Liberals, give our ideas a try

As previously mentioned elsewhere on this blog, I used to bunk with liberals in the ever waging battle of fake politics. This past foray with the left gives me a good idea of how they think. Liberals, I believe, have a lot of the same end goals for society as those of us of the more libertarian persuasion. Liberals, like their libertarian brethren, want peace, but they think that requires picking off dictators and sticking our noses (and drones) into the affairs of others. We think it’s a simple as leaving them alone. Liberals, also like us, want prosperity for most, but they believe that the only path there is through bureaucratic manipulation of capital and a nanny state. We think such tactics are immoral, dangerous and counterproductive and that free markets achieve optimal resource allocations more effectively. Liberals too want progress, but they think we would have never made it to the moon without a Federal Agency. We think if that was true it’s probably because there was no good reason to in the first place. Liberals have a list of grievances that looks like a carbon copy of ours but while we agree on the symptoms, the prescriptions vastly differ. What separates us is not our motivation, it is our execution. How we achieve peace, prosperity, and progress.

Admittedly it is a difficult task to prove what works best. Economics is a social science composed of explanations impossible to definitely prove using the scientific method. As a social science, it relies mostly on deductive reasoning based on reasonable assumptions about different variables. It is impossible to run a lab test on societal changes and chart the outcome. Even if it were, correlation would prove impossible. There are occasions in civilized living, however, that show us some stark results of a kind of quasi-scientific economic testing. I think we are in such a rare position these days. We have seen a century or so of state directed economic policy and its effects over that period. Although obviously not a complete picture this is a decent sample size for an economic experiment or about as close as we can get to one. Right now, we are living through the results of this experiment in state directed economics. The tendencies and failures of such policies have resulted in a situation rather similarly hypothesized by free market economists. The empirical evidence piles up daily: perpetual inflation, decreasing real wages, sustained unemployment, a laughable series of booms and busts. It’s these tangible results that have hastened the recent reemergence of the freedom principles in millions, particularly ex lefties.

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