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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dale Baker who wrote (381)	6/5/2005 11:43:19 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541355

If nothing else, supporting a centrist compromise means evaluating issues pragmatically and on their merits Not necessarily. Compromises are often simply what you can negotiate and have no inherent consistency or merit. Building half a dam as a rational alternative to either no dam or a whole dam is just dumb. Or I'll agree to build a dam if you agree to divert the river so it bypasses the dam. We have a lot of laws on the books that contain incompatible mish-mash owing to the pragmatism of getting something passed. The other problem with compromised is that they produce systems that you can't audit, measure, learn from. If the problem worsens, is it because of the part of the compromised that A wanted or the part that B wanted. Welfare failed because we wasted money on free-loaders who squandered it. No, welfare failed because it was underfunded. You can't prove it either way. At least when you do things one way or the other rather than a mix of the two, you have the data to evaluate the ideology. Having said that, I think the political environment has gotten bad enough that I might support half a dam or a waterless dam for no other reason than that it might get folks out of their intransigent ruts and working towards more constructive practices.

To: Dale Baker who wrote (381)	6/5/2005 12:24:27 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541355

My yardstick for measuring public policy is what needs to be done and what gets done. Ideological and philosophical differences lead to differences about what needs to be done, and to differences in the relative importance of different "things that need to be done", and the positive or negative results of the steps taken to achieve those things. I won't accept "we are doing what our ideology says is right" and let this pass if the policy is failing. And also to differences about what amounts to a failure. Tim