Introduction (How I Learned To Be A Liberal)

Early in life I held conservative political views.  To my mind, conservative views just made more sense.  "Of course", I thought, "the death penalty will deter crime - who would chance getting executed?  And welfare must encourage people to stay home and loaf.  And of course free-market health care reduces costs and increases quality - it just makes more sense".

Over the last ten years I've become a Liberal.  My switch from a Conservative to a Liberal came to be because I started focusing on the results produced by these political philosophies - rather than trying to guess which policies might work better, I started looking at which policies do work better.  And, from what I can see, Liberal policies work better.

You Can Always Find A Bad Example (How Not To Pick A Political Philosophy)

"democracy is the worst possible form of government, except for all the other forms"

-- Winston Churchill

Churchill's observation is clever, but what does it mean?  I believe that he meant that you can find a good many reasons to knock Democracy, many examples in which democracy fails. However, all things considered, Democracy produces better outcomes than does any other form of government.

We can always find fault in anything.  When making a choice, all choices will have some fault; there are three ways to deal with the faults we find:

1. We can do nothing but be paralyzed by the fear of making a mistake.
2. We can just take a guess at the best way to proceed, and hope for the best
3. We can carefully study the possibilities, and choose the possibility that produces the best results.

Results Matter Most

Good businesspeople know that results - winning businesses win because of results.  Rarely is a CEO allowed to get awy with poor results, even if they have ideas that sound really good. 

Science works the same way - it's the results that count.  Good iideas (hypotheses) are proposed, then tested.  Only after an idea is confirmed by the results of many tests is it accepted as correct.

Even Jesus agreed that results are the best indicator of the goodness of the source!  He said:

"By their fruits ye shall know them. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?"

Good business people, scientists, and Jesus agree: results matter, not ideas that sound good.

This Site

This site is dedicated to presenting measurements of the results of political and social policies, so that thinking people can make good decisions. 

My studies so far indicate that "left-ish" policies have better outcomes that "right-ish" policies.  However, as we go along, we'll let the chips fall where they may - if the policies of the Right turn out to be better, this will be presented.

I am grateful for any constructive comments - if you see an error, please correct it.  Comments may be left (by registered users) on almost any page.

"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." - Jesus