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Those Awful Liberal Elite Starting with Ronald Reagan there has been a very public, quite successful campaign by American conservatives to paint liberals as elitists who just want to control how people live their lives. Through masterful use of media (aided, of course, by the growing conservative control of said media) this campaign has been quite successful. Millions of people see the Republicans as the party that will protect them from the excesses of big government, and liberals as people who want to tell them how to live. This record needs examination on both counts. Let's start by examining what the liberal legacy is for most Americans. Guaranteeing workers a minimum wage, providing for a forty-hour work-week, and ensuring safe workplaces. Protecting the right of worker's to organize unions. Striving to provide clean air, clean water, and a healthy environment. Providing health care for at least some of the people who have trouble affording it. Continuing a thousands-year old tradition of state support for the arts. Fighting to protect an individual's right to have their day in court when they have grievances that require redress. Building public transportation systems. Not such a bad list, and nowhere near exhaustive. Do these programs affect people's lives? Of course, that's the point. Are they constraints on how people live? Well, they are if you want to have the right to work for $1 a day with a 70-hour week in a dark, dangerous factory, and live in a toxic environment. And what have the conservatives been doing? They have been fighting for the individual rights... of corporations. Trying to protect them from having the government force them to recognize labor unions. Making them have safe workplaces, follow anti-discrimination laws, and limit their pollution. This is really what the Conservatives mean when they talk about freedom. They want to protect corporations from the excesses of big government, and allow those corporations to have complete control over their employees. The right to fire workers who try to organize: a conservative value. The right to pollute: a conservative value. The right to discriminate in hiring and in the workplace: conservative values. As to governmental powers, it is the conservatives that favor fewer restrictions on police searches, tighter controls on alcohol, use of obscenity rules to suppress free speech, etc. Guess their true goal really is to provide complete freedom for corporations, and join with the corporations in telling everyone else how to live their lives. I guess the choice can be grossly oversimplified to this: do you want the people that will tell you how to behave in your own home (the conservatives), or the people that will tell your employer how they must behave in your workplace (the liberals)?