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Comment by benj111 | Hacker News Reader

Interesting, I'd have thought it would be a more conservative thing. Keeping money local, protecting local businesses. Maybe that's why they're moderately popular? They cross the political divide.

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Looking forward to a sustainable economy requires some protectionism against globalism. That's how the left became protectionist in many European countries.

When were leftists NOT protectionists? Protectionism is anti-liberal and anti-free-market? It was always left-wing.

actual communism and socialism was internationalist at its core.

Internationalist yes, but not pro-free-trade. And in practice it was always almost always the opposite of that. In Europe all the hard-left parties were anti-EU precisely because they were opposed to free trade and wanted to protect the local markets.

Currently in the United States the liberal party is the party of free trade while the right-wing president calls himself the Tarriff Man.

1. The Democrats are not leftists. Liberals are not leftists. 2. Ideologically speaking both US Republicans and US Democrats are Liberals and pro-free trade, Trump is an exception.

Language changes, and in American English at least, the definition of liberal has changed. If you use the word liberal to describe what we might refer to as "classical liberal", you will needlessly confuse people.

Kind of an outlier, though, because the Republicans typically cheer free trade (but then put tarrifs on shoes, cheese, tires, etc, etc, and of course subsidize big agribusineess, Wall St., etc).

> the Republicans typically cheer free trade

These affinities have shifted many times in American political history. For example, Lincoln was a Republican.

There are plenty of examples of leftists not being protectionist. The Girondins of revolutionary France were very pro free market, something that lost them a lot of support among the starving sans culottes. The more radical Mountain factions appear to have mostly supported protectionist measures, namely maximum prices, largely out of the need to stop the mobs of Paris from literally storming the legislative halls. The moment the parisians believed that the maximum didn’t work, they were dropped.

Here I am hoping anyone still cares about federated, democratized powers and people having the right to control their own money supply.

The Fed can print 4 trillion dollars for Wall St and people don't care. That's getting pretty close to half of GDP for one year (at the time). Hundreds of millions of people's work product...

If they're going to print money like that at least inject it into the economy by buying stuff like free healthcare or education.

Can you tell me when people have been able to control their own money supply at any point in history and have it be worth anything? It has always been in the hands of a mint of some sort of shackled to the base metal if done by weight.

Lincoln authorized congress to do it and it proved to be a success and improvement. It helped the North win the war.

It is 'cozy' and 'underdog' in a way that fits the memetic zeitgeist essentially - not something sensible in itself. Like 'buy local', food miles, and other fallacies that disregard production efficiency entirely.

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