Canada

The bedrock of their economic calculus is a disbelief that they could ever possibly net profit by spending on other people. As I said in the last paragraph of this comment, it is their concept of society itself that is limited/constrained in scope, and that has nothing to do with money.

You're weighing the cost of fixing a problem now vs later, and they're clinging to the idea that because they're not the victims of that problem (currently nor in their own optimistic projections), it would be best to simply never solve it at all. But talking about cost to (an intentionally vague) us is generally more acceptable (and compelling) to a liberal society than its counterpart -- dehumanizing whomever currently pays it.

Wish I could upvote this multiple times. It is consistently a pay now or pay later equation. Often spending money to avoid a problem costs you less than paying for the fallout later.

fiscal responsibility

Thats the important part

Who would you say is more fiscally conservative, a person who wisely invests their money in the future, or a person who wastes it all on bricks to throw at their neighbours windows.

The latter is what current "Conservative" parties are.

Fiscal Conservativism is about wisely investing your money and avoiding wasting it on stupid shit.

Conservative parties rely on "lalala I cant hear you" tactics. Theyre the sort of person who gets a small weird lump and ignores it and then 15 years later die to cancer they could've gotten treated a decade ago.

Thats not fiscally conservative, thats just being fucking stupid. Sometimes you do need to spend money on basic human needs because it net benefits everyone, even on pure paper number balancing.

Im conservative in the "hey we can save a lot of money if we do x/y/z" sort of way, like a person who clips out a bunch of coupons and ends up getting 90% off on their groceries.

Thats also being conservative, you are conserving your resources wisely by allocating them in ways that pay back well.

And turns out... those ways coincidentally are pro human rights.

I hold that liberal goes beyond that, starting to spend extra money and tax extra when the returns are no longer as good and instead it's less about literally saving money and more about quality of life

Fiscal conservative is "once the returns aren't as good, stop there"

Whereas liberal goes "nah even if the returns start to suck, it's better to further tax to even further help people purely for ethical reasons"

Liberal mindset is ethics > money

Fiscal conservative is money > ethics

Current "conservative" policy though is power > inflicting suffering > money > ethics

Which I respect and I'd love to get us towards, but tbh we gotta convince people to get past step 1 first of realizing spending money to actively hurt people, surprisingly, isn't a good fiscal policy (which somehow genuinely confuses so many people, it's crazy)

We are still at the stage where too many people think that spending money inflicting active harm is genuinely a good idea and a good use of taxpayer dollars

They think paying cops to go around kicking indigenous teens in the head is truly a solid Fiscal policy. Truly.

They think paying money to fund bombs being dropped on children is good Fiscal policy.

They think paying money to poison our water, destroy our ecosystems, and pollute the oceans is good Fiscal Policy

Getting past that part is step one

Literally just convincing these people to stop stabbing themselves is step 1.

Maybe later we can talk about convincing them to help others after we get them to stop hurting others...

you would vote Liberal

I do, because despite its name our liberal party is conservative lol

The NDP are Liberal, the Liberals are Conservative, and the Conservatives are fucking batshit insane fascists.