I steadfastly identify myself as politically independent despite generally lining up with the left. I refuse to stand under a party umbrella, each issue should be independently resolved. The idea that people organize into two masses of groupthink is just sad. Despite the implication above, I'm not a liberal independent. I'm actually fairly moderate: I didn't vote to legalize pot because I didn't think the fiscal and criminal impact would be non-trivial (I could be wrong, of course). I'm for fiscal discipline (in macro environments and my own life): you should learn how to live off the money you are already getting instead of playing catchup to the money you want to spend.
In this same vein, I believe in personal responsibility and solving your own problems as being the foundation of success. Focusing on others simply doesn't scale: people get lazy, people get dependent on the system and most fundamentally it's harder to take care of someone else. If you can't perform something for yourself, there's no chance you can do it for another. Even if you can, it's more expensive for me to take care of you and for you to take care of me instead of us both doing it for ourselves. Thus there's additional friction/cost in the system and everyone loses. Before anyone blows up, this is a generalized argument at scale; it's simply supposed to show that it's better for us to take care of ourselves whenever possible.
No comments:
Post a Comment