Socialist Left and Fascist Right

[ndrosen]

Daniel Raisbeck has an article in Reason on Latin American politics, describing how conservatism is discredited by right-wingers who don’t much respect liberty, or follow free market policies, leading to the Left coming to power, which, as can be seen in Venezuela and elsewhere, is not always a good thing for the poor and downtrodden folks whom the leftists claim to speak for.

What Senor Raisbeck does not say is that this could also apply to North America, where the party of Reagan became the party of Trump, and then lost to free-spending, pro-regulation Joe Biden. I am not happy with the direction my country seems to be taking.

Comments

[warriorsavant]

Gosh, almost sounds like most countries would do well to have some sort of centrist party, y'know, where the majority of people actually are. What a concept!

[ndrosen]

Although I am not in favor of splitting all differences, and I do not believe that the course popular with the broad center is necessarily the wisest course. (Developing and keeping institutions that will, at least most of the time, do what is genuinely beneficial is a hard problem.) Implementing real free market and limited government policies may be unpopular, for example, because it hurts sympathetic people who aren’t getting their welfare benefits any more, and steps on the toes of favored businesses that are no longer getting subsidies, tariff protection, and other special privileges; but I believe such policies to be good for most people in the long run.

[warriorsavant]

I’m a rather Lapsed, or at least Reform, Libertarian; formerly Orthodox. But I’m not much good at Orthodoxy of any sort. Although I’m more in favor of limited government than most (and I’ve noticed the Right is not any more in favor of limited gov’t than the Left, just different extravagances), I find that governments do some things better. Or perhaps I should say that it’s better to have them do some things. Or both.

Example: once upon a time, if your house was on fire, you had to put it out yourself, or with the help of sympathetic neighbors. That didn’t work all that well, so fire companies came into being, but they weren’t gov’t run, they were in fact, fee-for-service, with insurance companies paying them. Well, that didn’t work all that well either, so eventually (local) governments organized fire departments. Even where the firefighters themselves are volunteers, the organization is gov’t mandated, run, and paid for (infrastructure, equipment, training, and usually dispatchers all have to be paid for). I’ve taken the leap to parallel that with health care. I’m very much a bottom-line kind of guy. Despite the flaws in Canadian medicare, bottom line is that Canadians now live 2-3 years longer than Americans, whereas pre-medicare, the life expectancies were the same.

[ndrosen]

Some libertarians regard me as unorthodox for being a Georgist; people like me sometimes call ourselves Geolibertarians.

I think that David Friedman said it well: libertarianism is an attempt to apply a set of ethical and practical insights to a complicated world.