michaelab said:
My summary would be: left-wing means you care about other people, right-wing means you only care about yourself.
Perhaps a little harsh, Mike (and, like yourself, I lean strongly left). Perhaps a better definition would be that the left believes in improving the lot of ordinary working people by direct intervention (using tax revenue for better social services, health care, public transport, in the extreme case, nationalisation of particular utilities and even industries). The right, on the other hand, stands for unbridled capitalism, free play of market forces, the right of the rich to get even richer, etc. The theory here is that, if this is allowed to happen, benefits will trickle down to the workers, thus improving their lot. Winston Churchill was a strong believer in the "trickle down" idea, but then Winston was really a 19th century man (and from an aristocratic family) who, in the words of one famous commentator, was prepared "to put up with the best of everything".
Unbridled laisser-faire capitalism brought disaster on Ireland in the 1840s when the potato crop failed two years in a row, because of blight, a fungal disease. A million Irish died and another million emigrated, mainly to the USA, where they took their anti-British bitterness, which in turn helped make the North the mess it is today. This was not a genocide, as some Republicans will try to tell you, but a simple application of extreme right-wing politics (these people could have given Maggie lessons). They were not cruel people, but they just said, "We can't give people money and food for nothing, otherwise it'll remove their will to better themselves and provide for themselves. They'll just become lazy and dependent." So Ireland remained a net exporter of food all during the potato famine. Population of Ireland before the blight struck, about 8 million, population today (both North and South), about 5 million.
Of course the reverse extreme case is Marxism, in which all means of production belong in the hands of the people (in theory anyway). The father of Marx's collaborator, Friedriech Engels, was a mill owner in northern England, and he was horrified at the conditions that ordinary workers had to endure - "dark satanic" wasn't too far wrong. Marx drew inspiration from Darwinism, then on the rise - as man had evolved from more primitive ancestors, so Communism would be the eventual, inevitable outcome of man's political and social evolution. Marx would have been astounded that his system would not take root in the advanced West, as he thought, but in backwards Russia. But that was because of a further element. Marx believed that capitalism would collapse inevitably under the weight of its own contradictions; Vladimir Ilych Ulanov added the element of giving capitalism a helping hand to go, by violent overthrow. And so we had Marxism-Leninism. And, as we have seen, it didn't do any better than capitalism.
There are inherent problems in both positions and both are caused by human nature. As Mike implies, few on the right care about anyone but themselves. But human nature is the same across the board and many on the left feel the same way - and nobody has ever truly been able to legislate people into doing what they really should do. The old joke in the eastern bloc was, "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us". The social democracies of continental Europe seem to be the best compromise, but even they have been creaking in the present conditions, under pressure from globalisation and jobs being done cheaply elsewhere. And if I had the answer, I wouldn't be sitting here rambling on to you, I'd be dusting my Nobel Prize medal on the mantelpiece and consulting for the 1000th time the S-Class Mercedes catalogue, trying to decide what colour the other one should be.
, wasn't you was it??
and its so damn loud
. However, judging from e-mails and PM's I get, the lefties (like me) tend to be less vocal on political issues on the forum which is probably a good thing as political arguments on forums will go nowhere and no-one will convince anyone else of their point of view and it just creates a load of bad feeling.
