Complete Picture Politics

Image credit

I have posted this comment here:

Reich is making a very grave point — unconvincingly, though.

I do not trust the one-sided propagandists who talk about the problems of deregulation — which are in many ways severe —, but cut out the huge problems that are associated with regulation — assuming a posture often typical of the so-called left whereby all it takes for regulation to be ideal is that it is designed and implemented in accordance with their political goals.

This is what I call the left’s syndrome: once the left have taken power, they assume, the state’s policies can only be good.

The left’s myth of the state becoming unproblematic by virtue of its being controlled by the left is no better than the right’s myth of a self-regulating market order.

I trust only her who is capable of defending the good in regulation and deregulation and criticising the bad to be found in both.

Only yesterday I participated in a conference where a green politician assumed without compunction the left’s “Bonapartist” attitude described in the first paragraph above.

He proposed to get rid of democracy because he felt multi-party politics was not compliant with green policies. While at the same time demanding an industrial policy for Germany, he conceded that the Energiewende (turn to renewables) was failing/has failed — a policy that if it succeeded would have an effect on world temperature so small that it cannot be measured by modern instrumentation (not to mention that the theory of anthropogenic global warming is highly contested, increasingly so, while a mono-causal explanation of something as complex as climate is in itself already a strong indicator that something is amiss).

When I pointed out that the Energiewende is the most massive industrial policy that we have seen since II. WW, his answer was: yeah, but politics isn’t following our blueprint (which in itself is a steep claim), coming up with all kinds of ad hoc provisos that needed to be fulfilled, in his view, to resuscitate the White Elephant.

It never occurred to him that the comprehensive mix of bad regulation and bad deregulation in favour of Energiewende projects (largely driven by the green blueprint for industrial policy) was beginning to create a political backlash (just as politically correct suppression of unprejudiced science is beginning to get challenged) — even in green crazed Germany.

The inability to take a differentiating look at pros and cons leads to or is the result of one-sided dogmatism, the religious approach to politics.

Like a libertarian, this gentleman was eagerly demanding depoliticisation right, left, and centre (meaning: cut the people out, disempower democracy, cripple political competition, stunt democracy, let politically correct technocrats rule (a mythical self-regulating economy, in the case of libertarians)).

He had only an embarrassed smile for me when I pointed out that his cat was biting her own tail as nothing is more political than deciding what depoliticisation is to mean, how it is to be applied and who will be affected by it in what manner and which areas are to be exempted from it.