Tortoise Enthusiast

I really don’t get the idea of voting for left or centrist parties for growth. The two factors that matter for growth more than anything else, by far, are energy and intelligence. These are a priori what produces wealth. Trade or whatever are rounding errors in comparison. They’re nothing. MAGA is more pro-energy and pro-intelligence than even centrist Republicans. Restore Britain has the most comprehensive pro-energy and pro-intelligence industrial policy in British politics. What is the Sensible Centrist bean counter justification for voting against these factions?

And this is why the “woke right” exists. When supposedly centrist leaders like Macron can’t provide the rock-bottom core purpose of a government, which is a monopoly on violence, people shop around. Centrists really have no room to complain here. Until you’re all Bukele with Hillary characteristics, you have no claim to the high ground. I have plenty of mutuals who fall into this camp, but my patience is really running out. The state must lock up criminals, secure private property, and deliver necessary public goods without 90% loss to bureaucratic graft (permitting, environmental review, “affordable housing,” etc). If you have no candidates who can do this, you are not the adults in the room. You’re children in oversized suits. You are the ones who don’t recognize the seriousness of the moment and are larping. Where are these Democrats who reject rent control, reject redistribution, want to cut social programs, want to cut red tape, want to execute murderers? You have none. So it’s a choice between right illiberalism and left illiberalism, and that’s an extremely easy choice for a White male net taxpayer.

You cannot morally analyze acts totally divorced from their context. Throwing boiling water on random people for no reason would indeed be worse than stealing. Throwing boiling water on people burning down your city is a positive moral good.