Taylor wrote: the conservative end of the political spectrum they will say something like "Small government is good", the question they do not answer however is...what exactly is a small enough gov't.
An excellent book on this topic is
The Constitution of Liberty by Friedrich Hayek, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who was the main inspiration for British PM Margaret Thatcher (
Chicagoist summary of Hayek's book). The conservative libertarian view is that the purpose of the state is to secure rule of law. Everything else is better delivered by the private sector. Now I accept that getting to that ideal is difficult, given pervasive market failure, but it remains a worthy goal, since in principle competitive markets will generate greater wealth than a command economy, including for the poor.
Taylor wrote:This libertarian view...this anti-federalist view...this far right thinking is an easy cop-out.
What do you mean by ‘anti-federalist’? I think it is true that libertarian economics is anti-democratic, just in the sense that most people prefer big government, seen as much in Republican military welfare as in Democrat policies of tax and spend to redistribute wealth. So plans to shrink government to an effective size are not going to win popular elections. I can’t see that as a cop-out, since it presents a moral ideal of self-reliance within a functioning civil society, even if it might take a long time to achieve. Ignoring that goal increases the risk of catastrophic collapse. Having money in the bank is safer than debt.
Taylor wrote: I am not aware of any historical time frame where this idea of sound money or a pure capitalist economy was ever anything other than a tool for actions like: monopoly building, mineral or transportation manipulation, labor manipulation. just to point out several examples.
I raised this topic of sound money in reply to your comment in the thread on impeachment, but happy to also discuss it here, as it is perhaps more relevant to the art of the deal. My relevant post is at
post164064.html#p164064 Sound money is definitely relevant to the whole problem of analysing US politics, in this crazy era of quantitative easing, hundred trillion dollar debt levels with no prospect of repayment, and general cultural escape into fantasy.
Here is the article on Sound Money by the great conservative economist Ludwig Mises that I mentioned. What is fascinating here is that Mises presents sound money as a core ethical principle, while advocates of unsound money cynically suggest that balancing budgets and preserving value is just a corrupt stratagem to steal from the poor.
Taylor wrote: It is no wonder that the political extremes in the U.S. court the centrist, it is strength in numbers. The center is not always smart though, so there is easy manipulation.
Political centrists tend not to have strong ideological views and tend to believe in compromise, and include swinging voters with either little interest in politics or ability to be swayed by bribery. The further one goes to the extremes of right and left the stronger becomes the 'take no prisoners' attitude. As I said in the other thread, power results from the base persuading the uncommitted to support them.
Taylor wrote:Manipulation towards what?. Power mostly...The power to control money. This battle between the extremes is what really pisses me off, It is where lies are generated.
Polarisation is politically toxic, destroying respect, dialogue, trust, mutuality, etc. Polarisation is primarily fuelled by corruption, with the perception among the poor and their allies that business has no ethics. That collapse in perceptions of moral legitimacy drove the revolutionary sentiment in Russia and China, seeing politics as class war. From the other side, right wingers think that left wing ethics are corrupt, based on transferring from producers to consumers. Makes me think of
Gil Scott Heron B Movie lyrics Taylor wrote:The truly hard work is at the center, it is where the rubber meets the road so to speak. It's in the center where we manage the unanswerable, How much money is needed? Who/what should we as a society be concerned about? what level should that concern be? what are/is the abuses if abuse is happening?.
No, that analysis is flawed. Centrism is the locus of compromise and the art of the deal, based on what can command majority support rather than what is true or good. The truly hard work is building understanding of what is true and good.
If the majority believes the nation can ignore major issues, such as climate and debt, the rubber never hits the road, and eventually the car runs into a ditch.
Taylor wrote:I get that Co2 reduction is a slippery slope, Decarbonization as it is sometimes proposed carries heavy downside implications for the individual much less the global economy. I can see where decarbonization is a dramatic push to the left as it would be gov't regulation that drives it.
Thanks for that comment which I completely agree with. What we have in the traumatised divisions over climate is the politics of class warfare transposed onto the politics of climate change, even though the issues are different and this class approach makes no sense. Decarbonisation, the war on coal, is a policy whose concealed leftist agenda is increasing the power of the state over society. As well, emission reduction just won’t work as a way to stabilise the climate. The sensible elements of the right see these basic problems, but because popular politics only gains traction at the mythic level, the only effective popular counter to climate fanaticism is denial.
Taylor wrote:It would be heavy handed totalitarianism and the conservatives are correct in their push back.
Yes, except the pushback is quite incoherent, standing in denial of the toxic externalities of fossil fuel emissions. The principle of opposition to totalitarian tendencies of the left is sound, but the right also has its dictatorial traits.