DiscussWorldIssues - Socio-Economic Religion and Political Uncensored Debate - View Single Post - Right wingers better people says research

**annouhMus** · 06-16-2008, 07:24 PM

You might want to look up the author of this piece. He's a notorious wingnut of the Ann Coulter persusasion, IIRC.

Again, there's an obvious reason why egalitarians aren't going to have as much faith in charity. They know it produces a suboptimal outcome. Barbra Streisand is actually being rational here: your money is better spent on trying to change the welfare laws than on futile acts of private charity. Private charity is subject to market failure. Left wingers are smart enough to see this. Right wingers, not so much, since they're usually dumber and have an aversion to government programs. So all this says is that right wingers are more likely to engage in their preferred method for alleviating poverty. The problem with their method is that it's stupid, like most of their other methods.

The following seems deranged:

Setting up a computer game that allowed people to accumulate money, they gave participants the option to spend some of their own money in order to take away more from someone else.

The result? Those who considered themselves 'egalitarians' (i.e. Left of centre) were much more willing to give up some of their own money if it meant taking more money from someone else. Duh... they are egalitarians. There's not enough information about the experiment here. One possible reason is that being egalitarians they care more about equality and are willing to give up some of their own money to prevent extreme inequalities, or the experiment was self evidently a game and this was an obvious strategy for winning. If I was playing it, I would purposely spend money to reduce the incomes of others because I don't like misers and money grubbers and enjoy watching them get all sad and pathetic.

If this mook wants to play science and politics, let him go read the academic literature on authoritarianism. It tells you more or less where the nazis, religious kooks and bigots cluster, and it isn't in contemporary liberal circles. In fact, there's a good case to be made that the left/right distinction in our societies is simply a crude approximation of the authoritarian/anti authoritarian scale.

06-16-2008, 07:24 PM	#9
annouhMus Join Date Oct 2005 Posts 621 Senior Member	You might want to look up the author of this piece. He's a notorious wingnut of the Ann Coulter persusasion, IIRC. Again, there's an obvious reason why egalitarians aren't going to have as much faith in charity. They know it produces a suboptimal outcome. Barbra Streisand is actually being rational here: your money is better spent on trying to change the welfare laws than on futile acts of private charity. Private charity is subject to market failure. Left wingers are smart enough to see this. Right wingers, not so much, since they're usually dumber and have an aversion to government programs. So all this says is that right wingers are more likely to engage in their preferred method for alleviating poverty. The problem with their method is that it's stupid, like most of their other methods. The following seems deranged: Setting up a computer game that allowed people to accumulate money, they gave participants the option to spend some of their own money in order to take away more from someone else. The result? Those who considered themselves 'egalitarians' (i.e. Left of centre) were much more willing to give up some of their own money if it meant taking more money from someone else. Duh... they are egalitarians. There's not enough information about the experiment here. One possible reason is that being egalitarians they care more about equality and are willing to give up some of their own money to prevent extreme inequalities, or the experiment was self evidently a game and this was an obvious strategy for winning. If I was playing it, I would purposely spend money to reduce the incomes of others because I don't like misers and money grubbers and enjoy watching them get all sad and pathetic. If this mook wants to play science and politics, let him go read the academic literature on authoritarianism. It tells you more or less where the nazis, religious kooks and bigots cluster, and it isn't in contemporary liberal circles. In fact, there's a good case to be made that the left/right distinction in our societies is simply a crude approximation of the authoritarian/anti authoritarian scale.
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