Brigette RussellMy column on socialized medicine last week generated a firestorm of comments — 101 at last count, which I am told makes me the NMI record holder.  It is a dubious honor, considering how many of them were unflattering in the extreme.

One even called me the Marie Antoinette of New Mexico.

Conservatives are routinely branded as heartless by those on the left.  We are said to be uncaring and selfish, concerned only with holding onto our own money whatever the consequences for those less fortunate.

Once when I was in grad school, a good friend and fellow student said to me in angry, almost tearful frustration after the U.S. Senate had voted down a social program she thought should have passed, “Those Senate Republicans are just evil. They want children to die!”

Even though I was a closet conservative (I wanted that doctorate, after all), this friend knew the terrible secret of my political persuasion. She knew my policy position was the same as the “evil” Senate Republicans, and yet she knew I wasn’t evil, and didn’t want children to die. We’re still friends all these years later, and she knows full well that I am not as heartless as the infamous French queen who quipped that if the peasants had no bread, then let them eat cake.

Nevertheless, as a good liberal she had been conditioned to believe that fiscal conservatism meant cruelty, and the idea that a friend whom she knew to be kind and compassionate could be opposed to a “necessary” social program created such cognitive dissonance that she simply couldn’t keep to our usual practice of not talking politics.

Conservatives believe in the founding principles of our republic. We believe that the appropriate role of the federal government is set forth clearly in the Constitution, and that most of the powers it has arrogated to itself over the last century have been unconstitutionally usurped, and then given the false cloak of legitimacy by judges who have taken it upon themselves to view the Constitution as a “living, breathing document” whose meaning can be stretched beyond recognition to cover just about anything the federal government cares to do.

Conservatives believe that most people are capable of earning a living and taking care of their own needs for food, clothing, shelter and medical care — or at least they would be if they weren’t (a) paying so much income, Social Security, property, gasoline, utility, import, sales and who knows how many other taxes to support our many layers of government bureaucracy, and (b) being told by demagogues on the left that they shouldn’t have to take care of themselves because they really aren’t capable of it at all.

Our society’s culture of entitlement is asphyxiating the spirit of enterprise that made this country great. Leftist fear-mongering has persuaded increasing numbers of Americans that they are like helpless children who need government hand-outs to survive.

If, when told the poor have no bread, a conservative points out that farm subsidies the federal government unconstitutionally doles out increase the price of that bread, leftists interpret this as, “Let them eat cake.” Indeed, any answer save, “Then give them some bread and charge it to the 1 percent who pay 39 percent of the federal income taxes (while earning 18 percent of the pre-tax income)!” gets us branded as the moral equivalent of Marie Antoinette.

The Democrats in Congress and the White House seem to think there is a bottomless pit of wealth into which they can reach to bail out failing businesses, fund desperate spending sprees in hopes of “stimulating” the economy, and tack still more federal programs onto the rickety scaffolding of the bureaucracy that has still not won the “War on Poverty” Lyndon Johnson declared more than 40 years ago. They think, to rework the Marie Antoinette metaphor a bit, that they can have their cake and let us peasants eat it, too.

There is no bottomless pit of wealth. Their socialist vision of America’s future is eroding the spirit of enterprise that is necessary to create wealth. They are gobbling up the last of the bread and the cake and there are not enough productive bakers to replenish the supply.

In the final analysis, where conservatives and leftists differ, it is because the latter are utopians and the former are not.  Conservatives do not believe government can solve all the ills of the world. The world has always, and will always, have ills to spare. Recognizing this is not tantamount to saying with brutal unconcern, “Let them eat cake.”

About the utopian dreamers who think they can fix all the ills of the world if only we relinquish to them enough of our money and our liberty, I will say, “Let them read the Constitution.”