I used to be a Republican, now I'm a Democrat, and of course, as everybody knows, I love explaining things in terms of basic principles. That's why back in April I wrote an essay trying to explain to my fellow liberals why conservatives think the way that they do. Now I'm ready to return the favor, but it's going to take two essays, because the two distinct threads of liberalism have less in common with each other than the various flavors of conservatism have in common with each other. But I will say this: from the way that conservatives talk, it is painfully obvious to me that they just plain do not understand liberalism at its most basic level. And as with all cases where people on opposite sides of an issue don't understand each other's motives, since they can't think of any honest reason why the other person would disagree with them, there can only be dishonest or otherwise evil reasons. Allow me to demonstrate that there's nothing evil, and everything sane and reasonable, about liberalism.

The first principle of economic liberalism is that there are certain services that, unless everybody gets them, everybody suffers. Let me give you a perfect example, because we actually tested this in history. We don't have to imagine what privatized fire protection looks like, because until about 90 years ago, nearly all fire fighters in America were privatized. If you bought home owner's insurance, it included with it a metal plaque you bolted to the front of your house. Then, if your house caught fire, you could call the fire protection company that was subcontracted to your insurance company, and they would come out to fight the fire. If a fire fighting company got out to your house and the plaque wasn't there, they'd turn around and go home. Which is what you deserve for not buying insurance, right? Well, even if you think that way, what about the houses on either side of you? If your house is allowed to burn to the ground just because you didn't buy insurance, what's going to stop that fire from spreading to their houses? Sure, they might have one or more fire protection companies on call, but won't they have a lot less damage to their house if, instead, your house isn't allowed to burn until the fire spreads?

• If anybody doesn't get immunizations and related basic health care, then everybody has to risk living in a city where plague is spreading death and decay and the resulting vermin and rot.
  
• If anybody doesn't get police protection, then everybody has to live in a city where the criminals have safe havens they can retreat to.
  
• If anybody doesn't get a full education, then everybody has to live in a city where the permanently unemployable have nothing better to do than to burn the city down, and plenty of incentive to do so.

Granted, I chose the easy cases first, but not the easiest. Even conservatives understand that you can't privatize national defense, because when the army has to go overseas to protect America from some imminent threat, it's not as if they can "only" protect the people who paid for the army.

The second principle of economic liberalism is that it makes the most sense to pay for these things by taxing the people who can afford to pay. From the standpoint of pure fairness, you'd like to pay for these things with a flat tax. After all, if everybody receives the same benefit, everybody ought to pay the same price. Not that, in America, everybody receives the same benefit. It's not as if poor neighborhoods get the same quality of schools or policing that rich neighborhoods do. But let's keep things simple, and imagine a world in which everybody did get a fair share of the things that everybody has to have or else society will crumble. In such a world, everybody ought to pay the same price. After all, McDonald's doesn't "means-test" its hamburgers. If Bill Gates wants a Happy Meal, he pays the same price for it that I do, because we both eat the same snack and get the same toy. That's only fair, right?

But what if you took 100% of the income of the poorest people in America, set that as the baseline for taxation, and charged everybody that much? It wouldn't come to anywhere near enough to pay for even the minimum basic services. So somebody's going to have to pay more, or else we have to choose to let society crumble. And to some extent, in America, we have chosen to let society crumble rather than collect enough taxes to pay for these things, as even a casual drive past a rural or inner city school will show you; you can see the broken windows and sagging roofs from the street without even getting out of your car. But even with all of the social pressure to not charge rich people an "unfair" amount for services that everybody gets, we still do have to charge them more. As any conservative can readily tell you, the richest 25% of Americans pay 83% of the income taxes collected, and the poorest 50% pay only 4% of the income taxes collected. But the fact of the matter is that those poorest 50% can't afford to pay another dime.

The third principle of economic liberalism is that the middle class is "the economy."</b> Conservatives believe that if you cut taxes on the rich, they'll invest that money into companies, which will use that money to hire more people or pay more overtime, and therefore everybody benefits. For the last four years, we've been testing that theory. And indeed, rich people did invest that money in creating jobs ... elsewhere. They also invested that money in technology that could be used to replace workers. In short, giving money back to rich people resulted in them using that money to make it harder for ordinary Americans, the 80% or so of us who identify as middle class, from earning a living, let alone earning enough to invest anything in preparing our kids to better themselves, let alone enough to be able to pay enough taxes on to support the cities we all live in. And so after four years of tax cuts for the top 10% of all wage earners, we have the predictable result that cities are going bankrupt, and families are going bankrupt. And the other effect of this is that the companies themselves are going bankrupt ... because nobody can afford to buy their products.

Liberals understand that the biggest single problem with the economy, not just here in the USA but around the world, is insufficient demand. How many empty factories do we have? How many warehouses full of machine tools and processed raw materials do we have? How many workers do we have looking for jobs making things? How many people do we have who don't have enough things to live on? Why can't we move the huge inventories of processed raw materials and machine tools to the idled factories, hire the unemployed to work in those factories, and make the things that people need but don't have? The reason that we don't is that the people who need those things can't afford to buy them. And the reason that they can't afford to buy them is that wages are too low. Sweatshop workers in Burma and Indonesia and Malaysia don't buy a lot of American products, or for that matter, not a lot of Burmese or Indonesian or Malaysian products, either.

In summary, liberals don't support more public sector jobs and spending because public sector workers vote Democratic, but because they see things that every American must have access to or we all suffer along with them. Liberals don't support higher taxes on the wealthy because they feel entitled to steal from the rich, but because somebody has to pay for the things that we all benefit from (including the rich), and the rich are the only ones who can afford it. Liberals don't support higher wages and protection for American jobs because corporate officers and top shareholders vote Republican and unions vote Democratic, but because they understand that as long as Americans don't make good wages, the whole economy will be worse than it could be for rich and poor alike.

(Next: Lifestyle liberalism explained.)