I guess this should have been my first post, explaining my definition of a common sense conservative. While there are many definitions of being a conservative in America, but I think we all can agree that conservatives believe in small government, low taxes, national security, personal responsibility and having the free market regulate business. Intended or not, conservatives in general has also championed religious causes like the abolishment of abortion, general morality and keeping the relationship between government and religion they way our founding fathers wanted, not the “separation of church and state” liberals have been dictating for decades now. In today’s world there are many different classifications of conservatives; fiscal and social, conservative and moderate. Someone like Rudy Giuliani is a fiscal conservative but a social liberal, while some religious leaders are social conservatives but fiscal liberals. I call myself a strong fiscal and social conservative. I don’t blindly follow these values but use my brain and being realistic in applying my conservative values on today’s issues.

I like to use the example of Ron Paul, who is on paper a good conservative but his ideas are unrealistic in today’s world. One example is his calling for going back to the gold standard and a overall stringent monetary policy. While I do agree that having a very weak dollar and a large debt financed by foreign governments is a bad thing and will probably nip us in the butt years from now, going to extreme measures like going back to the gold standard and taking a huge chunk of money out of the economy isn’t the answer. For one it will be virtually impossible doing these things without causing a large global depression that would make the Great Depression look like a blip on an economic map. We do live in a global economy and things are a lot of different in the world than even 20 years ago. There is many more industrialized nations like China and India that are competing for business. We didn’t get to point in our economy overnight and we shouldn’t be serious about solving these issues overnight either. We have to make sure that we don’t make our economy worse, we need to make strides to shore up our monetary policy and make the dollar stronger versus others. The main culprit of our economy is running a huge budget deficit. Money is better spent and more jobs created if individuals spend their own money than having the government doing it for them. If we can get congressmen that are serious about balancing the budget, keep taxes low, controlling earmarks and not depending on economic flukes (Clinton got lucky from the revenue from the Internet bubble, so he can taut having a surplus) we can have an long running strong economy that would be the envy of the world.

Another Ron Paul example is his foreign policy. He believes we shouldn’t give any foreign aid, getting our troops out of foreign affairs like Iraq, Germany and South Korea and interfering in foreign government affairs like Israel. This policy might have worked a century ago, when travel between countries were much harder and there are no such things as nuclear bombs and chemical weapons. Ron Paul needs to realize that there are people out there that hate who we are because of what we stand for and will do anything to destroy us. While I don’t know your views on WWII but I think that you would be against fight the Nazis in Europe because they didn’t pose a threat and didn’t attack unlike the Japanese. Sixty years ago was the Nazi and today is Islamic extremists. The world is smaller than it once was with any group of rebels can get the weapons to destroy entire nations. I am a strong believer that since we are the only true superpower left in the world, we have the responsibility to our citizens and the resources to fight these threats before it reaches our borders. While we have built up governments that have eventually turned on us like Iraq and made enemies from our support of Israel, foreign aid and our presence in other countries have helped us become a safer nation and a safer world.

Other examples of non-conservative values but are either necessary or impossible to change would be monopolies, Social Security, Medicare, and government agencies like the Department of Education. We need to either limit the scope of these problems (like trying to change Social Security into private accounts, renew talk about abolishment of the Department of Education and implementing a flat tax)or slowly improve the situation (like actually cutting spending to balance the budget). If this means compromising our values once in a while, that’s ok as long as we win the minds of the citizens and win the war. Ronald Reagan for his tax cuts to pass had to sign bills that had huge spending increases in them. As we learned, tax cuts worked to increase tax revenue and if we can actually decrease spending by controlling the growth in spending, eliminating earmarks and cutting unimportant programs we can balance the budget.

As you will all see in my upcoming posts, you will see a mix of conservatism mixed with a little common sense and being realistic living in today’s world. We might not win every battle but we need to win the war versus the liberals where they want to strive for socialism, which history has proved doesn’t work.