On Wed, 15 Sep 2004, Dan Minette wrote:
> I don't have the time to find his examples in the archives or to outline
> them in full in my own words, so let me pick a proponent of each as an
> example. They are Hubert H. Humphrey, and Barry Goldwater. (Goldwater,
> BTW, once said that Humphrey was the person who was most qualified to be
> president...its just that he disagreed with many of his ideas.)
> Humphrey espoused the left handed approach and Goldwater the right
> handed approach. David wants an approach that includes ideas each of
> these men espouse.
On Friday, January 15, 1999, David Brin sent out a post that included the
following:
Historically human beings have used two major classes of approaches
to societal problem solving:
1) acting as a group, coordinated by tribal authorities who use group
resources to accomplish specified tasks. I call this the Left Hand.
2) acting as individuals within a society's overall protection and
rules, but otherwise negotiating with each other, bargaining,
innovating and striving to get ahead. This is the Right Hand.
Ideologues commonly oversimplify human nature, and thus insult our
true complexity. Socialists bad-mouth the right hand and
libertarians hate the left.
In fact, the march of human progress has seen many great advances
achieved by both method (1) and method (2)... and many horible crimes
perpetrated by both. What we need is to start understanding what
jobs each is good at, and what each is bad at.
The Left Hand is regrettably necessary for certain non-profitable
services such as defense and maintaining scrupulous standards for
weights and measures. What it's very good at is addressing urgent
and ACUTE problems... Kill Hitler... feed these particular children
right now! Go to the Moon!
The Left Hand is lousy at making poverty go away or creating a
self-sustaining and profitable infrastructure in space. When such
CHRONIC problems are addressed socialistically, you often get
permanent welfare structures and incentives to maintain an ongoing
client class. (One of the longstanding complaints of the right.)
On the other hand, the Right Hand is very good at keeping a resilient
and robust economy going, while state planning inevitably flubs it
(e.g. the USSR and, more recently, Japan). Ultimately, wealth is
created by individuals trying to get ahead. But defenders of
capitalism often downplay how important it is that the system have
rules that fine tune the play, so that the inherent inequities are
minimized and fair-competition is enhanced. Otherwise, cheaters will
conspire & prosper at the expense of the helpless. (They always
have! Ours is the only civ that ever kept this nasty human trend
under overall control, so that real competition could thrive.)
The insanity of ideology is exemplified by the fact that Marx would
have us amputate the right hand... and Ayn Rand would have us lop off
the left. It's just plain loony.
(Of all the e-mails my brief search turned up, this seemed to be the most
well-written.)
If DB has anything to add to this, I would welcome reading it, assuming he
has time to do so.
Julia
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