Conservative v. Liberal

Grant Gallicho points out that, over at the First Things blog, Stephen Webb (a conservative) has offered a bright-line definition of liberals.  I find the definition astounding, not because of what it says about liberals, but because of what it implies about conservatives.  He writes:  "You know you are a liberal if you think that the poor need money more than they need moral discipline."

If Mr. Webb is making an empirical statement that poor people lack moral discipline more than they lack money, that's not far from coming right out and asserting a causal relationship: poor people are poor because they lack moral discipline.  If he is making the less astounding claim that, within the subset of poor people who lack both moral discipline and money, it is wrong to focus on the latter to the exclusion of the former, I can go along with that (without, of course, conceding that the definition is more than a caricature of liberals).

Rob