Throughout my life, I have always been told that Republicans are the party of the rich, and Democrats the party of the poor. This is likely because Republicans have traditionally been associated with conservatives and Democrats with liberals (the truth of those stereotypes is not something I will discuss in the body of this article; it's too tangential).
What I have noticed that feeds this stereotype, though, is that conservatives are better business people than liberals. And because people associate conservatives with republicans and business people with the wealthy, this is a stereotype that holds.
The reality of WHY conservatives are better business people than liberals hit home this last week. I needed to find a hard drive for one of our customers (I am head of the PC Repair Department, a promotion I may have mentioned) at work. I found two hard drives, one from our list of approved vendors, the other from Newegg, per my boss' suggestion. The Newegg hard drive was far superior, it was larger and more reliable (a 250GB Seagate Barracuda) than the vendor's offering (an 80GB Western Digital), and I duly submitted both quotes.
The president's decision was to go with the smaller hard drive because it came from our list of approved vendors. In other words, the customer received lower quality for a higher price simply because of the politics of going through approved vendors (we do not receive commissions from either source).
I felt, and still feel, it was a bad business decision, but as an employee I have no choice but to follow my management. Although I did chalk it up to a bit of personal experience for the future.
How does this relate back to the topic? Because the president's decision, I feel, was more typical of that of liberals in this country. They do not look for the best solution, because it is not their money, and they aren't worried about spending it as efficiently as possible. A true conservative, on the other hand, sees themselves as a steward, and always looks for the most efficient way of doing things.
Put simply, conservatives are better at spending other people's money.
The role that our politicans have failed to recognize for themselves is that of being stewards of a public trust. See, every paycheck, we put our money into a public trust known as the federal government. And our federal government chooses how and where to spend it. Only they don't see themselves as trustees, they see themselves as rulers.
The one fatal flaw in that is that the United States was not meant by its founding fathers to HAVE rules. If our country were functioning as intended, power would flow from the people upward, not from our leaders downward. That's what "of the people, by the people, and for the people" means, just for the civics geniuses out there.
As I have stated before, more efficient does not always mean cheaper. In the example used above, I could have saved the end user $20 and purchased a cheaper, inferior hard drive that was smaller than both the WD and the Seagate. But the end user would have lost in the long run. As a steward, I believe it is my responsibility to look at the best quality for the best price.
We need a governmentled by true conservatives. Not people who care about what people do in their own homes; that is not the role of a steward. But people who care about the public trust they were elected to protect, and who spend their money accordingly.