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You know, I'm sorry to have to do this since you just complained about people writing "pages and pages arguing about the rules", but, there's a substantive philosophical issue here that is worth discussing.
Can you explain why you think my comment is uncharitable? Because I certainly don't think it's uncharitable.
Let me be perfectly clear: I myself think we should remove market forces that push people away from poor decisions. That is something that I assent to. It seems strange to say that it's uncharitable for me to ascribe position X to someone else, when I myself hold position X as well. Obviously I don't think that X is anything derogatory in that case.
Of course, I don't hold the position with absolutely no qualifications. Mainly the qualifications come in terms of feasibility. We can't simply will the market away. We're stuck with it, and we're stuck with the fact that it picks winners and losers. That brings me into disagreement with certain leftists. But the underlying principle, the idea that human life should not be subject to the cold impersonal forces of the neoliberal market, is something that I agree with them on.
To elaborate further, "we should remove the market forces that push people away from poor decisions" does not entail "we should remove all standards for judging decisions and we should remove all punishments whatsoever". Some decisions are indeed poor and some decisions deserve consequences. I just generally don't want "market forces" to be playing the judge and doling out the punishments. If I had to sum up the alternative in a few words, I would prefer to replace "market forces" with something like "general comportment with what is virtuous".
It seems to me that the only way that someone could judge my comment to be uncharitable is if they either 1) misread it (e.g. they thought that it was implying that there should never be any consequences for anything whatsoever; which I just said is incorrect), or 2) they're so enmeshed in market ideology that they think the idea that it could even be desirable for people to live lives that are free of market competition is a priori absurd; they think it's an obviously mad position, and ascribing it to anyone is tantamount to calling them mad. But I don't think it's a mad position, and I don't think I'm mad either.
Frankly, I think this is a good illustration that the determination of what is "charitable" or "uncharitable" is inextricably tied up with one's own ideological position.
How many leftists do you think would agree with you that their reason d'etre is to "remove the market forces that push people away from poor decisions"?
It's very tedious to go through another round of "You modded this comment because you disagree with it." I no longer bother trying to disabuse people of whatever assumptions they make about my ideological positions.
Re the first question, judge by actions not words. Democrats support raising the minimum wage. Democrats support wealth transfers. Democrats support subsidies to numerous industries (eg education, green). Democrats support very intrusive anti discrimination laws predicated on disparate impact. Democrats support extensive mandatory maternity leave laws. Democrats support nationalized health care. Democrats support banning goods they determine are bads (eg gas stoves). Democrats believe in highly progressive taxes. Democrats believe in a robust industrial policy (see Biden’s activities).
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If we're talking about economic leftists in the sense of classical Marxists/anarchists? All of them. It's an anti-market ideology. Read Marx, read Adorno, read Marcuse, read any classical Marxist thinker. They are anti-market and therefore they are anti markets doing anything, let alone "punishing people for bad decisions". This is all pretty explicit, it's not a secret.
Now granted there's been a lot of slippage of the word "leftist" over the years (including in my own history of the usage of the word) and it's come to describe a lot of people who are economically liberal rather than Marxist - people who actually support markets and think they should continue. These people might not agree with my original comment. Fair enough; I could have been more precise and narrowed down my claim to only describe Marxism rather than what is today known as "leftism" as a whole. But honestly even then I think the distinction is somewhat moot in this case. Even a technically-economically-liberal LGBT activist, say, who doesn't really care about classical Marxism, is still not going to be in favor of using markets as a tool to punish people. They're going to agree with the basic principle.
That's simply not what I said. What I did say is that determinations of uncharitability are made (in part) on the basis of what readings and positions are counted as inherently "insulting", or "beyond the pale". You can personally disagree with something, but you won't perceive it as uncharitable unless you also perceive it as either a naked attack, or outside the Overton window.
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