Liberal, Conservative, Moderate, and The State of the Union

Dear readers,

In this post I will compare the Juris Naturalis viewpoint to the most common viewpoints in America and also discuss some of the current events around the world and how they relate with Juris Naturalism.

Most people view the parties as being like this:

I would like to propose this view instead:

Now I will explain all of these world-views which will show why I arranged them like this. First I will talk about the differences between conservatives and liberals. Generally speaking, conservatives believe in freedom of the fiscal or monetary side for people, but believe that it is necessary to restrict people from doing socially, or morally incorrect things. Liberals, generally believe that people have a right to do whatever they want when it comes to social and moral issues, but believe that they cannot ruin the economy by using their money unwisely. Keep in mind that you will very rarely ever find someone who believes that there should be complete freedom in one area and total restriction in the other, but this is just a general idea of the parties. I would also like to state another part of my bias, which is that in my personal life, I am very conservative, but I believe that the government should not be conservative for reasons which I will explain throughout my posts.

The next topic of discussion is the middle ground. By my diagram of the parties, you can see that there are really two middle grounds. How is this possible? Well like I said, conservatives and liberals both restrict one side of liberty and support the other. So moderates take the route that there should be some restrictions on both sides, while Juris Naturalists believe that there should be liberty on both sides. Just consider the red in the diagram liberty, and the blue restriction. A libertarian can be a Juris Naturalist, but most libertarians are not, so I have separated them.

Now that we have a basic understanding of Juris Naturalism, you can clearly see that Juris Naturalists are for the smallest government possible which I wrote about in my last post. Now that we know this, I can talk about current events in the world, and what a Juris Naturalist would say about them.

The most current thing that has happened is the president's state of the union address. Unfortunately I wasn't able to watch the entire speech, but I saw a large portion of it. I have to say that comparing this speech, and every other state of the union address in this country's recent history to the founder's beliefs was absolutely appalling. Every single point that was made was either about increasing government, or spending money. The only thing in the speech that I could agree with, was that our country's debt is not entirely Obama's fault. While he has certainly contributed to the debt, and raised the budget by hundreds of billions of dollars in the name of saving money, all of the presidents before him for the last hundred years have done basically the same thing. Yes conservatives; this even includes Ronald Reagan. Reagan raised the budget during his term just like so many presidents before him. Now during the Clinton years, you often hear that we balanced the budget and had a surplus. This is true if you consider a surplus as being trillions of dollars in debt. You see, when they say that the country had a surplus, they mean that they spent less that what their budget called for. They truly had no money what soever. In fact they owed trillions of dollars, but it was still considered a major feat, and then the next few years, they went on raising the budget again.

The word that I probably heard the most in the state of the union last night was afford. From our government's current position, this word means nothing. President Obama said that people question if we can afford certain programs and then went on to try to explain why we could. What does afford mean to our government. We can't afford anything. We have no money and owe trillions of dollars. Think of an individual person with hundreds of thousands of dollars in credit card debt. He may still be able to spend money, but eventually he will have to pay it off or declare bankruptcy. Now think of that same situation times one billion dollars. That's the trouble that our government is in, but instead of trying to find a way to pay this debt off like any individual would have to do, they continue to spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year. The reason we spend so much money is that we have so many programs that are supposed to help the American people, but you would never want to get rid of those right? Well I will explain why I believe we should get rid of the vast majority of government programs and how it would still help the people who benefit from those programs in my next post.

Common Law

Dear readers, I thought that to begin my blog, I would discuss worldview, and state mine. My worldview will very likely not be yours, and I don't expect you to see the logic in what I am saying, but I believe that there is plenty of logic to it, frankly because it is my worldview, and therefore I would be crazy to believe it if I didn't think it had any logic to it. The reason I start with my worldview is because so many writers try to be an unbiased observer, but this is an impossible feat. Therefore it is best to state your bias before you begin writing the "obvious truth". My bias is basically a libertarian, but I like to just say that I believe in Natural or common law. Richard Maybury calls this belief, Juris Naturalism in his book Are You Liberal, Conservative, or Confused, and that is the title I will use throughout my posts. Juris Naturalis is Latin for natural law. Natural law is the belief that law is a science that is to be discovered, not made. It has always been the same and always will be the same in the same way that physics or biology are always the same. You can see by this connection between these sciences and law that (just as in physics) we have not discovered everything about law. We were well on our way to making incredible discoveries about law, but sadly, today all of the things that we knew about law are completely forgotten. Thankfully there are still plenty of writings by some of the greatest scientists in this field that are well known today, but people simply fail to draw the same conclusions that these men had. The chief of these writings is known as the constitution. At the beginning of the discoveries natural law, it was decided that to form the law, governments would look at every major religion or philosophy and find things that all of them agreed on. The results were the beginning of common law, which our country is founded on. Common law is based on two basic laws: Do all you have agreed to do, and do not encroach on other persons or their property. From the first law, tort law was formed, and from the second, criminal law was formed. The governments based on this common law were easily the most prosperous in the world. When the founders broke away from England and became a separate country, they had a difficult decision to make. They didn't truly want to form a government, but they realized that if they didn't, then someone else would. Why wouldn't they want a government? Because government itself is a violation of common law. Government is given the special privilege of encroaching (common law #2). They realized that any man who is given power over an entire country will become a slave to this power. He will misuse it to get more. The founders came up with the only possible solution to this problem; they created a government, and then they crippled it, giving it as little power as possible. They clearly outlined how little power the government should have in all of their writings. They outlined it so well, that for the first hundred years or so, even the power-hungry polliticians didn't completely destroy the country, but the next 100 years was a completely different story. This country has spent trillions more than we have, and then encroached on their people's money to pay off their mistaken policies. Almost every decision the government has made over the past hundred years has increased the power of the government, and decreased the power of the people. Whether liberal, or conservative, the government has increased spending and decreased the people's rights. Now that you can clearly see my bias, I will begin explaining it in more detail, and comparing it to opposing viewpoints in my later posts.