Conservatives' and Liberals' Moral Psychology

This is an old column but I came across when someone else things to it as part of a response to one of his current columns on ideological diversity.  It discusses how liberals give us to charity than conservatives and the implications of that, in the context of the public policy debate in which Liberals are widely agreed to be more generous public spending/public resources/public funds/the budget to the downtrodden.  

I've read/heard elsewhere that this finding disappears when you control for religion, so it's religion and not conservatism that makes people more charitable, and it's in religion and not liberalism that makes them less so. (check to see if this is in the column, and check to see if it's true)

More recently, it's been discussed some from the unearthing of a 1981 quote from Bernie Sanders that he does not believe in charity.

This might seem to accord with my analysis on liberals and conservatives and their differences on collective action problems: liberals favor coordinated solutions to collection action problems and conservatives don't, in general. 

Maybe this is because liberals overestimate/overprotect free-riding/action of unenlightened self interest, so they don't believe uncoordinated action can solve it, and maybe it's because liberals see themselves and those around them, who are also highly likely to be liberals, free-ride/act of unenlightened self-interest frequently/most of the time, i.e. that liberals free-ride/act on it unenlightened self-interest more than liberals do.

Maybe because they're less generous slash more vicious/less virtuous, or maybe it's because they have a different technical/positive view/belief, i.e. they believe and uncoordinated solution is less likely to happen, and are just taking the rational action rashly taking the action consistent with that belief.

Test both of those 

Maybe liberals just think that they don't have to do it, and it will even get done more efficiently by government.

The pros think they just should not have to do it.

Are they doing it out of defensive free-riding or initial free-riding?

Bleeding Heart Tightwads - NYTimes.com

Why Would a Conservative Support the State and Local Tax Deduction?

In this review of the tax proposal by Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Mike Lee (R-UT), Amity Shlaes and Matthew Denhart criticize rolling back the deduction for state and local taxes without pointing to any reason at all.

Why exactly?

I know why liberals might support this deduction and oppose rolling it back. State and local taxes can be a lot more regressive than they might think best, so allowing them to be deducted from more progressive federal taxes (which implies that the difference in revenue to the federal government is made up for under the more progressive rates) alleviates that burden somewhat, among other more mundane reasons for it.

But what it also amounts to is low-tax states and localities subsidizing high-tax states and localities, so I don't know why conservatives would oppose scaling back this deduction or eliminating it.

The Right and Compromise

Reading this piece in NRO made me think back to the intra-conservative argument over strategy and whether Republicans ought to attempt to work with the White House or obstructively oppose him on everything, an argument that flared in 2013 with the government shutdown that resulted from Ted Cruz's attempt to defund the Affordable Care Act with an amendment to a budget bill.

But a point I haven't heard made either then or now is that the position of Cruz and his supporters to oppose compromise in their mission to defund was self-effacing. Why make defunding the ACA the hill to die on rather than repealing it, if not out of compromise?

Conservative Healthcare and Insurance Ideas?

Greg Sargent reports on the prospects of further reform to insurance and healthcare policy, now that the full range of benefits of the Affordable Care Act have kicked in and more and more people start to use them, making outright appeal more and more difficult.

According to Kaiser Family Foundation Larry Levitt, one possibility for a policy change both sides could embrace, assuming that "Republicans do get to a point where crippling or eliminating the law is not the only acceptable outcome," is "allowing insurance sales across state lines... if the law's uniform federal minimum coverage standards are kept".

This would indeed be a great improvement to the law, but let's not pretend that it's a newly suggested proposal that liberal proponents of the law haven't supported in the past, or that it's a conservative idea that liberals would only accept for a trade.

Bloomberg is the Worst Kind of Pro-Regulation Liberal

Bloomberg is the worst kind of liberal because he validates the libertarian and conservative accusation that liberals want to regulate more and more the private lives of citizens, but he does so not for the cause that most liberals would find worth that cost of validating the opposition, but for a cause that most liberals would assign a lower priority.  In other words, I am (and I believe most liberals are) willing to defend government regulation in finance against objections that it's illegitimate paternalism before I am willing to defend nutritional regulation from those same objections.

Is the Fight Against Inequality or Poverty?

As the Iron Lady did in very quotable fashion, many conservatives today continue to accuse liberals of fetishizing economic equality to the point of willingness to sacrifice the living standards of all, including the poor, to promote it. As Margaret Thatcher put the charge, liberals "would rather the poor were poorer provided the rich were less rich".

This accusation made towards liberals is false almost without exception. For just one example, here's Matt Yglesias refusing to trade living standards for equality. In this case, even though economic recessions may reduce income inequality by cutting the incomes of the rich more than those of the poor, Yglesias nevertheless opposes recessions and so declines the living-standards-for-equality trade because absolute living standards for all outweighs income equality.

Yet, many liberals have indeed claimed the struggle against economic inequality as their own. How ought their position be interpreted? While there might be other valid reasons to oppose inequality, the most undeniable reason to do so, and thus the most effective grounds on which to make the case, is that inequality implies inadequate living standards and poverty that are avoidable.  

The Inherent Conservative Advantage

Insofar as conservatives want to conserve the status quo so as to not throw the baby out with the bath water and prevent incurring unintended consequences, and liberals want to strive for a better one at a risk of uncertain consequences, conservatives have an advantage because there is only one status quo to defend, making it structurally easier for them to organize, while there are an infinite number of possible status quos making it much harder to organize.