Why should I be a conservative?

I need to learn and may be a victim of group-think

Yes, judging by your post you seem to have a very uninformed worldview likely shaped by those around you and school indoctrination. These layers of indoctrination are hard to writhe free from, akin to unplugging yourself from "The Matrix". Here's a good introduction to help get you started down this journey.

please tell me why I should be a conservative and address why I'm wrong to support strongly taxing the élite and redirecting their money toward the disadvantaged/disenfranchised in our society.

Look around you. Is everyone of equal strength? Intelligence? Ability? Of course not. So why must we bog ourselves down spending vast amounts of resources and energy pulling the weight of everyone who can't contribute to our society? If we continue go down the road of redistributing wealth so everyone has an equal share, then we remove to incentive to strive. We punish and tax success. We reward mediocrity and punish self-sacrifice.

Think of it as a boat: men worked to build it, maintain it and fill it full of fine goods to help them weather the passage across the ocean. This boat has rats as boats tend to. The rats don't contribute anything to the maintenance of the boat but since there is no surefire to be rid of them, the sailors let their guard down and allow the rats to occupy the lower decks. In the beginning, the sailors go to great efforts to keep the rats from getting into the supplies and consuming goods meant for humans, however as time goes by the sailors begin to ease up. At every opportunity the rats begin to eat the bread, burrow through the cheese and even drink the wine.

Eventually these fat and well nourished rats, having jeopardized the ship and all the humans on it by eating and contaminating the supplies, begin to multiply. They'll eat the goods at faster and faster rates, the ship will begin to fall apart due to all the rats chewing and gnawing away at it. Eventually the boat will begin to leak, the food will be all but gone and by the time the humans begin to act it will already be too late for them.

This is the danger socialism and wealth redistribution will bring. The rats will always be there and they'll always eating whatever they can get their hands on and if we let our guard down by not putting a stop to it early on then our society will end up exactly like the boat in this analogy. That is, in a nutshell, why conservatives are conservatives and that's why you should be too.

/r/askaconservative Thread