left v right

Apt46 october 9th 

The Wizard of Id is a great comic that’s been running since 1964, and the below is not one of theirs — it’s just a parody someone made at some point in the run-up to the 2008 elections.

It’s along the lines of Margaret Thatcher’s famous quote:

Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people’s money.

One interesting thing to note is that it is very much part of human nature to divide people into “us” and “them”. This kind of division happens along very many lines, not just political right and left: black and white, smart and dumb, educated and blue collar, rich and poor, north and south, fat and thin, lazy and hard-working, etc, etc ad nauseam. Almost always, the division is meant to show one side as good and the other as bad. But of course, humans everywhere are pretty much the same, and no one group is fundamentally any better or worse than another.

This can be clearly seen in the division between right and left:

• The left criticizes the right for being greedy: they don’t want what’s best for the country, they’re just heartless fat-cats who want to line their pockets with profits made off the backs of the poor that can’t afford health insurance
• The right criticizes the left for being lazy: they don’t want what’s best for the country, they’re just naïve idealists who want to get everything for free from the hard-working rich people so they can sit around and drink lattes all day

In the end, each side criticizes the other for not being patriotic and in truth, if either side won outright it would be a disaster.
If the left won, the cartoon above would turn into reality: why would people work if they can get all their basic needs for free? To see the truth of this effect, we can point to the consistently low productivity in the countries behind the Iron Curtain in the last century, which eventually caused the fall of the communist block. For example, East Germany’s productivity declined about 25% while it was a Soviet satellite state.
If the right won, Upton Sinclair’s  The Jungle would turn into reality: those without a social safety net would die of hunger, disease or old age in the streets. And while traditionally churches have provided that safety net, as people have become less and less church-going, that safety net has turned into a combination of charities and government programs.

Henry Clay

So we do need both sides, and one thing that’s great about the voting population is that the biggest number of people aren’t die-hard Republicans or Democrats, but rather independents: they might have a nominal party affiliation, but their vote isn’t enslaved to either party. If the country gets too socialist, they vote Republican; if it gets too much like The Jungle, they vote Democrat. But it would be nice if we had in Congress a Great Compromiser like Henry Clay — someone that could get things moving in the legislature without having to wait for a complete elections sweep by either party. Someone that could get a bill passed that would lower the unemployment rate, balance the budget, keep taxes low and keep people’s medical bills manageable.