Saints or Sinners?

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Okay, I found this in a comment over at Althouse:

Liberals view a world [in which] everyone is inherently good, who are then corrupted by society or evil people in power...

In contrast, conservatives believe all people are sinners and thus we need rules and institutions to deter and prevent us from sinning.

I may not have enough readers yet to have much of a discussion on this, but I'm going to try anyway. Do you believe the above? If so, why? If not, why not?

I'm going to save my comments for later, but if you remember that I'm a mamby-pamby moderate, you can probably figure it out.