby whenever it will cramp their lifestyle. They want to terminate their mistakes with a surgical solution to a moral failure. Is this the best they can do? This sad disrespect for human life cannot be, as some have suggested, the glorious peak of liberal womanhood.

The liberal mind will defend and promote lying Democrats, infidelity, sodomy, pornography, promiscuity, prostitution, drugs, and socialism. It will defend violent movies, bad music, biased reporting, and hatred toward America. In short, it will defend the lack of self-control in all of its many forms. But it will not defend the right to spend what you earn, an unborn baby, or America when it comes under attack. It will not promote traditional families, moral values that prevent suffering, or personal responsibility.

When I began to realize that it was even more useless and destructive to try and replace the tyranny of the rich with the tyranny of taxes, I began to change. Creating a greedy bureaucratic government structure to replace the corporate structure is even more wasteful and unfair. At least corporations invent and provide useful products and services that we cannot do by ourselves. When has a bureaucrat or politician ever done that? When I began to see for myself how liberal laws create more problems than they solve, I learned that meaningful change can only come from within. Unless we first learn self control, attempts at controlling everyone else will always fail.

The liberal mind wants what everyone wants: a world free of injustice, lies, greed, poverty, suffering and wars. Unfortunately, there are no laws that can make this happen. There is no legislation, liberal or otherwise, that will fix what is fundamentally wrong with this world—the people in this world. When people become as good as they want everyone else to be, that is when the world becomes a better place. When the liberal mind stops judging everyone else and starts to look inside itself for lies, greed, and injustice, only then, will the wars end.

Copyright, 2004

Michael A. Roybal