A little quest of mine is to determine the most succinct way of articulating the difference in worldviews between someone like me and a progressive--discovering a singularity in belief that sends someone down the left or the right path.

Of course, I'm trying to keep it out of the "they-are-dumb-we-are-smart" realm and instead would rather have something that people both sides could look at and agree on.

I always criticize the Left for their reliance on bloated, wasteful, fraud-riddled, and unsuccessful big government programs to socially engineer society. For example, progressives are just learning that kids don't like vegetables. But why do they support this kind of nanny-state stuff and I don't?

For someone that spends a good deal of time complaining about people who can't manage their own lives, you'd think I'd hop on the nanny state train and force people to conform.

Progressives and many conservatives can agree on one thing, I think. People are generally ignorant, discourteous, uninformed, and lazy.

Progressives like to throw around a country bumpkin caricature with a thick southern accent to represent the common man. Obama Regulation Czar Cass Sunstein calls us Homer Simpson. President Obama says cling to our guns and religion. His wife doesn't think we can feed our own children properly.

They're right about that more often than I prefer--I run into many more Homer Simpsons during my day than people who've mastered the art of self government.

Where we differ, however--and hopefully I'm at least approaching a singularity--is what we want to do about it.

I want people to be rewarded naturally for making the smart choices and to accept the consequences of making the dumb ones. If you work hard and make a lot of money, you get to keep it. If you invent a product that people want to pay you for, keep it. If you don't want to work or think, then your life isn't going to be very good. Sorry.

Good behavior, thus encouraged, would increase. Likewise, bad behavior would decrease. And we wouldn't need government overlords to decide who wins and who doesn't. In a paragraph, I've summed up laissez faire economics.

Progressives start out at the same place. There are societal problems and they largely have to do with people making poor decisions. But rather than let people get their just desserts, they want to harness the power of government to eliminate poor decisions through regulation. We're going to make it illegal for you to own guns. We think you aren't smart enough to see through the lies of talk radio or Fox News. You can't be trusted to raise your kids without government's help so we're just going to have to feed your kids for you. You really aren't responsible enough to spend your money in a way that benefits society so we're going to take half of it and spend it for you. You're not bright enough to save for retirement or have savings for periods of unemployment, so we'll have trusts that do that for you.

It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. People become so dependent on unemployment and retirement benefits that they don't save for a rainy day. Shielded from the consequences of their bad decisions, they simply make more of them. Single mom on welfare with three kids? You get more money the more kids you have, why stop there?

Good behavior--being productive members of society--is punished because their incomes are transferred to those on social programs making poor decisions. Many of those people made bad decisions and then get a check in the mail to boot. Society gets worse, increasing the need for government solutions in the eyes of progressives.

However, I'm getting a head of myself. The point here is to simply summarize the difference between us, not analyze whose worldview is superior.

Both sides can agree that people make poor decisions .But while progressives want government to externally influence the individual's decisions via regulations, conservatives want the individual to internally make better choices.

In other words, progressives want to limit choices by making things illegal or heavily taxing them, while conservatives want people to make the correct choice from a wide field of options.

Forming it into a sort of singular definition then, we get this. Progressives think government imposition is necessary to achieve the best result while conservatives think that imposition is precisely what prevents the best result from occurring.

I don't think either side would find anything too distasteful about that statement.

Of course, I can always be trusted to take it one step further, however I lose any chance of getting a definition both sides can agree to.

But I can't help but say, that at the root of it all is that the progressive wants to maximize control, and the conservative wants to maximize freedom.

I think we've lost all meaning of the word freedom, but when you spell it out in terms of limiting choices versus maximizing choices, it becomes clear. The world suddenly rotates from right versus left to up versus down, freedom versus slavery, light versus dark, and good versus evil.