#come to think of it i generally favor anarchist critiques and solutions but also tend to find them insufficient when it comes to money

[senadimell]

Most right wing econ view? Most left wing?

huh, this is a really hard question to answer because it’s hard for me to actually define what counts as a “right wing” or “left wing” econ view because:

a) I focus much more on political economy than economy and my formal training has taught me enough to recognize that I don’t know crap and introduced me to just the right amount of information to realize no one model fits everything

b) I’ve spent the past few years focused on post-communist European and post-Soviet countries and it’s a pretty common line of scholarly thought that typical assumptions about economic and political “left” and “right” aren’t super meaningful political/economic terms in the region(s)

c) I grew up in the US, which doesn’t have a strong establishment “left” or labor party presence and is also historically allergic to anything too ““communist,”” and our two-party, non-coalition system arbitrarily splits things into Republican (red) and Democrat (blue) but our “left-wing” party is centrist at best

d) specifically, I grew up in the US bible belt, which is red-voter central, but given our whole two-party thing, the most meaningful political description I’ve seen comes in the form of Pew Research Center’s 9 categories of US voter, which means that “right wing” groups encompass economic views from “no limitations on corporations whatsoever” and “corporations are evil, actually, and tariffs are the best” 

e) I was raised by what we might call a more classic soft conservative (what Pew calls a “committed conservative”) father and a populist mother in a town with its fair share of “faith and flag” conservatives but had contact with an unusually high percentage of college-educated religious adults, which really skews expectations of what various economic terms mean. It also means I’m still unpacking a lot of assumptions I grew up with.

so the end result is that classifying economic positions is...complicated for me

I initially started thinking about making linear scale that starts with neoclassical to keynesian to marxist (which is more of a critique than a model), but then realized I’d need to factor in questions of wealth redistribution, state intervention, and locality of decision-making and realized I’m trying to make a Grand Comprehensive Theory of Economic Alignment which is a far greater scope than it takes to answer the question. 

But given my upbringing, pretty basic concepts like “economic policy should serve the common welfare, actually” can be oddly controversial and turn into moral debates?

ANYWAYS, I guess one right-ish wing belief (more of a populist view tbh, or really just a non-neoliberal one) is that tariffs and capital controls can be good, actually. Also that semi-socialized programs can be worse than both fully-socialized or entirely-private ones because it combines the excesses of both (thinking here about changes to the US medical system in the past 50 years). Going along with that, the economists may have a point when it comes to voucher systems?

As for left wing, idk, frankly. It’s too hard to conceptualize what is a left-wing view. I’ve been thinking about what you mentioned when I brought up a living wage and after mulling it over it seems pretty reasonable—living stipend makes maybe more sense than a living wage, which might even come off as a right-wing thing to say in some circles but the reason I hadn’t thought about it that way before is in part because I can’t see a democratic way for it to happen in my country because there are too many people who view work and wages as through a moral lens, and can barely be persuaded to accept a living wage as a necessity, so giving people money for not doing anything? [insert victorian workhouse line here].

miscellaneous: cash is good? it is good to have cash in the economy? the bretton woods system was pretty good and i clown on nixon but there were definitely stuctural weaknesses there but the neoliberals are wrong if they think the end of Bretton Woods happened because it was inevitable that pegs fail (because pegs fail but they also recover). 

also it is good to have currency pegged to something and i’m terrified of the post-2008 quantitative easing/swap lines world we live in because people keep spending money and holding the US currency in reserve under the assumption that inflation will never hit and for the love of all that is holy i do not want to face catastrophic inflation because now is bad enough.

so make of all that what you will. I am very far from having a cohesive economic value system. I’m pro-experimenting small-scale and measuring success or failure over implementing large-scale policy over ideals, generally speaking, and suspicious of the state’s efficacy but also see it as necessary given the need to check capitalists. And also you should never ask me to write policy ever