I interviewed the wall Wolf of wall street Jordan Belfort earlier this week.
And one of the things that came up was Jordan saying, I don't care what you do, I'm socially
liberal, but I'm fiscally conservative and this actually makes no sense and I want to
discuss that with you today.
Very often the way that we hear about someone being socially liberal and fiscally conservative
is they'll say something like, and I have many friends who say this, I want low regulation,
I want low taxes.
I don't care who gets married.
And I think women should be allowed to choose abortion if it's what's right for them.
Oh, it sounds plausibly coherent.
You're socially liberal.
And you're fiscally conservative.
Well, the problem is if you're fiscally conservative, you almost always have a position that is
terrible for the environment and for dealing with climate change.
You might have social liberal, fiscal conservative, self-described who agree that the science
is right on climate change.
They accept the science I think is better said.
But if you're economically or fiscally conservative, you're not going to deal with climate change
almost by the very nature of what it means to be fiscally conservative.
You need regulation to deal with climate change.
Fiscal conservatism is against regulation under the guise of we're for small government
and it's a direct contradiction.
It doesn't make sense.
The free market, which fiscal conservatives, um, uh, pray at the altar of, in many cases
will not solve the climate crisis.
Socially liberal might mean you have empathy for the poor and you want to fix homelessness
and deal with uninsured Americans who have no health insurance.
Okay, great.
But the problem is that fiscal conservatism believes in tax schemes that will not deal
with the poor and with homelessness and getting everybody healthcare, you can't do it.
It's a direct contradiction.
You can say it, but it doesn't make it a logical thing.
If you are fiscally conservative, you often repeat this idea, we've got to balance the
budget.
I'm a deficit Hawk.
We've got to reduce the deficit until a Republican is president.
Then you often forget about it.
But if absent any context, your priority is we've got to cut, cut, cut to reduce the deficit.
You can't deal with the social issues that you claim to be liberal on.
You just can't do it.
So very often when you hear someone say, I'm a centrist or I'm a social liberal and fiscal
conservative, you're really dealing with what's called a right wing libertarian.
These are essentially right wingers who don't hate gay people, right?
I mean, I, I'm, this is a gross oversimplification, but when I hear socially liberal, fiscally
conservative in practice, I hear I'm a right winger, but I'm not interested in persecuting
gay people.
Another way to understand socially liberal and fiscally conservative is I really would
love to fix the issues that are affecting the poor, marginalized, often minority, disenfranchised
individuals, but I don't want the government to get involved and definitely none of my
tax money should go towards fixing those problems.
It's not a very principled or coherent position.
That's the reality.
If you support these social rights, you have to have an economy that's going to provide
and guarantee those rights.
Otherwise, it's just nonsense.
There's a lot of corporate CEOs that want to be relevant that take this approach.
Sometimes they call it centrism Starbucks CEO.
Howard Schultz is sort of one of those guys.
He's a social progressive about non-discrimination in the workplace.
He's for gay marriage, all of that stuff, but economically, he's essentially a standard
neoliberal who is about free markets.
He's suspicious of characatures of socialism that float around, all of that stuff.
Now, the other thing I will say is it's a very small group of people who actually are
socially liberal and fiscally conservative.
Not when you say, Hey, where do you fall on the political spectrum?
When you do a proper poll or test where people are answering, answering questions about their
beliefs, the number of people that are actually socially liberal and fiscally conservative
is very small.
You pull people on the issues and you find in many studies, for example, one done by
the voter study group, uh, whose results were putting up on the, on the screen, the area
that is least common in this four quadrant system.
So imagine a four box where you can be socially and economically liberal.
You can be socially and economically conservative or you can be a mix.
The least common quadrant is socially liberal and economically conservative.
It's actually far more common to be socially conservative, but economically what we might
call liberal in the more progressive sense.
So even many of the people claiming that they are socially liberal and fiscally conservative
actually aren't.
But the more important analysis is that it's incoherent if you are socially liberal and
fiscally conservative.
The fiscal conservatism essentially makes your social liberalness irrelevant beyond
just you don't hate gay people.
And again, it's a, it's a gross over simplification, but it really illuminates the contradiction.
If you aren't going to be pushing for regulating businesses in a way that makes sense.
If you're not going to be pushing for economic justice policies, being socially liberal in
some uh, uh, in, in name only way, I guess is what I'm saying is not really worth much
in terms of policy.
If you disagree with me, let me know.
I'm on Twitter at D Pacman.
The show is on Twitter at David Pakman show.
We are going to take some phone calls coming up and later on we're going to get back to
this
issue of the regulation of social networks and what should and shouldn't be part of that.
That's coming up later, but much
more right after this
short break