My Six for '06...and after

Before I get started, big thanks to Feanor and Poppy for their New Year's Eve brunch. Tasty food and good company are the basic ingredients of any enjoyable party, and both were in abundance at theirs.

Now back to blogging. As some of you know, I’ve been reading and, yes, even posting to RedState.com. Initially I read the site simply to do some secret gloating over the 2006 elections, but after a time I decided to actually post there. Not to snark, mind you, but to see if these folks were any more reasonable to deal with than the folks on MediaGirl.org. The experience has been largely the same, except in place of liberal wack-jobs it’s conservative wack-jobs, with a few sensible people to leaven the bread of craziness.

In any case, the whole experience has gotten me thinking about my own liberal views, and how I might best summarize them. Here goes.

1. I believe in transparent political processes that encourage participation and that tend to result in a spread of power over a diversity of political points of view.
2. I believe in a transparent political system in which government bears the burden of proof in determining what secrets may be kept from the public and what information may be collected about private citizens.
3. I believe that any use of government power must be directly related to an objective, rational, achievable public interest, and not based on narrow ideas of morality or propriety.
4. I believe that taxation is not a burden but an investment in the societal structures from which all citizens, rich and poor, benefit.
5. I believe that basic, affordable health care and education should not be privileges enjoyed by a relative few but rights shared by all, and that it is the duty of government to make them so.
6. I believe that just as citizens should expect equality of treatment from society, so should society expect quality of contribution from them.
   
   

These aren’t my six just for ’06, though; I pretty much believe them all the time.