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My Way Is the High Way
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Having digested a number of reputable sources of wisdom, especially Thomas Sowell's A Conflict of Visions, what follows is how I view the crux of our Nation’s ideological divide. Any aspersions that one may choose to infer from my commentary are to be attributed to my personal opinions, stemming from my own cost/benefit analysis.
The Left (the gauche side of our ideological divide) views society as a collection of humans whose altruistic tendencies are perfectible, presumably through the good offices of big government, where government itself is implicitly presumed devoid of all flawed-human intentions. Such confidence in the intrinsic benevolence of one and all leads the Left to form special interest sub-groupings of individuals with a common allegiance to its own sub-group, primarily, and to the whole of society only secondarily.
The Right (the adroite side of our ideological divide), however, is less sanguine about the perfectibility of human kindness, not to mention the questionable benevolence of any governmental body (of flawed individuals). The Right, therefore, favors much less government and concomitantly greater self-reliance and communal reliance on free-market capitalism for the allocation of goods and services in as equitable and successful (as measured by wealth-generation) a manner as imperfect humanity has been able to devise to date. This skeptical view leads the Right to greater individual accountability and less reliance on special-interest associations, which, in turn leaves their principal allegiance to the Nation intact.
The Left can be characterized as the hopey-dopey pie-in-the-sky wishful-thinkers, ready to follow any smooth-talking messianic scammer promising heaven-on-earth in return for faith, hope, and tax-deductible contributions in perpetuity. The Right are the grownups who have heard, seen, and read-about-it-all before, and who must confront and reverse this audacity of ignorance and naïveté.
It's not easy being Right. But we weren't promised a rose garden, just a functioning brain.
Post 1,768 The View from the Top
The Left (the gauche side of our ideological divide) views society as a collection of humans whose altruistic tendencies are perfectible, presumably through the good offices of big government, where government itself is implicitly presumed devoid of all flawed-human intentions. Such confidence in the intrinsic benevolence of one and all leads the Left to form special interest sub-groupings of individuals with a common allegiance to its own sub-group, primarily, and to the whole of society only secondarily.
The Right (the adroite side of our ideological divide), however, is less sanguine about the perfectibility of human kindness, not to mention the questionable benevolence of any governmental body (of flawed individuals). The Right, therefore, favors much less government and concomitantly greater self-reliance and communal reliance on free-market capitalism for the allocation of goods and services in as equitable and successful (as measured by wealth-generation) a manner as imperfect humanity has been able to devise to date. This skeptical view leads the Right to greater individual accountability and less reliance on special-interest associations, which, in turn leaves their principal allegiance to the Nation intact.
The Left can be characterized as the hopey-dopey pie-in-the-sky wishful-thinkers, ready to follow any smooth-talking messianic scammer promising heaven-on-earth in return for faith, hope, and tax-deductible contributions in perpetuity. The Right are the grownups who have heard, seen, and read-about-it-all before, and who must confront and reverse this audacity of ignorance and naïveté.
It's not easy being Right. But we weren't promised a rose garden, just a functioning brain.
Post 1,768 The View from the Top
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