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Sea Shepherd fans routinely parrot the talking points issued by this group on their “reality” program series, web sites and blog posts but these are heavily dependent on the omission of information and use of hyperbole.In ethics and logic two wrongs do not make a right, regardless of the alleged successes of one party over a perceived wrong and the exaggerated vilification of the another as the perceived wrongdoer. And in this case information is withheld from individuals and misrepresented by this group to disallow full analysis of the situation as a whole or of individual incidents.For example, Sea Shepherd have repetitively asserted that the International Court of Justice had stated in their March 31st, 2014 judgement on Japan’s JARPA II whale research program that non-lethal methods of sampling were available when in actuality the court made the following statement on page 47 of this Judgement:“The Court notes that the Parties agree that non‑lethal methods are not a feasible means to examine internal organs and stomach contents. The Court therefore considers that the evidence shows that, at least for some of the data sought by JARPA II researchers, non‑lethal methods are not feasible.”[1]Australia and New Zealand’s representatives and experts agreed, as stipulated in the above statement, and the court had in paragraph 127 (p.45) of the Judgement previously found “that the JARPA II activities involving the lethal sampling of whales can broadly be characterized as “scientific research”, voiding the assertions made by Sea Shepherd and their fans on this matter.Even their claims made in regards to the illegality of the short lived NEWREP-A research program is voided by paragraphs 246 and 247 (p.76) of this Judgement:“The Court therefore will order that Japan shall revoke any extant authorization, permit or licence to kill, take or treat whales in relation to JARPA II, and refrain from granting any further permits under Article VIII, paragraph 1, of the Convention, in pursuance of that programme.”“The Court sees no need to order the additional remedy requested by Australia, which would require Japan to refrain from authorizing or implementing any special permit whaling which is not for purposes of scientific research within the meaning of Article VIII.”As stipulated, the Judgement was limited to JARPA II and Japan was free to enact another program, as long as it complied with the aforementioned convention article. And unlike JARPA II, no Fin Whale was to be subjected to lethal research in NEWREP-A and the yearly take of non-endangered Common Minke Whales and Antarctic Minke Whales was reduced to 333 per year.It should also be noted that a total of 18 fin whales were taken from the Antarctic during the JARPA II program[2], the bulk of special catches being comprised of the above mentioned Minke Whales. And that Japan had abandoned their plans to take Humpback Whales in December 2007[3] and had not taken Humpback Whales from the Antarctic[4], regardless of Sea Shepherd’s claim that they had saved and were protecting humpback whales eight years later, in a December 10th, 2015 blog entry by Paul Watson on Sea Shepherd’s official web site:“Sea Shepherd Conservation Society has actively opposed the unlawful slaughter of whales in the Southern Ocean since 2005 with aggressive interventions that saved the lives of 3,651 whales including Minke, Humpback and Fin whales.”[5]On the other hand, Sea Shepherd’s true actions in the Antarctic against the Japanese whale vessels were catalogued in Case ID 12–35266, resulting in their breach of a Supreme Court upheld injunction in the case[6], in turn eventually leading to a US$2.5 million dollar payment from the group to the Institute for Cetacean Research and further agreements with Kyodo Senpaku Kaisha Ltd[7].They had purposefully rammed Japanese vessels, maneuvered their vessels in a manner to result in collisions with these vessels and attempted to disable these vessels by fouling their props, these acts violating numerous international laws which were written in part to protect fragile marine environments like that of Antarctica, and had endangered the lives of people in hostile waters where rescue operations would be hindered by weather and remoteness.They had also previoulsy used projectiles containing an acid whose International Chemistry Safety Card not only warns of serious injury to humans (including blindness and severe, permanent burns to the skin, eyes and respiratory tract) but harm to “aquatic organisms”, the words “Do NOT let this chemical enter the environment” appearing on this card.The facts in regards to this activity were withheld from fans of this group, who were presented with a scenario that painted the group as heroes on their television programs, along with several post hoc ergo propter hoc based claims about Japan’s catches and statements that dismissed the potential injuries that could have occurred and the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuits February 25th, 2013 determination that these qualifies as acts of piracy under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea[8][9].The Final Award in ICDR Case No. 50 20 1300 0952 also established a pattern of misrepresentation and deception by this group, the arbitrator in this case concluding the following in Section 8, Paragraph 110 (p.65) of this September 18th, 2015 document:“…the Arbitrator finds that while the Ady Gil was disabled by its collision with the Shonan Maru #2, it was not sinking on its own. Respondents nonetheless concocted and implemented a secret plan to scuttle the vessel, for their own reasons and without consulting the vessel’s owner. This decision was not made for the primary reason of reducing navigational hazards, as Respondents later claimed when their actions were brought to light, but for purposes of continuing their mission and more fundamentally maintaining the high drama that they believed the Whale Wars audience had come to expect, and on which SSCS’s own popularity (and potential future fundraising) in part depended”.[10]Sea Shepherd had claimed the Japanese had rammed and sunk this trimaran in January 2010[11][12][13] and in numerous solicitations for donations that year, including a campaign for this vessel’s replacement[14]. But Maritime New Zealand’s official November 2010 report on the collision confirmed that the MV Ady Gil had accelerated forward into the Japanese vessel[15].In regards to Paul Watson, the founder of this group, the aforementioned Final Award also contains the following in paragraph 38 (p.19):“…the Arbitrator found Mr. Watson’s testimony regarding certain events to be highly evasive, internally contradictory, or at odds with his own prior written statements, and in certain areas simply lacking the basic indicia of genuineness that instinctively inspires confidence and trust.”His current stance on the Canadian Seal Hunt did also contradict his statements on this issue in his 1978 interview with Barbara Frum on CBC Radio, in which he openly condemns the campaigns:FRUM: Mr. Watson, how easy is it to raise money against the seal hunt?WATSON: Well I think that of all the animals in the world or any environmental problem in the world, the harp seal is the easiest issue to raise funds on. Greenpeace has always managed to raise more money on the seal issue, for the campaigns, than have actually been spent on the campaigns themselves. The seal hunt has always turned a profit for the Greenpeace Foundation. And the other organizations like IFAW, API, Fund for Animals also make a profit off of the seal hunt.FRUM: Are you suggesting that they fight for seals rather than other animals because it’s easy, or easier, to raise money that way, or because it’s a profit maker for them?WATSON: Well, it’s definitely because it’s easier to make money and because it does make a profit. Because there are over a thousand animals on the Endangered Species List and the seal isn’t one of them, the harp seal isn’t one of them.[16]Looking at the above evidence and the lack of evidence in regards to fulfilling their mandate, I do not believe they are ethical or are effective in their goals.Footnotes[1] https://www.icj-cij.org/files/case-related/148/148-20140331-JUD-01-00-EN.pdf[2] Scientific Permit Whaling[3] Japan abandons plans to kill humpback whales[4] Scientific Permit Whaling[5] Opposing the Japanese Pirate Whalers in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary - Sea Shepherd Conservation Society[6] FindLaw's United States Ninth Circuit case and opinions.[7] Sea Shepherd and Paul Watson agree to pay Japanese whale killers millions to settle lawsuit[8] http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/general/2013/02/25/1235266.pdf[9] Sea Shepherd conservation group declared 'pirates' in US court ruling[10] Ady Gil and Earthrace Limited v Paul Watson and Sea Shepherd Conservation Society - ICDR Case No 50 20 1300 0952 - Final Award - 18 September 2015[11] The Busy Little Japanese Kiwi Office of Absurd Propaganda[12] Rammed Vessel Ady Gil Sinks[13] Japanese Whalers Ram Sea Shepherd Ship Ady Gil[14] More Trouble for Sea Shepherd Society[15] https://www.maritimenz.govt.nz/commercial/safety/accidents-reporting/accident-reports/documents/Investigation-report-Ady-Gil-Shonan-Maru-Lo-rez.pdf[16] Barbara Frum - Paul Watson Interview, 1978 CBC

I love this question because it gets straight to the heart of what compassion really means in politics.I feel that this is one of the cases where comparison between the two extremes better communicates the values of Conservatives, so allow me to try to first communicate my views of modern progressivism’s methods for dealing with the poor before explaining why I think that the Conservative approach is actually the more compassionate of the two.To begin, let’s talk about equality. Everyone believes equality is a fundamental right, however when Conservatives and Progressives say the word, they actually mean two very different things. When a Conservative says that they value equality, what they mean is that they value equality of opportunity. This means that Conservatives advocate that society should aim to free everyone from as many artificial barriers to their own prosperity as is possible. Progressives advocate for equality of outcome. They seek to make all people’s lifestyle relatively identical regardless of factors surrounding that person, such as job, education, or personal wealth. The Progressive stance is to use state authority to level the playing field through taxation or other forms of wealth redistribution until the wealthy and poor lifestyles meet in the middle. The Conservative instead wants to remove obstacles in the way of the poor so that he can rise to the level of middle class or even the wealthy, usually through actually removing government interference itself.As an example, a Conservative sees a rich man and a poor man, and asks the question, “What artificial barriers prevented this poor man from being rich?” If after analysis they discover that the individual’s choices, such as drug use or managing their money unwisely caused their poverty, then there is no systemic problem that needs to be addressed. This man made his bed and now must sleep in it. If, after analysis, it is discovered that this man has some been the victim of some system barrier to opportunity, such as being born to a district where he was not allowed to choose to go to a better school and instead received a poor education that didn’t allow him to progress to a good college and so on, then that is a failed system in need of redress. In that case, Conservatives would fight for future children in the man’s district to have the right of school choice so that they could flee known failing schools for better ones where their their success could better be determined by the quality of their effort than the luck of their birth.As you can see, this doesn’t fit the narrative of Conservative callousness as depicted in questions like: “Why don't underprivileged people just work harder? or “Is being poor immoral?”Conservatives don’t believe that people who are working are doing anything wrong. They argue for a freer economy that can sustain more positions where those who work harder can find better alternatives for themselves, which actually makes it easier for people on all levels of the work spectrum to be prosperous at the level they want to occupy.Alternatively, when a Progressive sees a rich man and a poor man, they usually gravitate to ask the question, “What did the rich man do so that he gained an inequitable share of the poor man’s wealth?” In this instance, wealth is not owned, but shared in collective, so inequity of wealth is a form of immorality. For Progressive ideology, any time there is an inequality, it must be due to some systemic societal structure which was engineered for the purpose of creating advantage and disadvantage for specific groups. The presumption usually is that the rich gained their wealth through exploitation of the poor, in keeping with class based arguments reaching back a few centuries. It is to say that no matter how the rich man gained his wealth, be it through the creation of a widely desired product or service, or family inheritance; and likewise without regard for the possible poor choices of the poor man, the basic assumption that somehow, in some way, the rich man benefits through some known or unknown exploitation of the poor man. For Progressives, the solution has nothing to do with rewarding the rich man for his good decisions or holding accountable the poor man for his decisions, or even understanding why the rich man became rich or the poor man poor — the solution is just to right the inequality through the most expedient means possible — tax the rich man and create social welfare programs to raise the poor man out of poverty.Now, I’m going to leave it at that, without getting into specific examples because both sides can list off pages, and pages, and pages of specific examples where their point of view was proven right, so no one wants a pissing match. I want to handle the theory on the question.Let’s assume that the Progressive model is true, but what are the outcomes of such a model? Frankly, by and large, it doesn’t work to tax the rich and give to the poor on several accounts.The first is that taxing the rich for the simple reason that they are rich comes off as an attack, which it is. For that reason, the rich will defend themselves by whatever means they have available, most notably, through means such as Capital flight. Capital flight is when the rich simply leave a stigmatizing wealth environment that overtaxes them, depriving that environment of the top tax base. It doesn’t matter what your opinion is on if they are being overtaxed, but what their perception is on the matter as they are the ones with the wealth and the mobility, and their perception determines the reality of the system. This shifts a much larger burden down on the next tier of the tax base, who also move, perpetuating the cycle downward until we reach a point where the richest people are still being taxed, now overwhelming so, but these are the people who, in fact, are just the riches of those too poor to leave. In this situation, the wealth producing class has fled, and there is no one rich enough to provide the social welfare support for the lower class, and the system collapses.The second way the Progressive model has failed is that it relies on a fundamentally flawed premise — if you give to the poor, that they will leave poverty.Let’s look at pretty graphs for a moment, because everybody loves graphs.Below we have a history of welfare spending in the United States. Prior to the 1950s, in spite of Progressive welfare reformers such as Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt, welfare spending was negligible. With the institution of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and the War on Poverty programs, many new programs began which, rather than encouraging the poor to receive aid in an effort to join the Middle Class and no longer need it, encouraged lifelong participation in the aid programs, both causing the poor to stay poor while increasing government spending. Attempts by both Republican and Democratic policy makers (Reagan and Clinton respectively) did almost nothing to prevent the rapid growth of welfare spending.And this spending isn’t small numbers. Often I’m forced to defend military spending because of my time in the US Marines. The argument is that if we have a bloated military and that, if we would just cut spending toward the military, we could solve all our various needs, welfare included. Mars too. We could all have free healthcare, education, basic living, and live on Mars if not for military spending. Looking at the actual amount of government spending, we see that welfare spending already dwarfs military spending as a percentage of annual budgetary expenses. In fact, military spending relative to GDP has stayed constant for decades, including the War on Terror and 15 straight years of warfare (perhaps an indicator of why those wars never ended) while welfare spending continues to grow at unsustainable rates.[1]But here is the biggest problem with all this spending — it isn’t creating fewer poor people.Comparing the percentage of poor in the United States to the amount of spending to help them, we see an uncomfortable reality. Poverty in the United States was on the way down precisely until the implementation of modern welfare programs. Since that point, as welfare spending has grown to more than a trillion dollars a year, the average amount of poor people in the United States has stayed constant at between 10 to 15% for over half a century.Sure. We can both agree that there are people who get out of poverty who are on welfare, (me for instance) but the system seems to obviously stabilize poverty, rather than help the last fraction (a very large fraction) of Americans out of it. This concludes the pretty graph portion, but now leads into a video that will steal a minute of your life you won’t get back.This is a case study on what Conservatives are afraid of.Any truly compassionate person would agree that the example of Kiara is not one which they would wish on someone they love. That’s the big question with compassion, “Would you want someone you love to live like that?” We have an attractive, young, person who is apparently reasonably rational and most likely very capable, voluntarily living a life of poverty. She, by the age of 30, had accrued four children with no spousal support or permanent role model for her kids. She has been living on government assistance for her entire adult life with no future prospects of ever paying that back. Furthermore, the level of income she has is just enough to keep her at the level of subsistence, but keeps her poor because if she actually did get a job… she would net less money toward her monthly expenses. It’s a dehumanizing and horrible cycle.What’s worse, she has absolutely no ambition to improve her situation in life. She is fine with this because the lifestyle is normalized and encouraged by those who don’t see it as a systemic trap that keeps people Kiara in a state of inescapable poverty. Why is this the worst part of her story? Because in the United States, poverty isn’t an inescapable status. It’s a product of behaviors. In the US, it’s more than possible to fall on hard times and need help, but it is very, very hard for someone who works hard with the goal of improving their status in life to be trapped in inescapable poverty. You gotta want it.This was backed up by research done by the Brookings Institute, a left leaning thinktank. They found that for a person to escape poverty in America all the average person had to do was three things.Graduate from high school.Waiting to get married until after 21 and do not have children till after being married.Have a full-time job.That’s it. There is no need to start a company or even graduate from college if you only want to break out of poverty. This is true of any race, ethnicity, religion, gender, or anything. These three rules apply to everyone.[2]Worst of all, at the rate she’s going, her behaviors are going to be passed on to her children, who I’m at a loss to understand how they will get a better idea, or even want a better life, if their mother continues this lifestyle into making them believe such as existence is normal.But what if we just gave people in Kiara’s situation more so that they wouldn’t be trapped at the level of poverty forever?Again, it really doesn’t matter how much you give, because it comes down to the behaviors. If people don’t learn positive behaviors that build and keep wealth, they won’t be successful regardless of the amount of money you shower them with. Proof, you say?Lottery Winners.Lottery winners are a beautiful case study on behavior because we selectively choose a population which already can’t do math, as the risk rewards payoff of actually winning the lotto almost never meet the amount they pay to it and then ask them to make good decisions with vast sums of money. Unsurprisingly, people like this do the darndest things, such as nearly half reporting having lost it all in around 5 years.So if throwing money at people without the mentality to handle it doesn’t solve people’s money problems even in the scale of millions, how will it do anything for those doing it in the thousands today? It simply won’t. The behaviors must change if these people’s lives are to improve. Under guaranteed welfare they have no incentive to improve their lives. They choose poverty for the security of a welfare check. It’s a miserable existence and I question anyone who would call this a “compassionate response” on either the grounds of their sincerity or the amount of research they’ve actually done into the real numbers of those trapped in the welfare cycle.So what is it most Conservatives actually suggest to remedy the problems? It isn’t just to pull the rug out, though obviously it is to end welfare dependency. For most programs, temporary needs to mean temporary, and all programs need to be temporary. There must be deadlines that people know, “I have two years to get my life in order.” At that point, they are contributing to society, which studies have shown is far better for the person than the meager amount they actually add. Working and earning their own money gives people a sense of agency in their lives and their decisions, and gives people a sense of value, to say nothing of improving depression and overall health, reducing the risk of crime, and opening the door to better opportunities down the road. No, they won’t be fulfilled in their dream job on day one. Were you? I like what I do, but I was still making pizzas for gas money when I was 16. It wasn’t bad for a first job, but I wouldn’t have had a lot of the growing experiences that I needed to be successful later on without that first job. This is adulthood.But what about the really hard cases? What about the people who still need help and these incentives aren’t enough?This is where the power of private charity is encouraged. Private charities allow people, individual people and not large bureaucracies to determine if someone will abuse their welfare as well as offer counselling, training, and support to transition out of the behaviors that cause poverty. This form of giving is far superior in actually solving people’s problems as charities are incentivized to focus their efforts, as well as specialize to help, rather than give the helpless just enough money to remain dependent on more welfare.The problem with charity is that according to Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism by Arthur C. Brooks is that as government programs are created to “solve” a social ill, it decreases charitable giving to a point that there is a net loss to services rendered to the poor. So in at least one very real way, more government funding actually reduces the funding for the poor by hurting the perception of need for a charity, and thereby drying up funding, while replacing it with substandard care and a population divorced from responsibility i.e. compassion.Second, charity does something that government bureaucracy doesn’t. It’s incentivized to be efficient where governments suffer inefficiency. While most charity is volunteer, government welfare requires many layers of bureaucracy that are all paid positions. This means that the money going into that program is devoured by a structurally inefficient allocation of goods before finally reaching the people it is intended to help. This is to say nothing of the need to ask for money, rather than make requests in the form of Congressional Budget Proposals, where they are incentivized to spend every dollar lest they have their budget reduced in future years. Furthermore, if a charity is shown to fail, it is less likely to receive more funding. If a government agency fails, it is more likely to receive more funding as the reason for the government agency’s existence isn’t to solve the problem, but to show that politicians really care about the problem that exists. This is perhaps a cynical view, but one which is hard to disagree with. This gives charities even more of a reason to achieve mission results where government only creates feedback loops of inefficiency and corruption, even if the majority of the people who work for these agencies are decent people committed to service and care.And a final reason Conservatives prefer charity to government oversight, they get to choose who gets the help. I am naturally much more sympathetic to money going to elderly homebound women, single mothers, veterans, and to alzheimer's research because of my personal experiences in my life. I simply care more about these because they have affected me, where other issues do not carry the burden of personal history in my soul. That said, I am deeply involved in following the outcome of the charity I support, more so than an average taxpayer contributing to an anonymous millions of people in cities across America — some who deserve the help, and some many who will merely become dependent on it. What I really don’t like is someone who lives thousands of miles away taking my money to spend badly on someone who they have no plan on helping either get out of poverty or live a better life, and if I disagree with that, men with guns are going to come to my house and take me to jail. I’m just not down with that.One last thing that I want people to consider, the rich don’t want to prevent others from being rich. This is an old stereotype that makes little sense when we think about the nature of Venture Capitalism. A good venture capitalist has no incentives to keep anyone poor. In fact, a good venture capitalist yearns for someone great, anyone great, who has a great idea to show up and make that VC tons and tons of money. More so than this, every person who has ever become wealthy wants to at some point, become a venture capitalist. In fact, this is the chief message of a book out there many might find interesting “Why We Want You to Be Rich: Two Men, One Message”. One of the men who wrote it, you ask?Donald Trump.No, the modern economy wants everyone to have the ability to be rich, and the rich know that. They know that a poor person today lives a better life than a king 100 years ago for the simple reason that millions of people working for their own benefit do amazing things when put together with all the other people doing the same. It’s to say that when you become rich by making a new invention, all of our lives get a little better because I can now have one of those new inventions. If you want to improve an idea, all of us are richer because we get the benefit of an improved good. If you create a service, all of us get access to something that makes our lives better. The rich fundamentally understand this, where the poor hold on to a stereotype that they being oppressed when it is in no one’s interests to do so.The Conservative philosophy isn’t as simple as “the poor should work harder” and you don’t get to feel great because you voted to help people through a really simple plan that “People X get $Y, which will be taxed from people Z.” The right way to do it is more complicated than that. It requires the individual in need to develop behaviors, and to pull themselves out of poverty. Furthermore, once they make the decision to do that work, all barriers keeping them down must be fair so that they have just as much chance to prosper as the next person. Conservatives want to create a system where success isn’t guaranteed, no one can guarantee success, but to make it so that you have as few obstacles in your way as possible. Will it benefit those that work harder more? Yeah, but more importantly, it will make it possible for that kid who doesn’t stand a chance today to escape poverty to have a path to follow and lead others down as well.To make an analogy, Conservatives want to build a ladder, which they can leave so that a person who wants to can climb up to meet them at the top. The system is the ladder, but the person has do the work to get up.The other alternative is the rope. Welfare is people at the top throwing down a rope and saying, “Trust us and we’ll pull you up.”Now on the surface, the rope looks great. There’s no work involved. You just put your trust in someone else and they do the heavy lifting until you are prosperous. Everyone wants the rope, but there are problems with the rope. First, an obvious one, once you’re at the top, how exactly are you ready and able to pull anyone else? What new skills have you gained and how will you stay there? Second, on the way up, once you’re in the middle, you really have no guarantee that anyone is going to keep pulling or if they’ll just let you fall. Worse, you have no idea if they will just leave you stranded somewhere in the middle as they move on to someone more politically expedient. And perhaps worst of all, they bring you to the middle and shout down,“If you can help us out come November, we’ll be able to get you all the way to the top!”“But that’s what you said last year.”“Don’t worry, just trust us!”Second, you can’t really know how strong the one pulling is, especially when way too many people are on the rope with you. People, even good people, make promises they can’t keep, not because they are liars, but because they really don’t see what the realities are until they get into office. They make promises that involve compromises they didn’t prepare for, and for many who voted for them on those promises, the end result is just enough rope given to them to hang themselves.So if it comes between a rope or a ladder, Conservatives want to maintain the ladder. Maybe we are untrusting cynics, but don’t want a system where we are reliant on others for our beholden to others for our livelihood. Second, we want to make it so that people can compete because competition is good for everyone. Furthermore, the act of competition makes people better people, people who don’t believe anything is owed to them and people who are thankful for what they have because they earned it. Finally, when the process is built to make fewer poor people rather than incentivizing them to say poorer longer, you are able to spend the funds for welfare on people who really, really need it, those who simply can’t participate in competition for legitimate reasons beyond their means. Frankly the current system doesn’t work. We’ve got way too much rope and the people at the top are just too stupid to do what they promised. This is true of both Democrats and Republicans. If you call it harsh to say that Conservatives want all poor people today to be rich someday, but they have to work for it, then fine. The ladder’s still there, but don’t expect me to pull you up or apologize that I have already climbed a few steps.Finally, this hateful stereotype that Conservatives only care about making the rich richer and the poor poorer is utterly garbage that needs to die in the hateful conversations far too common today. Look, as Progressives or Liberals, there are plenty of fine arguments which can be brought to the table about specific problems with the mechanics of Conservative ideology or particular plans, such as how to make charity work, or the fallout from removing the safety net of some 40 million people dependent on welfare when it is removed, but the vilifying and character assassinations of millions of people just because you either don’t understand our views or because lying to those who trust you is politically expedient to rational and respectful policy debate doesn’t leave you in the moral high ground.I’ll be honest, I don’t think the vast majority of Left leaning people are bad people. I don’t honestly buy a lot of the thoughts on the Right that welfare is just to buy people’s vote, or a new form of slavery. Maybe some really, really clever Democrats really did come up with such a plan, but really I think the main drivers of welfare spending comes from the Liberals who are genuinely good, kind, charitable people, who want people who have it worse than themselves to have it better. I simply think they are wrong in how they pursue that goal. I think they do it in a way that sacrifices too many freedoms for the people on welfare and simply doesn’t work to get them out of it. Me though? I’m an evil capitalist bastard who only wants poor people to suffer because… well no one really knows why. Racism? Maybe, but then I screwed up in creating over 30,000,000 white Americans also on poverty and the welfare rolls.Many know that they’ve been in those conversations and that something just didn’t add up. This write up should prove that these hateful stereotypes are baseless and that a great deal of thought on the nature of compassion has gone into the conservative stance. Let’s accept that it simply isn’t true, start arguing specific policy instead of character, and probably find a nice solution somewhere in the middle we can both agree on that will help many, many people far more than the political infighting we do as they suffer.***Thank you for reading. If you liked this answer, please upvote and follow The War Elephant. If you want to help me make more content like this, please visit my Patreon Support Page to learn how. All donations greatly appreciated!Footnotes[1] What Is Driving Growth in Government Spending?[2] Three rules for staying out of poverty

I’m seeing the common theme in many of these answers that, to paraphrase, reads as, “Buckle down on traditional Democratic policies, because if we just educate them… then they will finally get it.” This is to suggest that the working class are, as a whole, unaware of the policies to begin with. It’s condescending because it assumes ignorance, rather than seeking to understand why they have chosen to abandon the Democrats’ methodology.The first thing I would like people to understand is the nature of the bubble of comfort and security they exist within and their complete disconnect with millions of others. Quantifying it helps. The libertarian political scientist Charles Murray put together a short quiz testing the thickness of people’s social bubble: Do you live in a bubble? which was brought to the public by a partnership with the Public Broadcasting System. The quiz isn’t perfect, but I have seen few better wake up calls for millions of Americans. I would encourage everyone to take the test then post your answer to How do you score on PBS' "Do you live in a bubble" quiz? Did you have any answers that you care to elaborate on? and start to realize how disconnected many people are from the red parts of the map.If I had to guess why the disconnect, first I would say this is due to an insular urban society which doesn’t encourage interaction outside of the cities or with the urban poor, one which is actually very lacking in diversity despite it’s advocacy of it, particularly intellectually. It also has a large part to do with “the other half’s” depiction in the media. Cultural representation in entertainment is almost entirely one way. They feature upper-middle class socialites simply existing as if that was the norm.Consider the lifestyle of shows like How I Met Your Mother, where the cast includes people who can afford to live in nice apartments in New York City for years without jobs before becoming a) A successful architect, b) a powerful and influential environmental lawyer, and c) a famous news anchor d) a world traveled painter and e) Barnie. This is an extreme example, but think of the last time you saw a show about rural life that wasn’t one of these people getting lost on the way to another city or of a toothless redneck depicting rural “folk” as uncultured and illiterate, and possibly cannibals. Honestly, when was the last time you saw something that didn’t depict people living an “average” urban socialite lifestyle, which almost no one American has?I hope you didn’t just make the closest jump you could to Orange is the New Black, in which one of the main themes is the quintessential personification of how the left looks down upon working class “white trash.” Ask yourself even this, in a country with 200,000,000 Christians, when was the last time you saw Christianity displayed in a positive light, or acknowledging the many benefits to society that people of faith contribute, such as being the number one contributor to charity, both Christian and secular, as well as the greatest volunteers and providing more to orphans worldwide than any other source combined? I’m not just saying this as a Christian, I’m asking you to take a deep and reflective look at how you’ve seen hundreds of millions of people personified in the last two decades, and how you might feel if whatever group you felt as deeply about as Christians do about Christ being represented as horribly as these shows present Christians.Given that, we have to address the nature of the, “If we could just make them let us help them, they would connect better with us.” We need to evaluate the way in which Democratic “solutions” to problems have looked from the bottom. While not a visible problem to the Upper and Middle classes, many of these policies have fundamentally broken many of the foundations of living and caused worse problems for poor and working class people. Here are a few examples:Policies beginning in the 1960′s with President Lyndon Johnson’s “war on poverty” can be traced to significantly harming the family. At a time where poverty was already steeply in decline, programs were set up to aid single mothers. What they actually did, however, was to incentivize fatherless homes by paying mothers who have no father present in the household. If there is a single value which most working class people have, it’s family, and if there is one predictor of a bad life, it is being raised without a father. However, when the government began replacing the role of the breadwinner for families, it caused many single mothers to be wedded not to the father (or fathers) of their children, but to the state, ensuring not only that they would be trapped in American poverty, but also that they had to vote Democrat to ensure their continued lifestyle.This affected black Americans first and worst, and we are seeing the fruits of it today. It needs to be understood that directly after the Civil War and even until about 1910, American blacks had a rate of so called “nuclear family” households, with the father married to mother both living in the home with the children at a rate higher than even white families. In the 1960’s, when the so called “War on Poverty” began, the fatherless rate of black households rose to just 25% and a researcher named Daniel Moynihan called the situation of black fatherlessness a “disaster”. Why this is important is that Moynihan wasn’t some sort of Conservative, but a left leaning researcher working in the Johnson administration, a man who later went on to become a Democratic Senator from New York, and his report The Negro Family: The Case For National Action (better known as the Moynihan Report) outlined the threatening direction that this trend in black families would be taking.Now, the percentage of blacks raised without fathers is at 75%, well beyond the disaster point of 25% fifty years ago, and their communities are even more devastated after five decades of social welfare programs to fight poverty. According to Larry Elders, this is the number one cause of deprivation in the black community, far more than white racism. Why this is important to understand of the rest of the working class is that now the percentage of whites raised without a father in the household (such as was my experience) is now at 25%, precisely where Moynihan called it a disaster for the black communities.Continuing on, New Deal programs such as the the Federal Housing Administration, created in the National Housing Act of 1934 eventually worked to create a system of renters among the poor where rents became much more common than mortgages that actually lead to wealth creation. They also cloistered poor blacks in extremely cramped and extremely crime ridden housing blocks (see the Projects).Another New Deal Program, the Social Security Act created a system where everyone would receive a fair retirement plan, though they did not pay fairly into it. Furthermore, the heavy taxation imposed by the Social Security taxes caused millions to have little disposable cash to invest and save. Even at modest returns, almost all investment strategies outperform government payouts over the course of a person’s working life. So you have many who have earned enough to still be taxed, but ended up paying almost all their disposable income on a program that won’t exist when they are older and need it.Minimum wage has been a deceptively damning Democratic policy. This week McDonald’s unveiled self-service kiosks nationwide. This came in response to the “Fight for $15” Minimum Wage advocacy program propped up by numerous champions of the Democratic party and backed by union organization.[1]This of course, means a conversation about manufacturing. The state of American manufacturing is a hard reality. In part, jobs by expensive workers were shipped overseas in one form or another and in part, a large part, because of automation. Automation has made the output of the United States continue to increase, channeling wealth from the working class to the entrepreneur class as fewer and fewer jobs are needed. This is most evident in the Rust Belt, where the name itself decries the state of economic collapse. There, excessive payments for factory workers spelled a great life for the few workers who could qualify, but destroyed the entire local automotive industry and the caused disruption and destitution for millions of workers. Left leaning news organizations do a great disservice to this problem with a selective telling of the history, such as this graph by FiveThirtyEight.It’s misleading because it tells the story of America’s outpaced increase in manufacturing output, but give hope that jobs are also on the rise. It’s interesting that they choose 2010 to start the graph, since a much more honest look at the state of American manufacturing can be found by following the American Enterprise Institute[2].By looking at the second graph, we can see that, while we have produced something of a half million manufacturing jobs since 2010, job growth in manufacturing has stagnated since the 1970’s and collapsed in the 2000s. This collapse began, not coincidentally, around 2001, the same year that China joined the World Trade Organization. This sudden and dramatic decline in the costs of labor markets, is what sent many of the jobs Americans had come to take for granted at exorbitant hourly wages overseas or incentivized for innovations toward automation to remain competitive against foreign corporations in similar industries.Looking to other parts of the country, high minimum wages have decimated entire industries outright. Consider agriculture. A look at my part of the country historically will show thousands upon thousands of acres dedicated to cotton fields and cotton production (and no, I’m talking about the 1960’s, not the 1840s.) My grandfather actually managed the town’s last cotton gin, as those cotton fields are now gone because no one can afford to hire workers and there is no technology to replace their labor. So no, industry hasn’t been automated… it’s just gone, leading to millions fleeing the rural areas for crowded cities and competing for the fewer and fewer jobs being created there.***This brings up the actual ramifications of the Affordable Care Act for the working class. Around the time the ACA began rolling out, I was a retail store manager, and wrote the schedules. Corporate had enacted a policy shift in response to it. Basically, most of our full time staff were getting a ceiling of hours where they were encouraged to get below 29 hours a week. For all the part timers, we had to give cushion in case we stayed open late, so I was never allowed to give someone more than about 22 to 25 hours. The reason for this is that a full time worker who never worked over 30 hours a week would drop down to part time status, which was good. You see, if we have only a massive staff of part time employees, then corporate has no obligation to provide now even more costly benefits, including health care coverage.The net effect was that I had to keep the full time people full time, but didn’t resist at all if they started to dip below a floor of 30 hours and, worst of all, make sure that our part timers had no chance of advancement. There was no force on heaven or Earth that would get them to reach full time status. They couldn’t even trade shifts because that could put them over the 30 hours if they really needed the money. They were stuck making next to nothing and couldn’t even work extra hours to make ends meet. The logical consequence of this was that many of my employees worked two to three dead end jobs just like the one I provided them… none of which were obligated to provide them insurance, which meant that they would be among the hardest working Americans out there, but still have to pay a government-mandated fine for not carrying insurance.The Affordable Care Act, in essence, incentivized thousands of companies to reduce the labor of millions of people because that was what was best for the company. I want to hate the company I worked for for this, but seeing the economic projections, as well as looking at the implications of John Roberson’s If your health insurance changed after Obamacare, in what ways did it get better or worse, and how did the cost of it change?, I realize that they were just doing what they had to for their survival.Prior to the ACA my family paid $350/mo for excellent health insurance. We were limited to the hospital near our house apart from emergencies, but copays were $20–35 and nearly everything was covered after a small deductible. It even had maternity coverage.Fast forward a couple of years once the ACA was fully rolled out. Insurance with the same group costs more than $1000/mo. No more copays and easy deductibles; every medical bill is simply split with the insurance company 50/50, excepting a couple of things that the ACA has specific requirements for. This is competitive with other insurers.In thinking about this just for John’s family, but then imagining providing that kind of insurance for thousands, or even millions of their employees, I can’t help but say I understand. I’ll be honest, the company I worked for wasn’t doing great. They were international, but paying their people an extra $650 a month by way of insurance premiums… that’s something that might have reasonably destroyed the company.I’m still bitter about it, though. Back in 2012, it made me sick to my stomach to know how much we were abusing our employees. I’m betting there were a lot more people in Corporate who shed even more tears about it than I did, but they weren’t as free to move as I was and couldn’t seek a lifestyle that didn’t make them hate themselves. That and other experiences were enough to make me abandon my business degree and focus on education and writing about politics and Conservatism. I don’t make nearly what I made in business, but with the money I make working for the schools and the support of my patrons on Patreon, I am able to provide comfortably for our family and sleep well at night. I was just so disgusted with a system that was portrayed as helping poor people, but instead created a class of people that went from poor — to hopeless.Millions of people who could have had insurance were no longer able to get it, and millions of others lost what they had. Millions more who had it are now paying much more for it, and suffering economically as a result. The Affordable Care Act created an environment where the largest hirers in America could not afford to provide care to their employees.Following the collapse of the markets in 2008, it made it such that employers had no incentives to bring back full time workers. Instead, they were incentivized to work around the new proposed legislation, they had to use shady and inhumane tactics that hurt their own employees just to stay afloat. And they did.This meant that the economic struggles of 2008 and the unemployment that followed never corrected. It just remained stagnant for years, with millions of full time workers out of jobs, instead juggling three crap jobs, making no money to save, never seeing their families, and still without health insurance. The worst part was how foreseeable all this was, or maybe it was how this was communicated as some sort of a win.On the subject of unemployment, this hasn’t even been honestly reported by the broader media. Today, I received a notification that one of the news agencies I am subscribed to said that American unemployment is actually at it’s lowest point in many years. This, however, is misleading. What we have actually seen isn’t a real reduction in unemployment. What we have are many people who are chronically underemployed, stuck working many hours at multiple low-paying part times jobs where they are never able to be promoted to full time employment status. This is a direct result of the Affordable Care Act.As I said before, part of ACA was federally mandating that only full-time employees had to have health care provided, so many corporations just cut hours and hired more people to work part time. If you didn’t work in the limited and specialized fields of tech in the few growth cities, you were screwed. Also, many people who couldn’t find good work just left the workforce altogether. What’s important to know is that people who aren’t looking for work aren’t counted as “unemployed”. Also, for reasons that I find dubious, the message of “more new jobs” stopped counting underemployment and completely ignores those who left the workforce out of the unemployment metrics. A better indicator is looking at the Workforce Participation Rate, which is pretty clear.This was actually a national problem, and not just local to small towns, but felt much worse in the recessed parts of the country.Finally, technology, one of the only truly prosperous fields in the United States are incredibly left leaning and growing more so, and are, rather carelessly, working to disrupt other industries in a process which creates great wealth for a very select few, while destroying the jobs and livelihoods of millions of people[3].How this looks from the bottom is that a growing class of young and idealistic technocrats are driving them out of work and ruining their lives in pursuit of their own wealth and political agenda. I’m not saying personally that that is an actual effort being made by the technology industry, but seeing the gulf of disconnect I have personally experienced while working in Silicon Valley, I can agree that there is at least a valid argument for many working class in Middle America to be angry with the technically savy left.Furthermore, considering the failing education system, simply saying that these individuals should “work hard” or “gain new skills” no longer works as a method to actually produce people capable of surviving in a dynamic job market. First is a public school system which fails regularly to perform its basic job. This, I blame (as a public school teacher) on the lack of incentives for quality teachers and the lack of removal of ineffective ones. This is due mostly to the saturation of teachers unions in the education system, pushing for greater protections for veteran teachers even when evidence mounts that they fail at their primary duty, educating.We also spend far, far too much on very few children engaged in tasks that do not lead to greater education. Additionally, the entire industry has shifted towards leftist ideals of education which place no practical value on fundamentals or accountability for the individual, leading to a generation which are incompetent, but feel great about it.Compound this with a secondary education system where students are force fed lefitst values that don’t in any way create students capable of being successful in the workforce. I don’t know how people of the left are raised. Perhaps you were taught that college is about “gaining new ideas, or challenging assumptions”, something I find odd given the nature of suburban life, but the mantra of the poor was always “do well in school, go to a good college, and get a good job.” This was literally told to us thousands of times in our childhoods, so when quite the opposite was true, it disrupted the projected life plans of millions of young people and left them horribly disaffected with the education system altogether.Perhaps this explains, in part, why the tech industry and much of the media, characterized by young workers, is so heavily influenced by the left and also why research showcasing how left-leaning agendas are failing so many people is regularly repressed by research institutions and the media. That’s just a theory, but the left has to acknowledge that the evolution of American education into a place of far-left ideas in no way serves the needs of the American people who need jobs much more than degrees in Inter-sectional Feminism.So, to answer for how people of the left can begin to connect with the other half of the country I would say that first, they need to check their privilege and realize just how damaged the working class has been, their family structure, their housing availability, their job prospects, and most important, their ability to be upwardly mobile in the American socioeconomic spectrum.The saddest of any of this, I can see how, in almost every case, most of the left who fought for all of these initiatives believed they would be helping us, but when we said, “Hey, this crap ain’t workin’” we were told that our experiences were false, and our observations were biased towards hurting the poor. What they failed to understand was that our observations were biased, because we’re the poor and we were the ones being negatively affected by their help. Had they actually been affected by most of their policies, they may have seen things differently. That said, most of the problems we faced were/or/face are due to severe overdoses of “help”. If the American left wanted to connect with the working class, they need to accept at least the possibility that these programs don’t work. Then they need to start looking to acknowledge their own biases in thought and practice, and finally to realize that the lifestyles of the working class is not being something to ridicule, but something to understand.If I were to offer any suggestion, it would be to read the works of two authors first. The first being , Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance and the second is Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed by Jason L. Riley. Both peel back the facade of, “If only we could get them the help they need,” and help the left get away from the mentality of superior benevolence over working class in general.***So many people are misunderstanding my point on technology, that I need to clarify with an added item. No, I am not saying I want to stop the flow and growth of technology just to keep my life the way it is. I worked in a technology centric role in the Marines, later when on work in Silicon Valley’s technology industry made an effort to hang a pennant for MIT in my daughters room. It’s important that you know that she is three months old. She already has a library of computer programming, robotics, and video game design books for kids in her little library for when she is ready. That will surely grow. We have invested in this direction for her life, because I know no other avenues seem to be possible for her generation, so I want to start her early.That being the case, I am tired of the very selfish mentality for people disrupt any industry they can, rather than thinking about what problems they can solve. Taxis really weren’t a problem before Uber, but education is a problem. Yet they disrupt the taxi industry while education still sucks. Why? Because opportunism. The government spends trillions on education and half of it is waste doing inefficient things (I can’t remember if I mentioned I’m a public school teacher here people.) There is opportunity there to help support educators.Take this, for example, Grannies in the Cloud. Someone devised an app to make volunteer retired people able to link up with and tutor children across the world. This provides the one-on-one support all kids needs, but which teachers are completely too overworked to provide. My wife is a school teacher too, 3rd grade. She is responsible for around 50 kids and works over 70 hours a week for a job that pays ~32,000 a year. She doesn’t have the bandwidth to give each of her kids any more of herself. It just isn’t possible. Something like Grannies in the Cloud could provide the support that she needs to help her kids progress at their own rate, since the state system holds all kids back at the speed of the slowest learner.Working to improve these huge level problems, such as education through better and cheaper technology would also help greatly to solve the work problem by driving more people into the actual growth industries, something we’ve needed for decades. For that matter, why isn’t “job loss due to catastrophic technological change” an insurance industry policy that employers can provide to pay for reeducation? I don’t know why the great minds of the world are busy screwing around with reenventing the wheel, or at least the taxi, when so much bigger problems could be solved through the same use of their talents.So yes, I love technology. Technology is great and it solves the world’s problems. I seriously want my daughter to be one of the first people on Mars, or maybe just her robots. I don’t care, but I am more than a little resentful that the best minds in the world seem to be focused most on solving the problem of how best a wealthy and highly educated person can become a billionaire creating digital services for millions of people rich enough to own a new iPhone, while carelessly destroying the lives of millions of the nation’s poor.Be rich. Be as rich as you can. Design and build things, but do so after you ask how many people will you getting rich hurt, and if that number is far more than will be made rich, you really need to be held accountable for that. Can you get rich in some other way? Basically, what America, and the rest of the world for that matter, needs is a generation of socially minded tech entrepreneurs who have left their bubbles I mentioned earlier and look to the urban and rural poor to see how they can solve their problems, give them the avenues to elevation, and flatten the graph of American prosperity in a way that improves everyone’s lives and not just a few venture capitalists in Silicon Valley.Thank you for reading. If you liked this answer, please upvote and follow The War Elephant. If you want to help me make more content like this, please visit my Patreon Support Page to learn how. All donations greatly appreciated!Footnotes[1] Thanks To 'Fight For $15' Minimum Wage, McDonald's Unveils Job-Replacing Self-Service Kiosks Nationwide[2] https://www.aei.org/publication/october-2-is-manufacturing-day-so-lets-recognize-americas-world-class-manufacturing-sector-and-factory-workers/[3] This one stat exposes a fundamental 2016 divide between the parties