Right vs. Left

I've been thinking about this for a long time;

"Conservatives will sell their grandmothers for a dollar"

"Liberals want the government to run their entire lives"

(These are the polite comments :D)

My father (Whom is a Conservative) and I have been arguing over School vouchers. I (Moderate to partly Liberal), am against the School Voucher system. My father, is for them. We have gone round after round about this. Gotten into heated arguments that makes Maia cringe (since these arguments are all over Skype, when she is here, she doesn't have much choice but to listen in), and everything.

But one thing keeps making me pause; Dad is an intelligent man, certainly as intelligent as I. If I can see the problems with the voucher system, why can't he?

The voucher system in a nutshell: We all pay taxes, and then each parent gets a voucher for "Tuition", if you will. Then the parent can take his voucher and kid to any school he wants. That way if the Public School system is not doing a good job, you can take your kid elsewhere.

Pros: This system encourages competition, public schools will have to shape up fast to keep up with the private schools who will (In time) bring our children's average test scores back up.

Cons: If a monopoly occurs, competition ceases.

We don't actually argue the point, you see. What we really do is spend time slinging insults at each other. "Guy, you're being Naive! the Government hasn't changed in 200 years, why do you think it will suddenly straighten up and fly right now? By the time we straighten the government up, our kids will be complete idiots. You Liberals all think that the Government should just walk in to your lives and take it over."

To which I reply: "Dad, you can't give our children's future over to business, Think Microsoft; do you like Vista? No? Too Bad, Microsoft has paid a lot of money so that computers don't work with anything other than Vista... so, unless you want to work in the stone age, you have to have Vista. Is Vista the best OS? No. But you don't have a choice. (And before I get people telling me "Yes you do; you can go to Linux", in actuality, you can't. Many very specific programs I use can only be used on Windows. Switching to Linux would stop all work I'm doing completely... No one has ported some of the programs I use to Unix... and "Gimp" as wonderful as it is, was built expressly to NOT be Photoshop, so using Gimp means I would have to start at ground zero and relearn the program again from scratch). How, my dear father is Microsoft a good example of "Good Capitalism at work"? Would you really want to be forced to take your kid to "Microschool"?

He would then say: "Guy! People are graduating High School without being able to read their diplomas!"

But, I keep coming back to the same thought; "Dad is easily as intelligent as I..."

What is the REAL problem between dad and me?

We keep assuming strange things about the other; "Dad, you would rather have a "Clear Channel" school where everyone has to learn about the Bible (Because the Christian Churches were the best funded, and have run everyone else out of business), and evolution is banned rather than a system that is controlled by the Constitution and civil rights."

"Guy, you would rather let the government take care of you, even if they are so tangled up in beauracracy that they can't buy a pencil without going through 50 people, rather than give the parents the right to choose whom they want to teach their children."

And that is the problem; we get so mad (I mean that in the "Insane" sense, not the "Angry" sense), that we would rather instult each other than understand each other.

I wasn't looking to change dad, by the way. I just assumed that my belief that he was an idiot must be flawed, since I happen to know better. So I wanted to understand his side...

But I had to get past all this rhetoric first.

"Guy, come up with a better plan, then."

Dad, I'm sorry, but that's just provoking a fight; Brilliant minds, far superior to mine have been working this problem for thousands of years. You can't expect me to surrender my argument simply because I am not more intelligent that the cumulative history of the world.

Why don't we get to the bottom of this, find out where our real positions are, and then figure out a solution together?

Here's the way I see it: There are two kinds of core monitary democracies we can have:

Socialism: Everyone pays the government taxes, the government then provides services rendered (School, military, food, clothing, etc).

Capitalism: Everyone pays other people to render services.

Of course, there are flaws to both of these governments. That's why we are mixed (For example: the US doesn't have a capitalistic military (The government pays for it), but we do have a capitalistic medical system....)

The real difference between Liberals and Conservatives is in which one of these two evils they see as lesser.

Liberals seems to see socialism as the lesser of two evils, conservatives see capitalism as the lesser of the two.

Neither group really thinks that we should be all capitalist or all socialist. That's a pipe dream on both counts, the reason we are mixed is that neither system works well in reality. The best we can hope for is some semblance of balance.

Why is it, then, that when we argue, we constantly assume the other side WANTS to do bad things?

Doesn't it seem like that?