The Basis of Left and Right, Part 3

The next installment from Steven Hayward, at Power Line, "THE BASIS OF LEFT AND RIGHT, PART 3: EQUALITY":

The Marxist-inspired radical who sees property as the ultimate illegitimate convention to be swept away need not concern us here. Of more interest and relevance is the moderate liberal who argues two related and compelling points: first, from a view harmonious with conservatism’s bias for social stability, large inequalities in wealth, or a static distribution of wealth, undermine society’s social cohesion. As a consequence, second, unequal wealth distribution should be measured by its utility to all classes (Rawls’ argument). Both of these concepts elude convincing and unequivocal empirical demonstration, let alone obvious policy responses. But one can observe the least amount of friction between left and right when policy choices regarding opportunity are on the table.

This leads inevitably to an important corollary of the right-left split over the nature of equality, concerning the efficacy of government itself, not only on direct distributional questions, but also on subsidiary matters regarding the “playing field” of opportunity. Liberals believe in using government—through regulatory and ameliorative means—to correct market failures, which liberals perceive as occurring on a wide scale. Conservatives are much more prone to wariness about government failure, often going so far as to attribute political intervention as the final cause of all market failures—often with good reason: the role of multiple government mistakes in bringing about the housing bubble and subsequent crash is hard to minimize. The arguments about the nature and reasons for both government failure and market failure are serious and extensive, but suffice it here to note that the extreme libertarian position ironically shares in common the same utopian expectation as Marxism: the belief in the possibility of the withering away of the state.

Again, it's a great discussion. My problem is that the idea of the "modern liberal" is a concoction of progressives to hide their statist, inherently totalitarian, ideological convictions. High-brow theory can explain all these minute nuances of theory and ideology, but in practice the deceit of left-wing politics always ends with the destruction of human agency and individual liberty. The left is the cancer of modern societies.