Apolitical Staples

Sure tax cuts make the middle class happy — until they go to access government services and find out they have been cut. Fortunately most people who lived through the Harris years (those fortunate enough to survive), have learned that lesson. So, pundits can throw the dreaded “S” word around all they want. People want their services and realize they need to be paid for.

PS. I think on the whole, I would rather live in Ontario than Texas even having to pay higher taxes. I suspect most other Ontarians feel the same.

And if PM Harper somehow found a cure for cancer, McQuaig and her ilk would be demanding victim impact studies on the tumors.

It’s no wonder conservatism is so F**d up. Nichols starts off with a fantasy based ad hominum attack and finishes with the mindless tax cut chant no conservative can go 5 minutes without reciting. And that’s considered good.

It’s pablum, Greg and is a sign of rot in our society. Nichols added absolutely nothing of value to the public discourse. Nada, zip, zero. So what is good about it?

The line about Castro. It was funny.

Robert is right, this really is brain-dead conservatism.

The faith-based insistence that raising taxes lowers productivity growth, the fetishization of “regular, hard-working, middle-class people” as cover for policies which benefit the wealthy far more, the historical ignorance of how socialist ideology impacts the lives of “regular” people, the unwillingness to acknowledge that tax rates are a small factor in investment decisions, the fiscally irresponsible one-sided talk of cutting taxes with no equivalent spending cuts mentioned, all crammed into a couple of paragraphs.

Even the quote at the top is about as funny as me saying that even if Mussolini was elected Premier, the Taxpayers Federation and the Frasier Institute would find him too left-wing.

Well actually Mussolini was very left wing and a committed Marxist before he founded the Fascist movment. Fascism and Nazism are not right wing at all but left.
It’s only because Hitler and Mussolini where slightly to the right of Stalin that they were labeled as such.
Ah yes you leftists; historically ignorant as well as humorless.

The faith-based insistence…

the historical ignorance of how socialist ideology…

One man’s faith is another’s ideology, and vice-versa. Is your whole outlook on life fodder for stand-up comedy?

Well actually Mussolini was very left wing and a committed Marxist before he founded the Fascist movment. Fascism and Nazism are not right wing at all but left.

It’s only because Hitler and Mussolini where slightly to the right of Stalin that they were labeled as such.

Ah yes you leftists; historically ignorant as well as humorless.

Hard to know where to start with this.

Care to cite a source for this claim? Hitler and Mussolini were nationalists. Communists are internationalists. That’s why Communists are placed to the far left of the spectrum, and Fascists are on the far right.

Secondly: these ad hominem attacks (Castro and Mussolini) are as silly as they are intellectually brain dead. Who here honestly believes that the Communists and the Fascists have ANYTHING to do with the normal everyday people who vote NDP or Conservative in this country?

Sure Iain, whatever you say, no connection at all between Mussolini and right wing policies. Here’s a quote from his wikipedia profile, “In political and social economy, he emanated legislation that favoured the wealthy industrial and agrarian classes (privatizations, liberalizations of rent laws and dismantlement of the unions)”

Doesn’t sound like any right wing I know. Sure he got carried away, turned on the business elites who supported him and started nationalizing stuff, but that was years later, and that kind of thing happens during war.

lrC, I don’t really get your point. The author insists on a relationship between productivity and tax rates even though this is not a settled question, hence my use of the term faith based.

Further, the author suggests that middle class people could care less about socialist ideology, which is silly considering that socialist ideology was a motivating factor in the creation of old age supplements, medicare, the cpp and progressive income tax. It is absurd to suggest the middle class could care less about these things.

You are right that I could have substituted ‘ideologically motivated’ for faith-based in my comment, but what difference would it make, either way the author is wrong on both counts.

“Who here honestly believes that the Communists and the Fascists have ANYTHING to do with the normal everyday people who vote NDP or Conservative in this country?”

Thank you James.

Well James you might start by checking out John Ray’s excellent blog ‘Dissecting Leftism’ and read his article titled “Fascism is Leftist” Check out his other writings while you’re at it. Interesting reading to be sure. Next time you hear someone calling a conservative a fascist bastard, it might help you keep things in perspective. Just a thought.

Corporations did very well in Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. They didn’t exist in the Soviet Union. The privileged classes were favoured in Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy; the underclasses were championed in the Soviet Union. Hitler and Mussolini claimed to speak for the nationalist aspirations of their race. The Soviet Union claimed that class subsumed race.

Most importantly, the fascist movements in Britain, Spain, Germany, Italy and elsewhere in the worldwere bolstered by people fearing the rise of communist movements. They were diametrically opposed.

There is no doubt that the conditions in Hitler’s Germany were as bad as in Stalin’s Soviet Union, but that’s only because extreme views twist social fabric to the point that the outcome of despotic regimes is the same, even though their worldview is diametrically opposed.

Do not mistake a similarity of outcome with a similarity of approach. Dangerous extremists exist on all sides of the political spectrum, and they have as much to do with the moderate speakers of a democracy as rain does to a desert.

Ask yourself: if you took the basic NDP philosophy and extended it to a ludicrous extreme, what would you call it? I suspect you’d call it Communism. And you’d probably be right.

But if you took basic Conservative philosophy and extended it to a ludicrous extreme, what would you call that? And if you believe that Conservative philosophy can’t be extended to a ludicrous extreme, then respectfully, I believe you are being hopelessly naive.

This attempt to foist off Hitler and Mussolini onto the left strikes me as just an attempt to demonize leftists by associating them with the worst regimes of history, without acknowledging the demons in your own closet. And so the next time you bridle at some ignorant person’s mislabelling of you as a fascist, give a thought to what you’ve done to innocent lefties here.

James, as far as taking conservatism to its’ extreme I think it depends on what variety you mean (this may be true of socialism as well, but I can’t speak for that). If you are referring to the libertarian right the extreme is anarchy. Social Conservatism - theocracy. Protectionist capitalism I guess would get you to fascism.

But I am with your original statement totalitarianism is pretty much off the political spectrum.

Greg,

I agree with you that the whole left-right political spectrum concept is just too two-dimensional to be real. For a while, I likened political thought to a triangle, with Toryism, Libertarianism and Socialism on the three corners and, out on the extreme of these elements: Facism, Anarchy and Communism, but then somebody came up with that four-way political plane with two spectrums, one between authoritarianism and libertarianism, and another between individualism and communalism.

It would be nice if we could just drop the labels of “left” and “right” because they are just so inaccurate, but as labels go, they are so easy to use, they’re positively addictive.

The reason you are so mixed up over where F and C belong on a spectrum is that you’re not using the correct metrics. Economic policy and ownership are poor shorthands for the true measure: individual freedom. A “rightist” favours individual freedoms and rights. All the collectivists - Communists, Fascists, Nazis, socialists - are over on the left-hand side.

That’s a little simplistic. Where do the social conservatives go on your spectrum, then?