OK, I’m a liberal. That’s what an internet based quiz for political inclination told me. There were lots of questions about public education and public health care, which I am in favor of, and that supposedly makes me a liberal.
But there were absolutely no questions about a balanced government budget, which I am also in favor of. Leaving out such a question suggests that the quiz was written by someone from the loony left who really don’t understand that today’s government borrowing requires future taxes to pay the interest and principal. So such a question can be conveniently left out of any quiz to identify the liberals.
This casting aside of any negative ramification of their proffered societal solutions is common trait of the looney left. Following is small list of examples I have encountered over the years:
When really pressed about government deficit financing, the eventually loony left retort: “tax the rich and corporations.” But try to mention that when these taxes go up, the taxpayers have less disposable income to buy other goods and services to stimulate the economy and provide jobs. And when taxes get a little too high, those big corporations move their factories and head offices somewhere else.
The loony left like solar power as an alternative energy source. I agree: it’s a good idea to use underutilized space like rooftops to generate more electricity. But when I mention that solar power in a very meaningful way is going to require either farmland to be taken out of production or wildlife habitats to be altered, the loony left just dismiss my comments because solar panels cannot possibly have any drawbacks.
Speaking about solar panels, an astute inventor has created solar panels for driveways. Good idea, but the inventor is promoting his product as suitable for streets and highways. The loony left liked electricity-generating streets and highways so much that they made the inventor’s concept viral. Should I bother mentioning the civil engineering required to support a driveway with a few low-speed cars a day is nothing compared to the engineering required to for thousands of high-speed cars and heavy trucks to pound our highways? No, it would be a waste of my time. Let’s give the inventor a few million dollars of government money to put his solar panels on busy highways.
The looney left despise petroleum and mineral extraction. In their vision of the world, there will be no more oil wells or pipelines or mines or mineral processing plants. Not only do they not have effective answers to replace all the useful products from resource extraction, their effective protests only move resource extraction from a western country to somewhere else where there are fewer regulations to protect that local population—and the western world still gets benefits of the products. What a self-serving and empty victory!
When a big corporation reports a billion dollars in annual profit, the loony left are outraged. They tend to forget that that same company probably made a 10-billion dollar investment to earn that profit—and the company probably lost money for a few years before it could reach that profit level.
Thankfully, the voice of the loony left is countered by the voice of righteous right, which leaves politicians finding solutions in the middle of these two extremes. But I can’t help but wonder that if the loony left acknowledged the drawbacks of its vision of the world, we just might be further ahead along that left-leaning path. Until then, I won’t be calling myself a liberal in any way—regardless of what that political spectrum test said.
Published in Writerbeat 2017
The Inspiration for Tiered Democratic Governance
