Canada

Wish I could upvote this multiple times. It is consistently a pay now or pay later equation. Often spending money to avoid a problem costs you less than paying for the fallout later.

The bedrock of their economic calculus is a disbelief that they could ever possibly net profit by spending on other people. As I said in the last paragraph of this comment, it is their concept of society itself that is limited/constrained in scope, and that has nothing to do with money.

You're weighing the cost of fixing a problem now vs later, and they're clinging to the idea that because they're not the victims of that problem (currently nor in their own optimistic projections), it would be best to simply never solve it at all. But talking about cost to (an intentionally vague) us is generally more acceptable (and compelling) to a liberal society than its counterpart -- dehumanizing whomever currently pays it.

These are all arguments to convince someone without empathy to accidentally do the right thing.

Well thats the thing, fiscal conservatism is effectively the trolley problem zoomed out to the size of an entire country.

At its core, we dont have infinite money and it is a zero sum game.

Fiscal Conservativism should be the process of balancing out to figure out "we only have finite money, how do we maximize our yield spending it to save as many people as possible"

So, yes, you have to discard emotion and indeed accept that you just cant save everyone. There's starving kids in africa and etc etc, you don't have infinite money and cant save em all.

So you gotta assess which investments give you the best bang for your buck, and theres tonnes of really really good ones that for very little money produce extremely good yields on people saved per dollar.

If you’re truly conservative then you’d also support a deregulated free market that allows extreme wealth disparity.

Only a short sighted conservative believes that. Once you zoom out you have to accept the market simply cannot be unregulated, it always naturally becomes regulated.

The question is, who gets to regulate it. Do you want to place protections now to prevent bad actors from gaining control, or plug your ears and pretend it'll never happen.

Captured markets are largely inevitable, all you can do is put protections in place to slow it down for as many decades as possible.

If you're truly conservative then you'd also support a deregulated free market that allows extreme wealth disparity.

That sounds more like mercantilism to me.

In my experience, people with empathy who identify as ‘Fiscally Conservative’ just want the government to be efficient.

Actual left, true left, is when you start spending money at the cost of efficiency to further improve quality of life past the point of getting good returns on it, when the point is no longer saving money, but improving life just for the sake of improving life.

Fiscal Conservative should be "spend money only when it saves money"

It's just that a lot of so called "conservative" people cannot wrap their head around the super crazy concept of an investment where, as wild as it sounds, spending money to improve quality of life genuinely yields paybacks down the line at a really good rate

The problem is a huge amount of current folks have been heavily indoctrinated into the us vs them mentality that being Conservative and Liberal are mutually exclusive.

The reality is... its not, you can simultaneously want the government to invest money wisely while also being pro human choice, and the cool part is the science and numbers even indicate these two are the same thing.

The whole "us vs them" mentality is the entire reason so many conservative folks think you have to be anti-liberal, because they inherently as well think its mutually exclusive, so they fundamentally cannot understand how spending money saves money

Breaking down that assumption is step 1 to fixing things, you have to abandon the concept to fully realize that truly being actually fiscally conservative is synonymous with being pro human rights, pro abortion, pro lgbtq, pro immigration, pro science, pro education, pro healthcare.

fiscal responsibility

Thats the important part

Who would you say is more fiscally conservative, a person who wisely invests their money in the future, or a person who wastes it all on bricks to throw at their neighbours windows.

The latter is what current "Conservative" parties are.

Fiscal Conservativism is about wisely investing your money and avoiding wasting it on stupid shit.

Conservative parties rely on "lalala I cant hear you" tactics. Theyre the sort of person who gets a small weird lump and ignores it and then 15 years later die to cancer they could've gotten treated a decade ago.

Thats not fiscally conservative, thats just being fucking stupid. Sometimes you do need to spend money on basic human needs because it net benefits everyone, even on pure paper number balancing.

Im conservative in the "hey we can save a lot of money if we do x/y/z" sort of way, like a person who clips out a bunch of coupons and ends up getting 90% off on their groceries.

Thats also being conservative, you are conserving your resources wisely by allocating them in ways that pay back well.

And turns out... those ways coincidentally are pro human rights.

I hold that liberal goes beyond that, starting to spend extra money and tax extra when the returns are no longer as good and instead it's less about literally saving money and more about quality of life

Fiscal conservative is "once the returns aren't as good, stop there"

Whereas liberal goes "nah even if the returns start to suck, it's better to further tax to even further help people purely for ethical reasons"

Liberal mindset is ethics > money

Fiscal conservative is money > ethics

Current "conservative" policy though is power > inflicting suffering > money > ethics

Which I respect and I'd love to get us towards, but tbh we gotta convince people to get past step 1 first of realizing spending money to actively hurt people, surprisingly, isn't a good fiscal policy (which somehow genuinely confuses so many people, it's crazy)

We are still at the stage where too many people think that spending money inflicting active harm is genuinely a good idea and a good use of taxpayer dollars

They think paying cops to go around kicking indigenous teens in the head is truly a solid Fiscal policy. Truly.

They think paying money to fund bombs being dropped on children is good Fiscal policy.

They think paying money to poison our water, destroy our ecosystems, and pollute the oceans is good Fiscal Policy

Getting past that part is step one

Literally just convincing these people to stop stabbing themselves is step 1.

Maybe later we can talk about convincing them to help others after we get them to stop hurting others...

you would vote Liberal

I do, because despite its name our liberal party is conservative lol

The NDP are Liberal, the Liberals are Conservative, and the Conservatives are fucking batshit insane fascists.