I recognize that you enjoy setting up "liberalism" as a straw man, ascribing to liberals positions that they do not hold and that are ridiculously easy to tear apart (which you then proceed to do), but for some reason i can't stop myself from commenting on your silly arguments:
I always see liberals spewing nonsense like "they can do that if they want to"
Nonsense. Society has structure and order. If you want to be a part of it, you need to abide.
No one denies this, not liberals, not anyone whom I've ever heard. The question is usually "Can [gays/jews/punk kids/reverse vampires/multinational corporations/etc.] engage in activity X?" The response "they can do it if they want to" is the liberal response under (generally) special circumstances, namely:
(1) the act does not harm or impose costs on anyone else or the environment;
(2) the act does not interfere with some other beloved liberal program or value the speaker admires.
The "libertarian" argument is generally "they can do it if they want to" so long as no costs are imposed on other people (impoising costs on the environment may be find in the view of many libertarians.
The
conservatives even give the answer they can do it is they want to in many cases, usually under the conditions:
(1) the act does not harm or impose costs on anyone else; and
(2) the act does not interfere with some other beloved conservative program or value the speaker admires.
The conservative position really varies in the identity of the values in clause (2). For example, if the question were "Can gays marry?" Liberals might say that their marrying doesn't hurt anyone, doesn't hurt the environment and doesn't otherwise trample any ideals they hold dear, so yes, gays may marry. Conservatives may or may not agree about the harm, but many definitely feel that it intereferes or sullies a value they hold dear.
Change the question to "Can oil companies drill for oil off our pristine coast line?" and the positions reverse. Conservatives say "they can if they want to because it doesn't hurt anyone and violates no fundamental conservative principles." For liberals it harms the environment and violates a principle (the principle of "Corporations, BAD!"), so they oppose it.
Both conservatives and liberals agree that it is okay to prevent rape and murder, though, as those obviously violate the "do no harm to others" tenet.
Liberals also want to tear down the foundations of society, destroy tradition and culture, and create some sort of selfish anarchist "society" if you could call it that
While there are certainly anarchists, not all liberals are. also, I think you do not understand anarchism. Anarchists tend to think that a world without governments will be a world where people volunteer to help one another and everyone lives in peace. You think an anarchic world would be one of selfishness and strife. I happen to believe you are right, but no one has rock solid proof one way or the other...we only can say that "in societies" people are very selfish. Many people, in a line of though many trace to Jean Jacques Rousseau, think that man "in a state of nature" would be more noble than man under the pernicious influence of society. The noble savage would not have a concept of property, so would, for example, be more willing to give and share with others. He would not know war, because war is by its very nature a societal affair (and since he'd be living in near other nobly savage carebears, giving and sharing because they have no "property", he'd have no need to attack them to take things he needed).
They also support the governemnt STEALING your money (taxes) EVEN MORE than it needs to.
Taxes are thievery? What happened to "Society has structure and order. If you want to be a part of it, you need to abide by them"?? Again, you only believe that when you agree with the rules, for the rules you disagree with, like perhaps maintaining a system of welfare for the poor, somehow those are alien to our "structure and order" and aren't things *you* need to abide. You, like a liberal, pick and choose what is part of the "Order" and what can be disregarded as outside of it. This is old clause (2) from the above. the things you think important are sacrosanct, the things you thing unimportant or dislike are anomalies that may be (or in some cases "should" be purged).
Obviously "EVEN MORE than it needs to do" is subjective. Most conservatives even want the governemnt to do more things that it absolutely needs to do to maintain itself. America could, for example, survive without the War in Iraq. If we pulled out today and let the chaos descend there, America would survive, and would save a lot of money (and American lives). There are valid reasons for conservatives to argue against doing that, but if the goal is to minimize government to the bare essentials, our military could be scaled back a lot. Similarly, there used to be privately minted money in the United States. We don't absolutely need the government to do that. There may be good arguments in favor of it, but again, if the goal is to restrict anything that isn't strictly necessary, there's another one.
Liberals, on paper, do have more things they feel that the federal government "needs" to do, but both liberals and conservatives are ultimately making a cost-benefit analysis rather than a pure needs analysis. (I say "on paper" because of the habit of conservatives to increase the size of the government's budget, just as it is with liberals.)
What people think of as things the government "needs" to do is usually based on