Conservatives believe the liberating Power of private business and free enterprise is essential. Private business and free enterprise are far from being the source of all evil. We believe private business is far better than big government.
That is true simply because the government takes your money at gunpoint. Private businesses, on the other hand, have to persuade you to freely exchange money for goods and services.
Taxes do not set you free
Think about that. Taxes are levied. They are collected using the police power of the state. Fail to submit what you owe timely and the revenuers are at your door. The government takes what you own to settle the debt. Think all those ads for tax settlement services. They don’t happen accidentally.
Dealing with a private business it is a free will transaction. Think about the DMV. What do you do if you don’t want to sit at the DMV? You cannot go to another DMV. There is only one DMV that’s the one run by the government. You are stuck.
Some guy cannot get your business by opening up another faster, nicer DMV across the street. There is no other place to go for lower cost and better service. If some guy could he would. He would make millions of dollars doing it and your life and mine would be better for it.
Competition
Don’t take my word for it. If you don’t want to wait in line at the post office can you go to another post office? Well, these days, yes you can. UPS, Fed Ex and all the rest of the carriers have made a ton of money and made our lives better and easier. This miracle is called competition.
Conservatives like competition, not because we are mean and like to hurt puppies and pull the wings off butterflies. We like competition because of the results it achieves. The people running those businesses know they have to convince us to give them our money. They cannot just take it from us at gunpoint like our noble and well-intentioned government can.
Exchange-based on free will
Because we give a business our money of our own free will and can go somewhere else when we are not satisfied the private section makes every single transaction, every single day better for every one of us. They are just faster, more polite and provide better service. It is simply a difference in philosophy.
Nancy Pelosi once said we need to raise taxes because Americans want a jobs bill. Stop for a minute and think about that. What does that actually require? She wants to take money from the people who make jobs, businesses, and investors. Pelosi wants to take the money they would use to open new factories, buy new trucks and hire new workers and send it to the government.
Then the government, after buying the Robert Byrd Center for the performing arts, funding NPR, Amtrak, and innumerable other payola, kickbacks, earmarks, and other forms of waste, fraud, and abuse… Then the government takes the remaining trickle. A trickle of that once mighty flow of private sector money and spends it on shovel ready projects.
Projects most of which nobody really wants. The government will fund a $50 million project that ends up hiring 30 people. It just better to let people keep more of their own money. It is simply wiser let people grow their own companies for the reason they would like to be better off themselves. Doesn’t that make more sense?
Conclusion
When it is all said and done, that is conservative. People aren’t perfect or perfectible. Conservatives revere the U.S. Constitution because it limits the power of people in government because they crave power over and control of others. We prefer business to government because if you don’t like the way a business treats you, you can go to another business. If you don’t like the service the government provides you don’t get to go to another government. Conservatives believe the liberating Power of private business and free enterprise is essential.