Shared Wrong Assumptions

Certain brands of liberal and conservative politics share a common fallacious assumption.

Liberal Politics on the socialistic side of the spectrum fails to reckon with man's sin nature.

• Liberals, in doctrine or practice, deny man's essential corruption.
• They have an exaggerated view of man's goodness.
• Consequently, they fail to see that when the temporal incentive for hard work has been removed (ie., either the possibility of sufficient profit, or the need to eat), worker productivity goes down. It should not be this way; everyone should strive to give 100% no matter what the return is. But what ought to be, and what is, are two different things in this fallen world. The worker does not work so hard, and the freeloader need not work at all.
• The Liberal's pursuit of confiscatory tax rates give the lie to their own confidence in people's goodness, for if people were truly good, they would give to needs without external compulsion. 

Conservative Politics, on the Libertarian side of the spectrum, can also fail to reckon with man's sin.

• Usually (but not always), conservatives will admit to mankind's essential corruption. Consequently they usually get the profit-motive and essential-need motive of labor right. Getting just these two things right can solve many of the fiscal problems of a society.
• However, they have an exaggerated view of the goodness of the free market, leading to a disdain for all regulatory restrictions. In short, they do not consistently apply their belief in man's corruption.
• The typical conservative argument is that the market tends to be self-correcting; if a business is engaging in unethical practices, sooner or later their deeds will come back to haunt them, and market forces will eliminate them.
• By and large, this is true.
• But what they neglect to understand is that the history of business is full of people who are very willing to kill a company and walk away from the corpse if the short-term gain of doing so is sufficient. Libertarian-style conservatives may also fail to recognize that there can be dark motives at work, and that the driving force may not be simple economic gain.
• There is no real market correction that happens when someone is riding a company into the ground for a short-term gain. In such a case, investors (or workers, or management, or the public) can be badly hurt before the company dies. The hatchet man walks away with a tidy profit, and a desire to seek the next victim. The only thing that can rein in this sort of profit-driven intentional corporate suicide, is regulation. The free-market can't do it, because it is being blindsided by an irresponsible non-market motive.

I am a bona fide conservative, and I find most government regulation to be little more than a jobs program for people who lack the ability to work on the outside. I thoroughly resent the intrusive regulatory control of unelected bureaucrats. But to say, as some libertarians do, that there is no need for regulation in the free-market, is to deny in practice what most conservatives will admit in principle: that mankind has been corrupted through sin, therefore law is needed to regulate his behavior, economic and otherwise.