| | Left | Right | Image |
|---|
| 40 Hour work week | Unions (Community Organizing, Progressives, etc) gave us the 40 hour work week. | Henry Ford (Capitalism) standardized on the 40 hour work-week, most others had adopted it, and then the Federal Government created a regulation (FLSA) that said we should adopt the 44 hour work week for the very few remaining. | |
| The Broken Window Fallacy | The left believes that vandalism can stimulate the economy by forcing spending (stimulus). | Breaking a Window destroys something of value. The Glazier might win, but the victim and his customers all lose. There's no net win there. | |
| Carpool lanes | Carpool lanes are great, they reduce pollution, reward environmentalism, and make the world a better place | They wasted billions, reduced road capacity (increase pollution), decrease carpooling, increase injuries. | |
| Financial crisis of 2007-2008 | We were under-regulated by removing Glass-Steagall, and it was the greed of Wall Street that inflated the bubble, and under-regulation made the banks “too big to fail”, so the taxpayers “bailed them out” and gave them money for fat bonuses and sheltered them from any consequences. It was all the Republican or evil Jewish Greedy Bankers fault. | We had more regulations than ever in history, the crisis was created by bad regulations like CRA (Community Reinvestment Act) and community organizers inflating a real-estate bubble of high-risk toxic loans, when that bubble-popped, other regulations (banking equity laws and FAS-157) magnified the resulting credit crunch and froze financial markets. We LOANED the banks money to get their liquidity up enough (short term) to unfreeze equity markets, and once everything stabilized, they paid all the money back (there was no net loss to taxpayers). No one has ever explained how Glass-Steagall could have stopped it, or why it hadn't happened in Europe/Asia without them ever having Glass-Steagall. | |
| Government and Society | The left/media often have this view that paying taxes, Social Justice, and many Social Services are "human rights". You can never have the right to someone else's property or labor. So the left will throw around, "un-American" to those that choose liberty over their view of balancing the Social scales, but their ideas are the ones out of touch with history. | Like it or not, the nation was built on the western awakening: that Nations were necessary evils (at best), and they were there to serve the people and protect their liberty (individual, religious, economic), from those that would encroach on it. That was what America was founded on. Telling someone what to do using governmental taxes/laws/regulations to bully them? That's un-American. Telling them fuck off when they try? Now THAT'S American. | |
| Government made the iPhone | Government created the iPhone, not Steve Jobs or Apple, proven by GPS. (So says Pelosi). | Music Player = private. Cell Phone = private. Browser = mostly private. So government gave us what? GPS (Global Positioning Satellites) which was a Satellite implementation of a civilian idea... and it only augment one small feature of smartphones (positioning for maps). And it was still the civilian sector that innovated and made the technology affordable. The private sector pays for government, not the other way around. | |
| Green Energy | The left believes in Green Energy: that it exists, it's cheaper, and could provide all our power needs, if we just embraced it. | Science says that Solar and Wind is unreliable, space inefficient and highly expensive if you remember to add in the costs of over-capacity, backup plants, and storage (for when they aren't working). The left hates cheap and reliable Greenest Energy: Nuclear, Hydroelectric and Geothermal. | |
| Income inequality | Because of lowering tax rates on the top few percent, the poor and middle class has suffered, wages have stagnated while the rich got richer, and income inequality has grown so everyone earns less than they did 40 or 60 years ago, except for the top few percent. | Through accounting tricks the charlatans leave out non-accounted for benefits to prove a fraud: they don’t count social programs, adjust for family size decreases, non-income benefits, deferred income (retirement), lifestyle and free-time improvements, purchasing power increases, technological advances, IRS collection compliance/changes, income mobility, quality of life, and so on. If you omit all those things, then the poor have still gotten richer, just by not as much as the rich have. The problem is our far better lifestyles cost more money than the more modest one of yesteryear. | |
| Keynes | Keynes was a Micro-economist who thought we could tax ourselves into prosperity. All of his Macro-economic theories were proven wrong by history, and explained why by Hayek. Since the left believes in Socialism and doesn't believe in history, they still think that real Keynesianism has never been tried. | Economists can't agree on anything, other than that Keynes was wrong. If it worked, then governments that spent the most would be the most successful. We could have spent our way out the Great Depression (it made it worse), Obamanomics would have worked (weakest recovery in history), there would have been a post-war depression (boom instead), there couldn't have been stagflation in the 1970, Communist China/Russia/Venezuela/North Korea would have been successes, and free'ing the markets of China/Russia/South Korea would have been disasters. | |
| Military industrial complex | Ike (Eisenhower) warned us about the military industrial complex, and that the military was spending all our money. If it wasn't for the war-hawks, we'd be able to spend enough on social programs to make this a utopia: that's where all of our money has gone! You need to fear the military and military spending! | Ike warned about an iron-triangle, where politicians colluded with government and industry to dupe taxpayers out of their money and liberty. Today the poverty industrial complex (Social programs) are over twice as much spending as the military at the federal level (that bigger when you add state and local), and military spending as a fraction of our budget has come way down since Ike. Most of our money is being wasted on poorly administered wealth redistribution failures, and worse run Socialists Medicine, that not only didn't achieve their goals, but made the problems they touched worse. | |
| Minimum Wage | Minimum wage hasn’t kept up with inflation, and we can just raise the minimum wage to give a “living wage” to the millions of working poor, with no negative consequences, it’s only been the heartless and greedy conservatives that refuse to allow this (because the less the poor have, the more they have). If it wasn't for Democrats the Republicans would make everyone wage slaves because they're only out to help the rich. | Minimum wage did keep up with inflation, most minimum wage workers are teens and elderly or part-time supplemental jobs, and there’s no one wage that would be equally fair in NYC and rural Idaho at the same time. Economists know that raising the minimum wage is the same as increasing discrimination against the least skilled or experienced: increasing the costs to hire, will reduce hiring (increase automation, offshoring, etc) and increase the cost of goods. The people championing minimum wage are failing to point out that if you un-employ many, to help a few, and drive up the costs of goods and services by more than you help, then no one is really coming out ahead. | |
| New Jersey and the Economist | The left thinks that the Red States get more back in taxes than they contribute, while the Blue States are the opposite. | This is based on a misrepresentation of a left wing article in The Economist. You can't take money out of a state, send it to DC, have some wasted and a fraction sent back with overhead and regulations, and somehow come out ahead in the equation. That's not how math works. Think compliance costs, borrowing, debt obligations, federal work rules and so on. | |
| Obamanomics v Trumponomics | Left view: Obama saved us from the Bush recession using Keynesian $1T stimulus that was on infrastructure, he created millions of job and lead to a booming economy. Trump on the other hand is ruining us with deficits, trade wars and stock market swings. The only reason Trump saw any goodness at all, was lingering effects of Obama (Obama tried to take credit for the Trump economy, and blamed Bush for the Obama economy). | The recession was caused by Democrat real-estate policies. Obama's wasteful spending and regulation lead to the softest recovery since the Great Depression. Most measurements, total employment, GDP, consumer confidence, number on government assistance, were all in malaise levels. After Obama predicted we were the best we were going to be, markets would crash under Trump, and we'd never see high GDP growth, Trump started enacting tax cuts, de-regulation, and some market protections -- and the economy took off. (With a slight hiccup after Dems took the house in 2018, and the Fed raised interest rates to cool growth). Despite those head winds, total employment and minority employment hit best levels, ever. Number on government aid plummeted. And we hit GDP growth that Obama predicted we'd never see again. | |
| Rent Control | Rent Control helps the poor or middle class combat rising costs. | Rent Control tells landlords to stop doing improvements or maintenance, since those re-investment costs can not be recouped, thus it harms quality. It tells developers not to build more housing (by capping returns on investment). So since it drives down availability, the costs for everyone else go up (by far more than the savings to the few it helps). Supply and demand: it's not just a good idea, it's the law. | |
| Socialism | Socialism is great, just look at Nordic countries. | Nordic countries aren't socialist, they are having major problems, and if you look at all the Socialist countries around the globe (North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba), and throughout history (Cambodia, Vietnam, China, USSR, etc), there are those that sucked, and those that are going to suck. Cherry picking is great for pies, but lousy for learning from life. | |
| The Great Depression | The left believes that the Great Depression was caused by capitalism/Wall Street and Hoover fiddled while Rome burned. Then FDR came in, gave us the new deal, and everything was good because he saved the day. All bunk. | What happened is
- Hoover saw some of it happening in New York, and warned FDR about it (who was in NYC), but FDR didn't react.
- When it crashed Hoover did spending and wanted to do more to lessen the bank failures, but the Democrats resisted any mitigating factors because they knew ruination would lead to regime change.
- FDR gave us the New Deal (copying Hoover's policies), and it didn't help, and in fact contributed to the second depression (depression in a depression as it was called), so he offered a New New Deal, and that didn't help either. (Government spending and dramatic changes scares investors/businesses).
- Then the war happened and saved FDR.
- When the war ended the Keynesians wanted another New Deal to prevent a post war recession, but the country had grown and resisted. Instead of the Keynesian predicted depression, we got a post war free market boom instead.
| |
| Trickle Down Economics | The left thinks the rich are Scrooge McDuck, and convert all their cash to mountains of Gold, and roll around in it. Which is why they mock Trickle Down Economics (aka economics). | The only things you can really do with more money is give it away (create jobs), spend it (create jobs), or invest it (create jobs). The left doesn't believe that the rich will do any of those things. | |
| Unintended Consequences | We can fix X by just doing Y, it's simple, just throw money at it. What could go wrong? The left always has the best of intentions, and ignores what the road to hell is paved with. | Historically there are more failures of big-government than successes, and every action has a reaction. Progressives look for all the good that one of their things might do, without considering any of the bad or how people might adapt. Otherwise, the wouldn't be progressive but thoughtful conservatives. | |
