Left and Right - the Political Conundrum

As I have been getting myself more and more worked up reading about how Goldman Sachs and other bankers basically fleeced every single tax paying American right in our faces and how our government opened up OUR checkbooks making it all possible I think about the Enlightenment in France and the struggle of the common folk against the aristocracy.  That struggle ended with the people of France rising up and cutting the heads off of a lot of arrogant aristocrats in the bloodiest revolution known to man.

First - if you are not totally pissed at our politicians  who have sold their souls to banking and healthcare special interests you need to wake up.  Do you really think that defaults on what amounts to 20% of the subprime mortgage market that makes up only a quarter of the entire mortgage market was going to cause a total failure of the banking system?  By the way those are generous figures.  Folks, we were robbed by a scam and it was our elected officials, both Democrat and Republican, that provided the pipeline to suck the money out of our pockets and put it in the hands of these criminals.

Also, do you think that a several thousand page healthcare legislation that was crafted by healthcare lobbyist was ever going to benefit the people?  That didn't pass (yet) but it doesn't really matter because healthcare special interests already have enough political clout at the state level to continue to fleece us via our taxes and Medicare payments.

The coining of the terms Left and Right politics came from the Enlightenment period in France when the aristocrats sat to the right of the king and representatives of the people sat on the left of the king.  During that time period those on the left were tired of special treatment and benefits those on the right were receiving at the expense of the people.  Today we have a similar struggle.  There are special interests that use our elected officials to guide money from our pockets into their own and there are those elected officials in both parties that facilitate this activity.

Today political discussion likes to refer to Democrats as leftists and Republicans on the right but this is totally false.  Right now both Republicans and Democrats are on the right because they refuse to take effective action to break the stronghold of special interests.  Another misleading concept is that big government, socialism and communism are left wing concepts.  History has shown us that big government ALWAYS winds up serving special interests at the expense of the people.  Sometimes, in the case of communism, it is the politicians themselves who simply become aristocrats who use the state police forces to maintain their power.

Left wing politics would be politics designed to protect the rights and opportunity of all and favor none.  It could never enact entitlements as entitlements always take more from some and benefit more others thus favoring one public sector over another.  It also has the side effect of enslaving to a certain degree those that receive the benefits and starts to favor the politicians who give the benefits because they, as the "slave owners", now have a group of people who will vote for them to keep the entitlement they have grown dependent on.