Questions
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Another view on Liberals: Link
“Liberals” don’t really care what you think is best for yourself. They want government to tell you what you should and shouldn’t be doing, believing, saying, etc. both inside and outside of your home and business. Doesn’t sound very liberal. Really, when they say “liberal,” they mean morally lax. But that isn’t for your sake. It’s for theirs. They just want to do whatever they want without anyone telling them it’s not a good idea… even if it makes everyone else miserable.
Consider the welfare “cure” for poverty. It might give a little more money to some people who currently have little, but leftist “radicals” have failed to understand why most people are poor. It’s often not because they are “under-privileged.” It’s usually because they are lazy. And welfare doesn’t curtail laziness. In fact, it promotes it. That’s like thinking precipitation hurts the bug population just because you don’t see many mosquitos while it’s raining. So, leftists aren’t radical.
In 1999, Cass Sunstein wrote an article in the Harvard Law Review entitled “The Law of Group Polarization.” Its thesis was simple:
In a striking empirical regularity, deliberation tends to move groups, and the individuals who compose them, toward a more extreme point in the direction indicated by their own predeliberation judgments. For example, people who are opposed to the minimum wage are likely, after talking to each other, to be still more opposed; people who tend to support gun control are likely, after discussion, to support gun control with considerable enthusiasm; people who believe that global warming is a serious problem are likely, after discussion, to insist on severe measures to prevent global warming. This general phenomenon — group polarization – has many implications for economic, political, and legal institutions. It helps to explain extremism, “radicalization,” cultural shifts, and the behavior of political parties and religious organizations; it is closely connected to current concerns about the consequences of the Internet; it also helps account for feuds, ethnic antagonism, and tribalism.
Group think is actually a need for a group hug, not a process to gain understanding. It is good when it happens through individuals that examine independently. It can be destructive when the will of a few takes precedence. History is full of such fundamentalism.
Mises put it well when he described socialism, to wildly paraphrase, as a romantic ideal of utopian nature that arbitrarily raises current conditions to an alternate universe where the collective is wise and benevolent.
What is a right sized perspective?