Maggie's Farm

I'd say that the danger on the right is that we make ourselves comfortable with the idea that people should continue to be exposed to the natural consequences of their own actions, but then we're uncomfortable failing to intervene to alleviate the misery that results. My own partial solution is to encourage everyone who can't stand watching the misery to intervene personally at his own expense, but the inevitable drift of society is to try to force one's fellows to go along. Quite often, this impulse becomes diseased to the point of insisting that others foot the entire bill, or nearly the entire bill.

The danger on the left is not so much that a bureaucracy is peculiarly necessary to perform the redistribution of goodies in order to establish perfect equality of outcomes. The danger is that force will always be required, and the force takes the form of theft in service of the alleviation of envy. For all the harm that unbridled self-interest can do in a free-market system, that harm is dwarfed by the harm from force fueled by envy. I don't say that as a theoretical proposition argued from first principles. I say it as the indisputable verdict of 100 million people murdered by collectivism in the 20th century.

Missing the point with word salad as usual. The topic was how each side of the spectrum goes wrong when it tends to an extreme. It's trivial to observe that most people don't make the mistake of going to the extreme.

It's also trivial to suggest that the solution to the problem of not wanting to witness the mess people make of their lives when they are faced with the consequences of their own actions is to help them. The entire point was that there's no problem with wanting to help them as long as you don't force someone else to foot the bill for easing your own conscience.