Sunday Posts

All our politics is Politics of Welfare. For, all our difference, between Liberals and Conservatives, the Left and the Right, can be summarised as this: 1. The Liberals want the State to tax those who earn and provide Welfare to those who do not, so that those who earn can keep themselves forever on the treadmill and those who do not can be happy with the handouts, and this should keep everyone off politics. 2. The Conservatives do not want to tax those who earn and do not want to give Welfare to those who do not, so that the former is happy and the latter is on the treadmill, and this should keep everyone off politics. These conversations are so common that one may think this was always the case. However, as we know, politics of welfare is not primordial, but rather an industrial age phenomena. At its core, it assumes that everyone can, and should, be able to find work, and it is either Unfortunate (Liberal) or Criminal (Conservative) not to be able to find work...

'Progressives' are supposed to be political dinosaurs, popular a century ago but wiped out of public memory since then. Indeed, there were great progressives on both sides of the Atlantic: Teddy Roosevelt was one of the original ones, though he chose to become mainstream before becoming President. One could count the late Nineteenth Century English Liberals as somewhat equivalent, perhaps best represented in the figure of Herbert Asquith, the longest serving Prime Minister of the UK (1908 - 1916) before Margaret Thatcher broke his record. Indeed, since Asquith's departure, progressivism has declined, not unsurprisingly given the formation of Soviet Union in 1919 and various extreme forms of politics thereafter. The power of the broadcast media divided the politics into pro-state and pro-market, and left little of the Progressive ideal of harmonious Public-Private world.  I argued that the current rise of the illiberal politics, from India to the United States, is the ...