Bri's Own World

um, your observations are kind of wrong. That's why there's the whole "political spectrum" thing going on. That's probably a bit more in depth. "AP partner" did a good job explaining it, I think.

maybe you consider yourself to be conservative and not want government involvement, but that would probably make you more of a moderate.

Republicans (conservatives...used interchageably, I assume) usually want governmet involvement in things that will benifit their own personal interests, like tax reductions and abortion laws. Lots of laws prohibiting things, you understand. Gay marriage, immigrant laws, ect... That's government involvement. not using government taxes to have better schools.

Democrats, on the other hand, want more control with money. They don't want to be told who they can marry, or what they aren't allowed to do with their bodies. They want MONEY being more controlled in government, not their own personal freedom.

You're thinking of socialism with government involvement funding a lot of things, too.. so that's also wrong. I'd lean our liberalism towards european socialism at times, though.
That's when you'd like government involvement in funding most public activities.

The only thing I'd disagree with "AP partner" is that commnism seems more on the far left... although I'm not really an expert on Russian communism. Maybe that was more right in theory than regular communistic ideas.

Well, I don't know a whole lot about republicans, but I do know that the whole liberal thing is based on the people having more control (or at least it is on some things). The whole liberal mindset is that there should be choices available. I know that was poor wording so I'll give an example with abortion: liberals want abortion to stay legal so that people are allowed the right to choose, not so they will choose it over things such as adoption. Most (if not all) people who are pro-choice would rather have people choose an alternative to abortion, or how about this great idea: don't have sex unless you want a baby (and can support it)! As with taxes and everything, I don't think that anyone want's to leave that stuff solely in the hands of the people. If most had their way, we wouldn't have taxes, and we wouldn't have roads, schools, or public transportation systems either. And as far as tax breaks go, liberals would rather have them in favor of the people that actually need them (like the poor people). Tax breaks for the rich are supposed to have a trickle-down effect (e.g. the rich people create more jobs for poor people which thus gives poor people more money, thus making them no longer poor), but since Regan introduced the idea (or someone in the Regan administration), this hasn't really worked.

-Aardvarki (who also is too lazy to log-in)

Defiantly, and some people like that. However, if you look at our schools some people just want to be part of something, so the join clubs and groups in school and as adults they join politics as one of the ways to fit in. One of the biggest reason people join is by watching the news and finding out what is going in the world and if you watch Fox it tends to have more of a republican ideals and MS NBC has more liberal ideas. So when watching the news you sometimes need to watch both because unfortunately biased still slides into the news.