My
friend Per who is a lifelong Lefty and reads my blog regularly asks a
wonderful question: is there some common ground between the Pro
Commerce world view and Lefty Fundamentalism?
Sure. Most of my
friends are Lefties and they are wonderful, intelligent and admirable
people. The simple way I would state the nature of our common ground
is that there is a spectrum of understanding about commerce, its
benefits and its mechanisms and the scale of understanding is greatest
in the conservative pragmatic business world and least in the Lefty
Fundamentalist world. People like John Kerry, on the Left, understand
that government redistribution of income in a society like ours is
harmful to commerce. Most other Lefties don't. People like Bill
Clinton understand that global trade is beneficial for everyone as
David Ricardo proved more than 200 years ago, many other people Left
and Right don't understand this and unions have the least understanding
of the benefits of global trade.
There is a whole category of contentious differences what are not easily determined by facts as those above.
Government is needed for: (1) stopping free riders, (2) protecting the disadvantaged and (3) penalizing negative externalities.*
When
there are no historic facts we have every reason to argue these
matters. In the current healthcare debate Lefties belief that among
the 44 million Americans without health insurance that forcing 20
million who can afford it (free riders) to pay will reduce the costs
for everyone. That is a reasonable argument without a test basis to
look back on.
However, Per, when I am hostile to Lefties it is because the facts are highly visible and the Left ignores them out of ideological blindness. Conservatives do that ocassionaly but the long record of history indicates that there is not much ideological blindness among conservatives.
The Left believes in CO2 Armageddon as all the evidence disappears. The Left hung on to their love of communism regardless of Stalin's and Mao's million-man murders, many still love Fidel, Che and Hugo Chavez. The Left still favors more government (more welfare payments), fewer big global businesses, and is against free trade despite the incredible disproof of those ideas in Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, India, Singapore, China and all of East Europe in the past 60 years.
How can I stop pointing out the failure of the Left to replace ideological blindness with an open eyed look at recent history?
*Footnote: Accepted government functions. (1) Free riders. A fire department where some people don't pay for the fire protection yet they still get fire protection to protect the other houses that do pay for it. (2) Protecting the disadvantaged. The oldest moral imperative we have. Found on a Hebrew shard 3,000 years old. (3) Negative externalities. Using a dirty bucket to get water out of the common well or spilling toxic effluent into a common river.
There is a whole category of contentious differences what are not easily determined by facts as those above.
Government is needed for: (1) stopping free riders, (2) protecting the disadvantaged and (3) penalizing negative externalities.*
However, Per, when I am hostile to Lefties it is because the facts are highly visible and the Left ignores them out of ideological blindness. Conservatives do that ocassionaly but the long record of history indicates that there is not much ideological blindness among conservatives.
The Left believes in CO2 Armageddon as all the evidence disappears. The Left hung on to their love of communism regardless of Stalin's and Mao's million-man murders, many still love Fidel, Che and Hugo Chavez. The Left still favors more government (more welfare payments), fewer big global businesses, and is against free trade despite the incredible disproof of those ideas in Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, India, Singapore, China and all of East Europe in the past 60 years.
How can I stop pointing out the failure of the Left to replace ideological blindness with an open eyed look at recent history?
*Footnote: Accepted government functions. (1) Free riders. A fire department where some people don't pay for the fire protection yet they still get fire protection to protect the other houses that do pay for it. (2) Protecting the disadvantaged. The oldest moral imperative we have. Found on a Hebrew shard 3,000 years old. (3) Negative externalities. Using a dirty bucket to get water out of the common well or spilling toxic effluent into a common river.