Thursday, July 2, 2009

Blue Meanies, Red Tories, Whatever

After picking on Canada all day, I should concede two things:

1. “Progressive Conservative,” to use the term for a basically-defunct Canadian political coalition, is actually a mushy oxymoron after my own heart (once more: see “Conservatism for Punks” slogan atop blog).

2. It’s not just left-liberal mushiness I fear — even though something in my gut almost since childhood has associated that sort of mushiness with moral laxity and lameness in general — but the sense that just as markets are fragile things, so too is philosophical adherence to property rights, no matter where people start out on the political spectrum.  It takes so little to nudge people toward collectivism, which is my real point.

As a (non-liberal-bashing) case in point, watch the ostensibly anti-centralist paleoconservative impulse lead inexorably to statism right before your eyes in the space of two paragraphs while you read the Wikipedia entry on the subset of the former prog-con coalition known (in opposition to more-libertarian “Blue” Tories) as “Red Tories” (who might even be called blue-green in England, but politics is complicated — main lesson, though: don’t badmouth markets because it always ends badly in some kind of socialism or other).

Tomorrow, I will not pick on Canada.

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