I’ve been pondering this for a few weeks now and I just can’t figure out why people of the leftist persuasion want markets to exist at all. Their basic premise is that the government is more reliable, more efficient and more moral than the market for everything and that they prefer to get their goods and services from the government rather than from private sources so why don’t they just support all out socialism?
A couple days ago I asked a leftist on the NYT wall why he wanted markets to even exist and he couldn’t give me an answer. Anyone else ever tried this?
Whatever they see that need’s to be accesible to all and that should be a “right” should be subsidized or have that industry taken over by the government.
The rest is “consumerism” based on brainwash marketing. After people pay every last cent of extra income in taxes to provide the “rights” there will be no demand left for these excesses. It amounts to about the same result. Given their initial agenda fulfilled they would surely drop the lip service to the remaining markets.
They seem to think that some things are too important to be left up to the market–education, money, courts, healthcare, etc. Of course, the fact that those things are important is why they need to be left up to “the market.”
They aren’t “socialists”, communists, etc…they are more akin to wanting scientism, technocrats, etc. It’s lefty postmodernism; highly professional, highly bureaucratic, highly specialized, and not wishing to commit to any modernist notion of anything absolute. Very few educated leftists are actually socialists or communists (in fact it is hip to call them naive in their circles), particularly in the Ivy Leagues.
Messy hair, sun glasses, bad boy adrenaline idealism is so out/ asburgers, chopped non offensive spiky hair, thick rimmed plastic glasses “logic” is the new black. In other words , instead of the “groovy guidance councilor” hippy, you have people like the Verizon Wireless guy wanting to run your 60 yr old Vietnam War vet dad’s life.
It’s all the cult of moral grayness: “The world isn’t black and white! There has to be some compromise!”
Somehow, capitalism and socialism are both evil because they’re “extremes.” Doesn’t matter that capitalism is actually just uncompromising liberty, only that it is uncompromising.
In my mind, food is important. If I felt as they felt, desired what they desired, I would demand that food companies be nationalized and that food be distributed by the government. So why don’t they want food to be distributed by the government?
I am not a moralist myself. I am a big believer in compromise and weighing values against values. I don’t really care about liberty for the sake of liberty. I care about liberty because I think that I’m more likely to get what I want when there is more freedom than when there is less freedom. I do the math in my head and I figure that I stand to gain more from less government. However, if their premise is that everything is better when the government does it, why don’t they prefer total socialism? Wouldn’t they get more of what they wanted? Is it not rational to try and maximize gain and minimize loss?