The Left and the Right — Two Halfs of a Bad Circle

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A note jotted down in a tired state at the end of the day, on having read this post.

In order to act as economic agents, humans must enforce political decisions. Try to set up a farmer's market, you will quickly find that markets cannot exist without political action. And by politics I mean the attempts at and results of defining what is legal or socially accepted and enforceable in a community. Most economic activities and in particular the functioning of markets depend on people working out the political substratum in which economic activities are embedded. In that sense every economy is a mixed economy, if by "mix" we mean the simultaneous presence of strictly economic activity (such as trade) and politically determined constraints without which the former could not come about. 

In other words, the liberal ideal of market activities as providing an alternative to politics, a means of depoliticising society, is fundamentally ill-conceived. That is what the "right" must learn. 

The "left" should return to its roots which are closely intertwined with liberal themes — such as (a) to (d) see below — and rediscover that, in an inevitably political world, the quality of politics is significantly improved by 

• (a) genuine pluralism, 

• (b) democracy, 

• (c) the rule of law and 

• (d) constitutional provisions bolstering the former three factors.

The "right" are hypocritical in that

• (a) by insisting on "market solutions" they pretend to be abstaining from political influence (when, in fact, they are not, because markets are political creatures and therefore political lobbyism is eagerly pursued by them) and 

• (b), they gladly accept state intervention of any kind and scale when these intrusions serve their purposes.

The "left" are equally hypocritical in that they are willing to

• ignore the broader concerns of a pluralistic democracy  — (a) to (d) — and

• champion an authoritarian state as long as it enforces their agenda.

The "left" think politics is unproblematic, even ideal, when it becomes the tool of their desires.
In their rhetoric, the "right" pretend to believe that politics is naturally bad, deserving to be replaced by "the good market", failing to appreciate the good that can be done by politics. 

Enticed by the irresistible prospect of the government enforcing their goal, the "left" lose their critical distance visà-vis the state too easily.

Both deny a fundamental truth about the economy, namely its inevitably mixed nature as partly a political and partly an economic enterprise.

The "right" cannot be trusted to further and protect the state's capacity for serving socially desirable purposes. 

The "left" cannot be trusted to guard against the state's totalitarian potential. 

Desirable is a balance of the spontaneous developments and the purposeful inroads. Too much political forcing is no less detrimental than overreliance on spontaneous forces. Yet the dangers of imbalance will not be understood by those ignorant of the mixed nature of the economy. 

See also A Note on Socialism and the Mixed Economy.