On 3/31/2015 3:55 AM, LizR wrote:
On 31 March 2015 at 23:31, Telmo Menezes <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> 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;
- 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;
- 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;
- Confronting the lobbies that prevent modern technology from being used to
create
dirt-cheap, comfortable housing.
I agree with you. I'm very sympathetic to anarchist views, which some of the
above-mentioned are (more than left wing). I was only arguing for simple empathy for
others, which right wingers seem to have deliberately cut themselves off from - to their
own detriment as well as others'. I wasn't particularly actually /being/ a leftie, but I
often get called one for espousing such ideas. But of course real lefties see me as to
their right. (I have a similar problem with feminists...)
The "right-wing" in the U.S. seems to be a syncretic alliance of conservative
authoritarians whose main purpose is maintain and even reenforce all existing hierarchies
(rich over poor, white over black, men over women,...) and the libertarian individualists
who just oppose government as a intrusion on freedom. They became allied because FDR's
New Deal and LBJ's Civil Rights act were both attempts by the federal government to upset
hierarchies and restrict the freedom of the haves to keep the have-nots down. The
economic conservatives hated them because it threatened the power of the capitalist to
exploit labor. The social conservatives hated them because it threatened their superior
social status relative to blacks, browns, jews, atheists,... The libertarians hated them
because they were coercive government actions that restricted freedom - even if it was
freedom to be assholes.
Brent
Brent
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