For And Against

There was a time when the debate on issues was not only civil, it was quite rich in content. It wasn’t so much an argument as an exploration of different ideas with both the left and the right bringing passion and conviction to an honest discussion of how best to resolve something. 

Today, there is none of that richness in the debate, no exploration of different ideas or the building of mutual understanding. Today it has come down to only two positions; you’re either for something or against it. Increasingly, the left which likes to call itself progressive and liberal is the ‘anti’ side of the argument and that is one of the major obstacles to our nations moving forward.

To be sure, the left is in favour of certain things but inevitably those things are at the expense of others financially or in terms of rights and/or individual freedom. They are threatened by the success of the individual claiming it comes at the expense of others. 

The left favours more government regulation on just about everything from the environment to healthcare. God alone understands why. If nothing else, government has demonstrated a remarkable inability to do anything cost-effectively, efficiently or in a timely manner.

If government was organizing the second coming of Christ, he’d be here and gone and The Rapture would be over before government had completed an environmental assessment of the venue where the final judgment had been held.

I can only conclude that the left is less about progress than they are about control and because they deplore the private sector, government is their only conduit to exercising that control. In fact, when you look at the primary difference between the left and the right, it is only about government control. The left wants more and the right wants less or to put it another way; the left stands for collective statist while the right stands for the individual.

Pick your issue and invariably it comes down to control.

Want to ride a bike? The right thinks you should be allowed to buy a bike and use it as you see fit within the context of the rules of the road that all vehicles must follow. The left wants mandatory bicycle helmets, bike lanes, licensing, age restrictions on major roads and a host of lesser regulations all designed to squeeze whatever sense of fun that comes from riding a bike.

It isn’t about safety, it’s simply about control. In my city, they’ve even imposed a regulation that children under six must wear a helmet when ice skating at public rinks. (Apparently children at private rinks never get injured) When did head injuries to children skating suddenly become so epidemic that it required more government regulation? The truth is that it didn’t but logic never prevented the left from imposing more regulation and control wherever possible. 

I had one bright light message me the other day to inform me that the problem with capitalism was that it over-managed everything, a statement so stupid that I had to remind myself to breathe. Clearly he actually believed what he messaged, he just wasn’t accurate. It isn’t the private sector that over-manages, it’s government. The private sector is all about profit and the more management or production expense, the less profit there is. Government isn’t concerned with profit so how much they spend to accomplish something is not something they worry about.

What makes me scratch my head is that in almost every society where government control was the rule rather than the exception, has failed but the left refuses to learn from that failure or even acknowledge it.

Socialist countries like the Soviet Union, Greece, East Germany and others collapsed from the lack of productivity caused by over-regulation and too much state control over the lives of citizens. In France, every citizen pays 46% of the salary just for social benefits and then is taxed on their income on top of that. The total for a typical French citizen comes in at over 60% of their income and that doesn’t include sales taxes, provincial or municipal taxes. It’s small wonder that the black market in France is booming.

In the past fifty years, left-leaning governments have been in power more often than those on the right. The result? While those governments dithered and passed more laws to restrict the day-to-day lives of people, our nations have experience record deficits, increased unemployment, poverty, crumbling infrastructure while none of the issues the left claims to care about have been advanced or resolved.

It is not government that provides prosperity, it is people; individuals who are left alone to live their lives as they see fit with a minimum of government interference. 

To be sure, some capitalists abuse the system and break the rules. They take advantage of others and outright steal and cheat. We have laws to try and protect us from them and prisons waiting for them. But it isn’t merely those evil capitalists who rip us off. Governments, like the former Liberal government in Canada, have stolen money from us and there are more than a few in the middle class who have stuck their hands in our pockets. Parking lot attendants at NASA’s facility in Washington are now being investigated for the theft of hundreds of thousands of dollars in parking receipts and that, my friends, is not the fault of capitalism.

Dishonesty is not a right or a left issue. It is not the purview of capitalism or socialism, it is a lack of character and you’ll find it in all walks of life. 

We need some level of government but not the amount of government the left keeps trying to impose on  us. We need laws to protect us from the bad guys and to ensure a level playing field. We need infrastructure, communications, defense; things in the national interest that benefit all equally. What we don’t need is government meddling in every aspect of our lives to the point where there is so much regulation and taxes are so oppressive that it undermines our potential productivity and creativity as a nation. We don’t need artificial wealth redistribution where much of the money earned by those who have worked hard to succeed is taken and given to those who couldn’t be bothered trying. We don't need to protected from ourselves or have government tell us how to raise our children. 

No society has ever been successfully built and run by a controlling collective mentality; prosperity has always come from the innovation and efforts of individuals. Each step taken by one becomes an opportunity and a stepping stone for others. Bill Gates spawned a technology advancement that has literally changed the world and provided billions in wealth and employment to millions globally over the past thirty odd years. Despite his vision and contribution to society both professionally and philanthropically, he has often been criticized by the left but in all honesty, what government has ever achieved anything remotely close to what he has? Mr. Gates actually contributes more financial aid to the third world than the GDP of some developed countries.

It is capitalism with all of its faults and flaws but respect for individual achievement, not the left’s socialist daydreams with all its pretentious idealism that provides real opportunity for even the poorest among us.

In the end, it is the right that stands ‘for’ freedom and prosperity by trying to control less and the left that typically is ‘anti’ prosperity and freedom by trying to control everything. It is not altruism that drives the right and it is not a desire for excellence that drives the left.

There is no creativity or productivity in being against something because it is not built on ideas but on envy, greed, laziness, and lust for undeserved power, a bizarre and twisted sense of social justice or just plain stupidity. 

The right is a celebration of individual achievement not collective mediocrity. It rewards effort and recognizes that the benefits of success rightly belong to those who achieve, not to those who didn’t but who expect a share of the rewards anyway. It is the big lie that the left promulgates to justify entitlements for those who hang around like vultures waiting for a share of the success and accomplishments of others. 

I’m not anti-left on a human level; I have friends who believe in the left’s agenda. They’re good people for the most part, just terribly misguided. Invariably, every single one of them works in the public sector. They have no concept of anything beyond a guaranteed salary and pension plan. They are risk averse, too quick to support any idea that imposes control on others and typically too willing to be overly critical of those who took the risk and achieved something they never will. They criticize the successful for being successful because they see it as some sort of inequality but they fail to recognize that it is an inequality of effort not wealth.

It is this misguided concept of equality that the left brings to every issue and invariably those who can achieve are penalized by those who can’t or who won’t try. Inevitably it is an attempt to find equality by bringing everyone down to the lowest common denominator.

The right would never dream up the idea that students in school should never receive a zero for failing to hand in a term paper. Only the left would put forward the idea that there should be no consequence for not meeting a basic work requirement. Only the left would fire a teacher who had the audacity to give a student a zero for refusing several opportunities to complete his term assignments.

We are all equal in terms of our rights as citizens but that doesn’t mean that we are equal in terms of ability or accomplishment and the left’s ongoing and bizarre attempts to balance that creates even more inequality than it set out to correct. 

There is a natural order to things that the left has failed to accept or even understand. Innovation does not come from a collective where thinking has been reduced to a level of mediocrity. It comes from individuals who have been left alone to pursue their ideas and their goals. The rewards of that accomplishment are theirs and theirs alone. 

It’s like the Olympics. The gold medal is presented to the athlete who persevered, who had the discipline and the ability to make it to the top of their sport. The medal isn’t presented to the rest of us who sat back and watched the games on television, nor should it be.

I believe that the left needs to stop deluding itself and start reconnecting with reality where competition, hard work and the rights of the individual are the things that drive prosperity and that lead a nation forward. They are justifiably rewarded. The idea that those who achieve little to nothing should share equally in that is an idea that is long past its best-before date.

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