A lot of people think conservatives are stupid because they stereotype all conservatives as rednecks. This really isn't the case. Some famous conservative thinkers include Frank Meyer, Russell Kirk, Eric Voegelin, and William F. Buckley Jr.
The key to conservatism is understanding what it is to conserve. For example, conservatives oppose abortion. Why? Conservatives believe people are innocent before proven guilty, and nobody is entitled to judge anyone else by default. This includes evaluating cognition. Preborns don't consent to exist, and any sort of medical evidence used to evaluate their behavior as a sign of cognition is a subjective value judgment. It presumes what behavior corresponds with what attitudes. That's prejudiced, and doesn't conserve the innocence which people exist with by default.
If you want another example, think about how sometimes, people smile when they're embarrassed, or people get defensive when accused wrongly. Just because someone smiles doesn't mean someone's happy, and just because someone's defensive doesn't mean someone's guilty.
Wealth is something people earn. It isn't something that simply grows on trees or pops out of thin air. It exists because people exercise their imaginations to create nice things, and consumers pay for things because they believe things are worth their price. Likewise, workers are paid wages to compensate them at the level investors think they're worth.
A lot of people think that consumers are getting ripped off, or workers deserve more than they're paid, but we need to remember that nobody points a gun at consumers to buy things, and investors didn't clone workers out of a vat. People are hungry, cold, and tired because their parents got together and made babies. They didn't spawn from some sort of mad scientist comic book story gone wrong. If someone deserves to be held responsible for people struggling, it's those who have torn apart the family unit, and didn't prepare their children for adulthood.
If anything, tax percentages are progressive by default because they tax people in proportion to their wealth. We don't need to double down on this by increasing the proportion of greater quantities.
Instead, we should be focusing on the quality of how government spends money, not simply increasing the quantity government has to spend. Throwing money at a problem such as resolving poverty doesn't fix it. It's how you throw it that counts. We shouldn't simply put people on welfare. Instead, we should make sure we're assimilating people into culture so they can make a living and become successfully independent while contributing to a society that includes them.
