I don't really like the conservative and liberal labels. They've both been changed so many times that nothing you say about either of them makes sense for more than ten years or so. They make sense in principle if you use the definitions to say that conservative means a little government and liberal means a lot of government, but that ignores the history of both terms, as well as the meanings that every individual person has when they apply them to themselves and others. Plus I've never really understood why Hitler is supposed to be right-wing (I suspect it's largely because he fought against the USSR, so they must be opposing ideologies). As best as I can tell, socialism is where the government owns everything, while fascism is where people own things but the government has total, absolute say on what they can (and should/must) do with them -- seems to me like socialism is just fascism that doesn't pretend to be capitalism.
Ayn Rand and Karl Marx, who are about as opposite as you can get, both envisioned a utopic society with virtually no government. In Randianism, the government gets out of everyone's way completely and supercapitalist competition takes care of everything, possibly even including privatized law. In Marxism, the government extends its reach, as a society progresses from feudalism (where everything is privatized) to capitalism (less privatization, government takes care of some essential public services like roads and armies and law) to socialism (the government controls major industries) until eventually getting to the perfect Communist utopia (which no nation has ever reached, regardless of calling themselves Communist), where the government basically becomes everything, and therefore ceases to exist apart from the rest of the nation.
Both philosophies end up at the same place, but in opposite ways, and I think the core debate comes down to what human nature is. The analogy that I use is that we're on one side of a river and want to get to the other, and can't decide whether we should use the bridge or just go through the water: the ultimate question is whether we're in a car or a boat. Marxism works on the premise that people are basically good, and their goodness can be unlocked and magnified (or, as most extremist Marxist regimes end up doing, that humanity can be made good by force or by the process of elimination), while Randianism works on the premise that humans are selfish, and that selfishness should be encouraged and then harnessed for the common good.
Of course, the real question is more complicated than the binary nature of the analogy would seem to indicate. Humans are both good and bad: created in the image of God, yet fallen. And no one actually wants to get all the way to the other side of the river; virtually everyone recognizes that we do need government in some capacity.
As a conservative-leaning Christian, I usually find political discussions to be a bit one-sided, as a result of the polarization of politics. As I said, I believe humans are both good and bad, and that that ought to be reflected in our system. I didn't celebrate "Human Achievement Hour" instead of Earth Hour, and I don't think selfishness is a virtue. It seems like most conservatives online, in reaction to Obama's policies (and Bush's in his last few months), have gone a bit too much in the direction of "CAPITALISM F*** YEAH!" The pendulum always swings too far, as they say.
I think the system that made America great was a binary system with a harmony between church and state. Yeah, separation and all, but separation doesn't mean there's no church at all. They ought to complement each other. The government enforces basic rights (life, liberty, pursuit of happiness/property) and when deciding how to protect them has multiple separate branches competing with each other for our approval (ideally), the economy has private businesses that need to make good products that people will buy in order for the company to survive (ideally), and the church -- especially local churches, who best know their communities -- pick up those that get left behind by the government and economy, through private voluntary donations that individual local churches will best know how and where to use. It's not perfect, but I think it's as good as anything we've come up with.
Gradually, over the last hundred years or so, the government has become more centralized, requiring less approval from the people, the market has become less competitive, both through monopolies and government regulation, and the church has retreated from the public square, happy to sit in their corners and preach to themselves and use their dwindling donations to build bigger churches for fewer people, leaving the government to take care of the people they used to help. We are, and have been for a long time now, going in the opposite direction we started out in.
Anyway, getting back to the video, I'm not sure. I think it all should be taken in balance. As a modified conservative/libertarianish-esque-lite/whatever, I do think we ought to have a lot of freedom as far as the government is concerned, but as a Christian, I don't believe individuals are truly free unless they are in God's will -- something the government can't enforce. And it's tough to know how to juggle it all biblically. The Bible gives rules for a theocracy that no longer apply, and it briefly references small groups of Christians living in communes, and it says to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's -- to submit to governmental authority so long as they don't intrude on God's turf -- but it doesn't really give specific steps to take when we're at the wheel. So yeah, I don't really know.
While this digresses somewhat from the point at hand, it's still vaguely topical
Dude, I am the monkey-fighting
king of digressing from the topic.
