Some Kind of Conservatism, That

Despite fierce competition, this is the most absurd argument in any article that I ever read. The inimitable Tim Ball does it again. What is interesting is that this article received top billing in today’s Canada Free Press, the leading online paper in the country, serving 750.000 readers. Canada Free Press calls itself “Canada’s conservative free press”, its conservative voice. But one would have thought that the first priority of a conservative would be to conserve the environment. You know, the environment, the place where we make our home. Yet conservatives seem to want to change it---for the worse---through mindless, unending population and economic growth.
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Conserve the family, conserve our natural rights, conserve our culture, conserve our language, conserve our Christian heritage, conserve the traditional concept of marriage, conserve free speech, conserve parental authority------but trash the environment in the name of growth. Develop farmland. Fill in wetlands. Massacre the boreal forest. But save the family. Some kind of conservatism that.

This is just another illustration of how phony and meaningless these philosophical labels of liberal, conservative, socialist and capitalist, right and left, have become. Their mock internecine battles are meant to disguise their basic commonality, their real ideological agenda---- that of achieving power. Once obtaining it, they quickly disappoint their constituencies by the brazen embrace of policies they once denounced, and re-christening them as necessary expedients to achieving their goals, from which they have never wavered of course. Their goal is to grow the economy, and quibble about what slice of a growing pie each special interest group will receive. Liberalism, conservatism, socialism, and capitalism are all merely factions of the prevailing perspective of our time---Growthism. A force of greed, cultivated discontent and ruin that is far more sac-religious and subversive than any burka, mosque, temple or foreign tongue is thought to be.

Read and comment if you will http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/13332

Tim Murray
August 3/09