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David Brin may be bombastic, but I think he's right, at least here.
http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2006/06/allocation-vs-markets-ancient-struggle.html
http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2006/06/allocation-vs-markets-ancient-struggle.html
It's long so I'll try to summarize the ideas. He notes "guided allocation" as an ancient idea, from Sumerian priest-kings to Soviet commissars, lumping feudalism and socialism *and corporatism* together -- a corporation is a planned economy. (This isn't original to Brin, of course.) Opposing this are liberal ideas of "accountability areans" of free individuals (not just economic markets, also science, democracy, and law), with roots in Pericles but resurgend in Locke and Adam Smith. Not liberal vs. conservative but liberal vs. oligarch. But he rejects the total rejection of guided allocation by market fundamentalists: if humans and companies and oligarchs can use foresight to plan ahead, why can't society? Full-blown guided allocation fails, but he says markets aren't things of natural law, but are crafted machines, and some governmental intervention works well: making sure children are educated and fed, helping the spread and symmetry of information in a market, ensuring fair play, opposing corporate oligarchs. To ban gov't intervention is to just let even less accountable corporate oligarchs run society.
And the extremists of both sides share similar personality/cognitive flaws.
He also links to some older writings of his against the left-right axis. As an alternative he starts with property rights, then government coercion, and says that people with different views of property rights but similar views of gov't violence tend to get along. Then more axes: belief in genetic vs. environmental influence (further separating Hitler and Stalin, though property rights already did so), belief in optimism, idealism vs. pragmatism, belief in Golden Age vs. Progress.
Somewhere, maybe elsewhere, he says liberals today tend to be too pessimistic, too resistant to hearing good news. They should be trumpeting that our society is basically a triumph of liberal ideas, and looking forward to new liberal ideas such as energy sustainability (which could be helped by judicious intervention in markets, e.g. carbon taxes and pollution caps) to solve modern problems.
And the extremists of both sides share similar personality/cognitive flaws.
He also links to some older writings of his against the left-right axis. As an alternative he starts with property rights, then government coercion, and says that people with different views of property rights but similar views of gov't violence tend to get along. Then more axes: belief in genetic vs. environmental influence (further separating Hitler and Stalin, though property rights already did so), belief in optimism, idealism vs. pragmatism, belief in Golden Age vs. Progress.
Somewhere, maybe elsewhere, he says liberals today tend to be too pessimistic, too resistant to hearing good news. They should be trumpeting that our society is basically a triumph of liberal ideas, and looking forward to new liberal ideas such as energy sustainability (which could be helped by judicious intervention in markets, e.g. carbon taxes and pollution caps) to solve modern problems.