Capitalist Piglet -
Leap, ditto to that, too, especially in regards to Social Security, the biggest slap in the face. I'm too stupid to invest my own money, apparently.
This is one of the biggies that I cannot figure out as far as the left is concerned. They claim that we humans somehow do not have the ability to run the large part of our lives ourselves, in person, but that we instead need to delegate such tasks to a "big brother" director/manager/overseer system. I can understand the need for a degree of management in a complex social environment such as a city (the transport system alone would dissolve into chaos if kept at the level it is but had no management system and cities are a typically alienating place where most of the people you see are strangers), yet the left wing (in this explicit city-centredness, which is simply an offshoot of their inherent powerbase (industry based, rather than landed, wealth)) apply that rule as a commonality to all human life (despite the fact that not all of us live in cities (nor wish to)). It also fails to take into account the environmental and social impact of the industrial, city-based, lifestyle (positing it as the “ideal” when it is clearly far from it – hence the massive desire in this country at least to “get out of the rat race” and head for the countryside).
The left are either saying cities are good (regardless of the alienation, ill-health, environmental hell, increased crime, etc. that they bring!) or they are simply trying to paper over the cracks. At best, denial, at worst, well, for the at worst option words fail me!
The right recognises the human values that the left fails to notice (those typically found more in the countryside than the city – personal freedom, personal relationships, personal responsibility) but has the problem of connecting its wealth increasingly with industry rather than land/agriculture (leading to a countryside attitude in a city; which, as the left point out, do not really cut it in a metropolitan environment).
We need to decide whether we will one, move to cities and live by the left-wing attitudes needed in such (essentially cities create greater wealth but at the cost of the person, the human as well as having horrendous environmental impacts), or two, lower our populations and move back towards countryside living and the more right-wing attitudes suited to there (accepting a lower level of wealth but a higher level of the personal in life (personal responsibility / relationships, private ownership, along with far less damaging environmental impacts)). |
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