{"id":5108,"date":"2010-11-09T11:02:35","date_gmt":"2010-11-09T16:02:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/?p=5108"},"modified":"2010-11-09T11:10:18","modified_gmt":"2010-11-09T16:10:18","slug":"extremism-in-the-defense-of-liberty-is-no-vice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/2010\/11\/09\/extremism-in-the-defense-of-liberty-is-no-vice\/","title":{"rendered":"Extremism In The Defense Of Liberty Is No Vice!"},"content":{"rendered":"

In his acceptance speech as the 1964 Republican Presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater said:<\/p>\n

I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice<\/strong><\/a>! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The public brouhaha over this statement contributed to Goldwater’s resounding defeat.\u00a0 What did the voters of 1964 understand that we are losing sight of today?\u00a0 I think it is the fact that extremism is the problem.\u00a0 It helps the country to have competition of ideas between a conservative and a liberal philosophy until you add the adjective “extreme”.<\/p>\n

This epiphany came to me while thinking about what I was reading in the book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism<\/strong><\/a>. The book documents the results of applying an extreme free market philosophy to a people who don’t want such a system.\u00a0 I recognized that the excesses that the dictators in these countries went to had a mirror image in the excesses of the USSR, China, Cuba, and other countries on the left.\u00a0 The common factor between these two was extremism.<\/p>\n

Both sides had a utopian view of how great the world would be if a pure version of their particular model of the society\/economy were implemented.\u00a0 These utopian systems always have a consistent inner logic to the description of how they work.\u00a0 Unfortunately, the inner logic usually leaves out an understanding of the way humans actually behave.\u00a0 Because people did not actually behave the way these utopian dreamers believed that they should, the systems had to be implemented via force and extreme brutality.<\/p>\n

In 2010, I believe that this country faces more problems from extremism on the right than it does from extremism on the left. Of course, neither extremism is good.<\/p>\n

The extremist leaders of the Republican Party have succeeded in scaring people about the problems of extremism on the left.\u00a0 Though they accuse President Obama of being a left wing extremist, he is nothing of the sort.\u00a0 In their fear of extremism on the left, the American voter seems to be fleeing into the arms of the extremists on the right. This rush can be likened to the Stockholm Syndrome as described in the article, Were American Voters Victims of the Stockholm Syndrome in 2010?<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

I was thinking of the health care reform issue in light of this argument about extremists.\u00a0 The right fears a takeover by the government of all health care.\u00a0 I was thinking that if the private insurance companies cannot compete with the public option, then the private sector might just wither away as the Republicans fear.\u00a0 Then I thought of the problem of a completely government run system being subject to the funding whims of the body politic.<\/p>\n

That is when I realized the beauty of a mixed system.\u00a0 The private health care and insurance competing against various options involving more or less government intervention. It is the competition, if it is fair, that keeps things in balance.\u00a0 If the government does something that is better than the private system, then the private system will have to adapt if it wants to keep its customers.\u00a0 On the other end, if the government starves its health care options of the funding that it needs, then customers will drift back to the private options.\u00a0 The mere existence of the competition tends to keep the systems racing to the top rather than to the bottom.<\/p>\n

This balanced system is exactly what Barack Obama had in mind.\u00a0 The Repubicans who tend to think only in terms of extreme free market or extreme government control, used rhetoric to convince many people that the President wanted a complete takeover of the system by the government.<\/p>\n

In program after program, regulation, bank bailouts, auto bailouts, economic stimulus, the Republicans only see extreme options.\u00a0 The President sees balanced options.\u00a0 The American voter has been scared into looking at it from the Republican extremist position.\u00a0 The Democrats share some of the blame by not making sure the public understood that they were not proposing extreme solutions.<\/p>\n

The extremists on both sides decry the fact that the two political parties are not extremely different enough.\u00a0 Actually, when the parties are not too extreme this is the sweet spot of governance for this country.\u00a0 This is this country’s genius.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In his acceptance speech as the 1964 Republican Presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater said: I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue! The public brouhaha over this statement contributed to Goldwater’s resounding defeat.\u00a0 What […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[166],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-5108","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-stevegsposts","7":"czr-hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5108"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5108\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5112,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5108\/revisions\/5112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}