I keep reading articles about how liberals don’t understand conservatives but it works both ways. If conservatives truly understood liberals they would find it ridiculously easy to drive them crazy. Let me play out a little scenario.
George Lucas, one of our most benevolent billionaires, recently announced that he was planning to expand the 6100 acre Lucasfilm studios in Marin County California, just north of San Francisco. To be fair, what George Lucas has already built is pretty remarkable, and is in very good alignment with nature and the community in which it exists. Despite this there was a considerable groundswell in the community to stop Lucas’ latest vision. Many were for and many were against. So Lucas, in what some might call a spirit of community solidarity and others a vindictive backlash, decided to trash his plans and sell the property to a developer to be used for low income housing.
Lucas has a history of doing right by Marin county, but no one with vision likes to have it foiled. His neighbors, most of whom, I have been led to understand, are basically liberal, were not satisfied to live in their beautiful surroundings and enjoy the 5000 acre park that Lucas created for their use. Let’s see how they like the result of their acrimony.
There is no easier way to tear a liberal community apart than to whisper the terrifying NIMBY phrase, low income housing. The old joke defining a conservative, as a liberal who just got mugged doesn’t hold a candle to the idea of a conservative being a liberal, who just had a low income housing development proposed for down the block. Now I understand that neither conservatives nor liberals consider these as flattering descriptions but in these cases, the shoe does fit.
What I’m trying to say here is that greed is universal and if the right understood that giving just a little more to those who are not as well off as they are, and this includes their own employees, they would take much of the incentive away from their biggest detractors.
I have a very conservative friend who owns a company in an eastern state. He may be super conservative but he understands that it isn’t good for business to crush his employees. So he pays them above union wages, takes care of them very well and has a happy, functional work force that has repeatedly voted down union participation. This guy is smart enough and human enough to understand that he doesn’t need all the money in the world and that by spreading the wealth the way he does, he gets better than normal productivity from his workers and a better bottom line for his company.
If more conservatives understood this and if more of them actually used their money to produce a product other than money, maybe this country wouldn’t be in the predicament, in which it finds itself today, and maybe they’d find that there were more liberals who didn’t want to run them off the planet.