One of my conservamentators on Facebook posted something using bad (but typical among my right leaning friends) understandings of a couple of economic terms, and I considered adding my two cents to the conversation, but decided against it, just for reasons of time. But in the imaginary conversation in my head, one of the commentators in my head described me, using a term for left leaning which I imagine he meant as a pejorative, but in fact was not. Since political terms are more descriptive of policy positions than of people, I got to thinking, how would I answer the question, "What are you? Some kinda [insert left-descriptive pejorative here]?"
By coincidence, another friend is having a birthday today, and in
order to make sure that I didn't send her the same birthday card as last year, etc., I checked our "See Friendship" file. Scrolling through, I discovered that I had sent her a link to an
old blog post from 2015 that fit my morning's preoccupation perfectly.
So I think I am ready to answer the question above.
- I believe that you should be able to start up a business that will provide an income that will enable you to provide for your and your family's needs, and the needs of your employees. So I am a Capitalist.
- I believe that, by law, the wages that you pay his employees should be enough for them to live off of. I also believe that your business should not put them in danger of death or injury. I also believe that your business should not do things that would poison the air or water, or otherwise harm the environment in your community or state, or crash the economy. So I am a Progressive.
- I believe that the local, state and Federal Governments should provide the infrastructure and economic structure that would enable your business to operate, such as streets, water, power, communications, fire and police services, etc. So I am a Social Democrat.
- I believe that all people should be afforded basic civil and human rights, including the right to vote, and that the Government should see to it that those rights are enforced in the public arena. Therefore, I believe that your business should be prevented by law from discriminating against people in your hiring and service practices based on broad identifiers such as race, religion, national origin, sexual identification, etc. I also believe that there are certain inevitabilities in life, such as injury, illnesses, recession, unemployment, natural disasters, etc., and that the Government should provide certain kinds of relief, such as a strong and adequately funded social safety net. So I am a Liberal.
- I believe that the health care system in this country has become untenable, that it is shameful that in the richest country in the world that people are dying from treatable illnesses and fixable injuries just because they can't afford health care, and that it's absurd that we are the only country in the world that thinks that this is okay. I believe Medicare should be expanded to include everyone because in other countries this is the system that seems to work the best, and we're already familiar with its operation. So I am a Democratic Socialist.
I don't actually believe that my right leaning friends are that different from me in regards to much of the above. But a misunderstanding of labels persists.
I'm no expert on this stuff, but I read a lot, and I hope I am curious enough to look up stuff when someone points out an error. Paul Krugman once wrote that the only real divide between right and left was how big the social safety net should be, and how should we pay for it. He said that these are essentially values issues, and that there was no right or wrong answer. But I think we should at least be able to understand the terms if we're going to be able to discuss differences intelligently.
I once knew the parents of a teenager who liked to wear extra-wide legged jeans. I joked to his Dad one time that if this was communist country, he'd have to share those jeans with four other families. I recently realized that I could expand on that: If this was a Socialist country, the jeans would have been manufactured by a government owned factory from cotton grown on a government run farm and sold in a government run "
company store." No one is advocating for that, of course, but "socialist" is one of the terms that the right likes to throw at anyone on the left. But attempts at being insulting would probably be more effective if they could demonstrate that they knew what the word actually means.
• The party in control determines what bills come to the floor for a vote.
