I was going to post to this thread earlier, got distracted, and now I'm back.
I think these discussions exist on a level of generalization about ideologies. Ideologies are the refuge of lazy minds.
For instance, encountering someone whose education was in a technical or medical specialization, the political discussion might invite me to suggest that if the other person was inclined to read Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations", then he should also read Marx's "Das Kapital". The reaction I obtain more than likely will be "No! No!" It is as though there is a category of "bad books" and you shouldn't read any of these bad books. I might must as easily have said to a person with a slightly different political orientation that if he were inclined to read Marx, he should also read Smith.
The only book with a monopoly on the Truth is the single book whose adherents merely believe has a monopoly on the Truth, and for which there are so many different "interpretations" that a bystander is left clueless as to exactly what is True and what isn't.
If you want to believe in something pertaining to the real world, you can believe in the Scientific Method, Common Sense and the Constitution.
And there are several fallacies floating around in our discourse, often barely mentioned where they need to be identified as such. Among these is the fallacy of infinite Freedom. That is, government should always incline to expand Freedom to an infinite degree for even the sparsest number of individuals capable of exercising it. But we all know this is false.
I suggest -- in discussion of government governed by Common Sense and the Constitution -- that we proceed with a notion that there are "Pure Public Goods" best provided collectively and indivisibly, and there are "Private Goods" such as your grocery list or your automobile. Some goods provided more predominately in a private market place have extensive collective aspects, such as the pooled risk of insurance, and there are policy implications for moving society from a point A to a point B in which the status quo becomes a practical consideration in how such movement is to be achieved.
Now within these scenarios, we have various toolboxes for addressing well-defined problems, and these toolboxes are often presented as ideological constructs. The choice of the one right tool for a particular problem should not be barred because someone else made an inferential leap of logic to conclude that we're on the road of "creeping socialism" or "creeping fascism". There are other moral restraints that make these doomsday scenarios less likely.
They only become more likely when someone chooses a Utopian overthrow on a broad level of government institutions born of blood, sweat and tears over a century. When you hear a politician like Sarah Palin whine about "Incrementalism", she is complaining about the very foundation of our government and the Founders' intentions for the Constitution. There was always supposed to be gridlock, and there was always supposed to be compromise.
So when I see someone like Rand Paul writing another screed about the evils of Socialism, my first reaction would be "stop wasting your time in the book-publishing industry, and get back to the work which you were elected to do."
thehill.com
