On 3/31/2015 3:31 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
Hi Liz,
You may be right. I am surely not going to debate that there are a lot of people who
were lucky enough to have been born in optimal conditions and feel superior to people
who were just less lucky. For this reason, they will support ideas that are just
self-serving rationalizations.
The problem with left/right polarization, in my opinion, is that it kills
critical thought.
It is possible to agree with everything you said, but also believe that the strategies
traditionally proposed by the left do not work. There are many interesting ideas that
are not taken seriously because they fall outside of this dichotomy, for example:
- Guaranteed flat income for everyone, no exceptions, no special rules;
I like that's well within the left camp.
- A return to a resource-based currency and the end of central banks, thus preventing
they highly leveraged investments that generate economical crises and only widen the gap
between the rich and the poor;
Leverage investments (essentially creating money) does a lot to stimulate economic and
technical development too.
- Deregulation of medicine, recongnizing that there is a trade-off between the
protections provided by regulation and the pricing-out of people out of medical care due
to barriers to competition introduced by said regulation;
The barriers are to competition in production, i.e. patents. Without those barriers there
would be much less incentive for development and research - which is wide open for
competition, but very expensive.
- Confronting the lobbies that prevent modern technology from being used to create
dirt-cheap, comfortable housing.
Moderns technology already has created dirt-cheap, comfortable housing - it's called a
mobile home (or house trailer). The problem with dirt-cheap is that dirt isn't cheap. A
home lot in Santa Monica, with a falling down house on it, goes for about 750K$.
I'm not sure if these ideas work in practice, but I am sure that they are not given
serious consideration because of the traditional left/right lock-in on critical thought.
I'm not so sure that it's a lock on critical thought rather than a lock on political
campaign funding.
Brent
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