A commenter on my blog repeatedly says: It is statists vs anti-statists. Right and left have no meaning except to define which things the particular brand of statists thinks is important.
Update: My friend Eric just sent me a link to a Reason article which covers the same subject in a lot more depth (it is a page or two long). It is most amusing.
Cross Posted at Classical Values
I found an interesting FDR quote while perusing NewsRealBlog. From Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.
“But the New Deal was a product of the impulses and ideas of its era. And those ideas and impulses are impossible to separate from the fascist moment in Western civilization. According to Harold Ickes, FDR’s interior secretary and one of the most important architects of the New Deal, Roosevelt himself privately acknowledged that “what we were doing in this country were some of the things that were being done in Russia and even some of the things that were being done under Hitler in Germany. But were were doing them in an orderly way.”"I liked that. Because it is in line with what was actually done.
Robert Tracinski thinks the left/Democrats are running out of utopias. The five year plans have only been delivering three years of results. People are starting to notice.
...there is something deeper here than just favor-selling and vote-buying. There is something that almost amounts to a twisted idealism in the Democrats' crusade. They are fighting, not just to preserve their special privileges, but to preserve a social ideal. Or rather, they are fighting to maintain the illusion that their ideal system is benevolent and sustainable.Ah. Yes. Utopia. As close as you can get to heaven on earth for $100,000 a year minus union dues and fees.
Unionized public-sector employment is the distilled essence of the left's moral ideal. No one has to worry about making a profit. Generous health-care and retirement benefits are provided to everyone by the government. Comfortable pay is mandated by legislative fiat. The work rules are militantly egalitarian: pay, promotion, and job security are almost totally independent of actual job performance. And because everyone works for the government, they never have to worry that their employer will go out of business.
In short, public employment is an idealized socialist economy in miniature, including its political aspect: the grateful recipients of government largesse provide money and organizational support to re-elect the politicians who shower them with all of these benefits.
Every political movement needs models. It needs a real-world example to demonstrate how its ideal works and that it works.Community organizing didn't bring in the hoped for cash flow. What do you call a system that can no longer service its debt? Bankrupt.
And there's the rub. The left is running low on utopias.
The failure of Communism-and the spectacular success of capitalism, particularly in bringing wealth to what used to be called the "Third World"-deprived the left of one utopia. So they fell back on the European welfare state, smugly assuring Americans that we would be so much better off if we were more like our cousins across the Atlantic. But the Great Recession has triggered a sovereign debt crisis across Europe. It turned out that the continent's welfare states were borrowing money to paper over the fact that they have committed themselves to benefits more generous than they can ever hope to pay for.
In America, the ideological crisis of the left is taking a slightly different form. Here, the left has set up its utopias by carving out, within a wider capitalist culture, little islands where its ideals hold sway. Old age is one of those islands, where everyone has been promised the socialist dreams of a guaranteed income and unlimited free health care. Public employment is another.
Now the left is panicking as these experiments in American socialism implode.
The left likes pain free utopias (why should anyone suffer?). The right likes painful ones (how else can you learn?). A middle way would be nice.
Cross Posted at Classical Values
In a peripheral discussion at the Belmont Club the subject of drugs and politics came up. Which prompted a few thoughts. Here they are revised and extended.
==
The proper way to look at it:
Addicted to drugs = person in pain.
Looked at that way a lot of what goes on becomes more comprehensible.
I believe left/right is more about intolerance/tolerance for pain than any kind of political theory. i.e. how do you feel about the suffering of others/yourself. And it has nothing to do with drug use (although that can be an indicator of the level of pain) Bomber Joe was an opiate addict. And Halsted.
The left likes pain free utopias (why should anyone suffer?). The right likes painful ones (how else can you learn?). A middle way would be nice.
If Conservatives are really serious about ending abortion I have a sure fire way:
Proclaim loudly that you favor abortion because it is killing off the next generation of leftists. But of course it would be immoral to say that.
"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake." Napoleon
The Left fears the government policies the Right prefers. The Right fears the government policies the Left prefers. I fear them both.
The Government has scored another drug war success. Homeless people are now supplying meth precursors to underground drug labs.
At the height of the methamphetamine epidemic, several states turned to a new weapon to disrupt the drug trade: electronic systems that could track sales of the cold medicine used to make meth.You would think that the people writing the laws have never heard of supply and demand.
Tracking sales by computer allowed pharmacies to check instantly whether a buyer had already purchased the legal limit of pseudoephedrine — a step that was supposed to make it harder to obtain raw ingredients for meth.
But an Associated Press analysis of federal data reveals that the practice has not only failed to curb the meth trade, which is growing again after a brief decline. It also created a vast and highly lucrative market for profiteers to buy over-the-counter pills and sell them to meth producers at a huge markup.
In just a few years, the lure of such easy money has drawn thousands of new people into the methamphetamine underworld.
"It's almost like a sub-criminal culture," said Gary Boggs, an agent at the Drug Enforcement Administration. "You'll see them with a GPS unit set up in a van with a list of every single pharmacy or retail outlet. They'll spend the entire week going store to store and buy to the limit."
Inside their vehicles, the so-called "pill brokers" punch out blister packs into a bucket and even clip coupons, Boggs said.
In some cases, the pill buyers are not interested in meth. They may be homeless people recruited off the street or even college kids seeking weekend beer money, authorities say.
But because of booming demand created in large part by the tracking systems, they can buy a box of pills for $7 to $8 and sell it for $40 or $50.
The tracking systems "invite more people into the criminal activity because the black market price of the product becomes so much more profitable," said Jason Grellner, a detective in hard-hit Franklin County, Mo., about 40 miles west of St. Louis.
I think the title of this post is a sufficient answer to a Slate article which asks: Are Assassins More Likely To Target Liberals?
Cross Posted at Classical Values
A commenter over at Althouse has a complaint.
I can't figure out the liberal philosophy. On the one hand, they voice an explicit distrust of the government and authority, yet on the other hand their policy solutions all require an intrusive, big government. It's not a philosophy; it's schizophrenia.Let me change just one word and lets see if we get any closer to reality?
I can't figure out the conservative philosophy. On the one hand, they voice an explicit distrust of the government and authority, yet on the other hand their policy solutions all require an intrusive, big government. It's not a philosophy; it's schizophrenia.The answer is simple. We are a one Party State. We have two factions of the Bigger State Party vying for control. And at the end of the day you can be sure of one result. A bigger state.
From Political Class Dismissed.
A person who thinks that we can improve society by pointing government guns at people who are minding their own business. Corollary: In so doing, liberals somehow manage to feel morally and intellectual superior to the victims of their legalized violence.Sounds like a lot of my right wing friends. Drug War anyone?
I am a member of a mostly lefty anti-prohibitionist list. The question to the list was: given Holder's recent Oct. 2010 announcement that he would go after Calif if Proposition 19 passes, how would the youth vote break? Would Proposition 19 bring them out? Would Holder's remarks make them vote R?
Which made me link to this post in my email response.
Richard Lee, the founder and president of Oaksterdam University, is a veteran activist who also is sponsoring a statewide ballot measure that would allow adults 21 or older to possess and grow relatively small amounts of marijuana. The initiative also would allow cities and counties to tax and regulate marijuana sales and cultivation.So I'm searching around the 'net to see if I can get a feel for the zeitgeist and came across this comment at a FireDogLake article about Federal corruption in the drug war.
Lee calls himself a "Libertarian Republican."
I’m beginning to think the Teatards are right, maybe we should drown the Fed Gov. in a bathtub.When even lefties start catching on I think the current game is OVER.
Jonah Goldberg wants to play a guessing game.
I’m thinking of a military leader who seized power in his country by stirring up populist rage against foreigners and foreign powers and promising a sweeping program of national-socialism. He claims that he is the true expression of the will of his people and is using every trick to make himself dictator for life. He is currently harassing the Jewish population, a quarter of which has already fled the country.You can find more of the discussion series at this link. Jonah also suggests this book: German big Business & the rise of Hitler
Give up? The answer is Hugo Chavez, world famous Buckleyite Conservative and devotee of Milton Friedman.
Eric at Classical Values was discussing the efforts to maginalize Glenn Beck. In that piece Eric also mentions the Drug Warriors on the right. Reality of course is much more hilarious than anything I could imagine. Instapundit shows that the Democrats are using Glenn (who claims to be a libertarian) to make fun of the outcry against Obama's Czars.
Yep. The right is up in arms about the cost of bailouts. In Europe.
BRUSSELS – Conservatives raced toward victory in some of Europe's largest economies Sunday as initial results and exit polls showed voters punishing left-leaning parties in European parliament elections in France, Germany and elsewhere.Mr. Obama might want to keep that in mind. If people don't see results commensurate with expenditures his party will be in trouble. No matter how much patronage Obama has bought at Government Motors.
Some right-leaning parties said the results vindicated their reluctance to spend more on company bailouts and fiscal stimulus amid the global economic crisis.
First projections by the European Union showed center-right parties would have the most seats — between 263 and 273 — in the 736-member parliament. Center-left parties were expected to get between 155 to 165 seats.
Right-leaning governments were ahead of the opposition in Germany, France, Italy and Belgium, while conservative opposition parties were leading in Britain and Spain.
The left has a hard time applying economic analysis to problems except the drug war. And the right is fairly good at economic analysis (comparatively) except for the drug war. Drugs makes the left smarter and the right stupider. Interesting, no?
Capitalism applies selection pressure in the right direction - efficiency, waste reduction, etc. Socialism (government) applies selection pressure (the process Schumpeter referred to as creative destruction) in the wrong direction.
I'm a libertarian - but not an absolutist - I believe in a minimal safety net - but it should not be comfortable. And why do I believe in a minimal safety net? Because revolutions are bad for business.
Here is the Joseph Schumpeter book that made his reputation: Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy.
Cross Posted at Classical Values
Jonah Goldberg is discussing his book Liberal Fascism
I don't have any problem with liberals or conservatives criticizing stuff that goes on in the popular culture ... [I]t's when you want to dragoon the state into these things, everything from hate crimes to these early interventions in childhood. You read "It Takes a Village" and Hillary [Clinton] declares that basically we're in a crisis from the moment we're born and that justifies the helping professions from breaking into the nuclear family at the earliest possible age.Well I don't like it either. But the progressives and the social conservatives had a long history together. Public schools, alcohol prohibition, drug prohibition. A history of failure. You know maybe the state is no better at solving social problems than it is at solving economic problems. Ya think?
You have a lot of this stuff on the right, I agree. [George W.] Bush had his marriage counseling stuff that he wanted to propose, I didn't like that. I think Ashcroft gets a very bad rap, but one of the things I did not like was him basically having this philosophy that since the federal government was an agent for a left-wing agenda that therefore it should be an agent for a right-wing agenda. I agree with you to that extent, that that stuff is bad, and it constitutes a kind of right-wing progressivism that I really do not like....
I have been thinking some about what all this voter fraud business means in the larger scheme of things.
It means that the left is on the wane in a very serious way. They can't win without cheating.
Cross Posted at Classical Values
Malibu burning?
Maybe the little people will get access to the beaches for a while.
H/T Instapundit
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. I can use the money - well actually I will use the proceeds to buy something from Amazon. I get a better deal that way.
