Hacker News Reader

Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

>The same word applies to roads that do not pay for themselves through gas tax and/or tolls.

I'm German and I can tell you it really does not. Like in a lot of countries car infrastructure is treated like the state of nature, it's just somehow there, and the infrastructure burden of parking, road construction and what have you isn't a topic. It's the 'default culture' and the support it gets is just the status quo, when you try to internalize the cost you cause a shitstorm. Look at how well surge pricing or road toll debates go over in most places, or how sensitive people are to fuel prices.

Rail transport be it commercial or individual despite the fact that it's so much cheaper (in particular on emissions as well) is always one political decision away from being privatized or culled.

View on HN

The far-right Berlin government is currently doing its darnedest to build the most expensive highway in all of Germany, that nobody actually wants, through a cultural area. Probably because their friend owns the highway construction company.

Oh please, far-right? It is leftists, that sees everything beside them as far-right. I would call it conservative. Something the 'left' forgets, that there are also some real people, who do not want to pay for the leftist dreamworld. Yuck.

> people, who do not want to pay for the leftist dreamworld

Except that time and time again, it turns out that the "leftist dreamworld" is actually cheaper.

Providing subsidized housing for poor people costs less in the long run than dealing with homelessness.

Providing nationalized or strictly regulated healthcare costs less than fully privatized systems where healthcare operators do as they please.

Facilitating active transport such as bike lanes costs cities less, and moves more people more quickly, than focusing exclusively on cars.

What these people actually want is not to save money, but to carefully ensure that any money spent suits only their preferences and identity groups rather than benefiting society as a whole.

The thing is, it is never enough and ends up usually in a disaster and people lose their life, because their opinions get in the way.

Subsidy kills innovation. There is no incentive anymore to make things better. You always must know someone, you can bribe, so that something gets done.

I get it, hackernews is flooded with well meaning people making way more money than normal people do. They see, how 'unfair' the world is: why am i making so much more and they so little. It is the ground, where this despicable left mind virus can grow, and then they start to steal people's money for their grandiose ideas.

Then let's stop subsidizing cars and fossil fuels.

Good luck!

I don't see how any government, regardless of location, that spends large sums of taxpayer money on a construction project could ever be considered to be "right wing" in any way, let alone "far-right".

Such behaviour fundamentally contradicts even the mildest of right-of-centre ideologies.

An actual right-of-centre government would never even consider starting such a project.

If a right-of-centre government happened to inherit one that had been started by a previous administration, for example, such a project would be immediately terminated, any assets liquidated, and the proceeds directly returned to the taxpayers.

The only way that such a project would ever exist under a right-of-centre government would be if it were initiated, funded, built, operated, and maintained solely by the private sector, without any government involvement at all.

Practices such as the collection of taxes, raising public debt, and government built/run infrastructure are part of left-of-centre ideologies, and certainly not right-of-centre in any way.

Unfortunately right wing parties throughout the West have been taken over by grifters, and anything like traditional conservatism has been tossed by the wayside.

You're absolutely right that some political parties wrongly use a term like "conservative" in their party name, or otherwise incorrectly portray themselves as being "right wing".

Ultimately, though, they're still left-wing parties in practice, pushing left-wing ideologies, regardless of the facade they might try to put up.

A party doesn't just become "right wing" because they claim to be, especially when their actions and policies are decidedly left-wing.

Pray tell, was Adolf Hitler left or right wing?

Left wing, due to the use of large and intrusive government, collectivism, government-run make-work projects, government-run infrastructure projects, central economic planning, conscription, a disregard for individualism, and other policies that are inherently incompatible with right-wing ideology.

Sure if you define terms in your own strict way you can write a long comment on how everybody else is using the term wrong. Why should people use your definition though?

That isn't "my definition".

Left-wing ideologies inherently promote concepts like collectivist big government, high taxation, massive government spending, and government-controlled infrastructure.

Right-wing ideologies, on the other hand, inherently promote individualism, minimal to no taxation, minimal to no government spending, and privately-controlled infrastructure.

That's just the fundamental nature of a two-dimensional political spectrum. It has nothing to do with me.

Anyone claiming that a government exhibiting decidedly left-wing traits is somehow "far right" is simply making a wrong analysis.

This is observably false. One observation is that the US government debt grows more quickly when the Republican party is in power.

What is true is that left-wing ideology promotes taking a bit from everyone to give a lot to everyone, while right-wing ideology does not promote giving a lot, or anything, to everyone, but often still promotes taking a bit, or a lot, from everyone and funneling it to places that do not benefit very many people.

Leftists will promote plans like: tax carbon emissions and use the money to subsidize clean power plants. Rightists will enact (without promoting) plans like: give a lot of taxpayer money to this company for unclear reasons, and don't worry about how to raise the money - make it the next government's problem to deal with the debt pile. The latter is, of course, individualist.

> Right-wing ideologies, on the other hand, inherently promote individualism

Right wing promotes authoritanism, which is pretty much the opposite of individual rights. Right wing governments stand for strict laws and strong enforcement, where the people must obey or else.

> Left-wing ideologies inherently promote concepts like collectivist big government, high taxation, massive government spending, and government-controlled infrastructure.

Incorrect. Left-wing ideologies promote downward distribution of power from established elites; one particular subset of left-wing ideologies (socialism) promotes labor control of the means of production, and one particular subset of socialism promotes a situation in which the working class controls the state which then acts as the vehicle through which control of the means of production is exercised (but libertarian socialism, for instance, also exists.)

Right-wing ideologies instead promote systems which concentrate power in narrow elites; different varieties of right-wing ideology justify this based in various mixes kf views of inherent merit, whether based on sex/gender, race, individual bloodline, “revealed merit” in notionally competitive environments where capacity at time t is heavily influenced by success at t-1, or whatever else.

You are confusing the left-right axis with the libertarian-authoritarian axis, which is a different axis of ideological (or sometimes merely praxis) variation.

Destroying "degenerate" cultural institutions is very much right wing; so is giving taxpayer money to cronies; so is overloading the government with debt.

This entity you're describing clearly isn't "right wing" if it uses left-wing practices like taxation, public debt, and government-funded "cultural institutions" (whatever that actually means).

Taxation is inherently a left-wing concept. Under right-wing ideologies, there would not be any taxpayer money to give "cronies" because such funds never would be collected from taxpayers in the first place.

Public debt is inherently a left-wing concept. Under right-wing ideologies, there wouldn't even be any government entity capable of incurring debt.

"Cultural institutions" involving the government are inherently a left-wing concept. Under right-wing ideologies, the government simply wouldn't have the resources to create "cultural institutions" and any such entities that did exist would be created, funded, and operated by the private sector alone.

If you're truly upset about the things you just described, then it's because you dislike left-wing ideologies, even if you don't recognize it.

US debt increases much faster when the right wing is in power. This is an empirical fact which trumps theory.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com