the happy conservative

I’ve been thinking about why people write blogs.

I think I’m looking for an audience. If I weren’t, I could just write on legal pads or windows. I’ve gone through the difficulty of opening a website for a reason: I want readers and feedback.

This leads me to two questions:

1. Why do I want people to read this? I’d like to think it’s not about pride, but it is partially. I’d rather that my motives were a little more pure than that, but I’m being realistic. My best argument is that I want practice writing and feedback from a different set of people. That’s probably true. There’s an extremely small subset of people who make a living writing like a member of the academy: the rest of us have to write for a wider and more discerning audience.

2. Given that I want people to read my blog, I have to ask myself why anyone would want to? What am I bringing to an already saturated market for people with lots of time to spend on the internet? Given my experience constraints, there are a few things that I am not bringing:

1. Seasoned political commentary. I don’t know the movers, the shakers, or the big whigs. I’m not getting paid to read depositions all day. I don’t watch CSPAN and I do not have a staff of interns who are morally disposed to removing their clothes and bringing me extra diet dews. No one cares what I think about politics.
2. Economic commentary. I do not have a comparative advantage in the normal avenues of economic thought; there are better educated people who are paid to write about these things. No one reads what they write. But no one would read it if I wrote it either.

What I do bring is a mix of agriculture, conservatism, and economic education. I understand incentives and I understand people. More than anything, I bring that perspective to a world where the inhabitants understand neither: academia.

There are a few of us, kindred spirits who despise the fact that there are no real history classes in a top tier school. There are a few of us who understand that sometimes you do have to pick right and wrong. Not all cultures are equal: some are strictly worse.

This blog is for those kindred spirits, in school and out. This is for those who believe in debate. This is for those who tried to get published in the student newspaper and were REFUSED on account of the conservative nature of their article. This is for those who are taking the diversity police to task. This is for those who are audacious enough for a second opinion.

Naturally, readers will have to suffer through the assorted airplane pictures and baseball commentary. It is my blog after all, and I love to fly and watch baseball.