Re: Left, Right,Conservative,liberal.
You start from a flawed premise, rolmops, in that what the left wants is the antithesis of what the right wants.<br /><br />And idealogy, which is what the right tends to argue, is a far cry from reality to the point the argument simply gets silly.<br /><br />"We want a smaller, less intrusive government" Well, under Bush, we have had the largest increase in the size of the government ever.<br /><br />You have to treat each issue separately, and then break them down to small, understandable chunks.<br /><br />For example, energy policy. "We want to get less dependent on foreign oil" Well, that's a noble goal, but if you only have (less than 10% of the known reserves, and consume 25% of the resource), there is no way possible to not be dependent on foreign oil. And increasingly so. Certainly ANWR with its relatively small supply would not even put a dent in it.<br /><br />We cannot drill our way out of dependence. We can invent our way out of it (ie hydrogen) or perhaps conquer our way out of it to increase reserves(Iraq) or we have to change the way we do things, (ala Europe)which has huge tax rates and $5.00 a gallon fuel. Of course, Europe has far superior public transportation, and as a result do not consume near as much fuel as Americans.<br /><br />But if the government is not going to fund inventing our way out of this problem, the economics of it must, and there is no way to independently develop and market the hydrogen product when energy in this country is still relatively cheap.<br /><br />But the problem is really, from an idealogic standpoint, that the conservatives offer solutions that won't work, and make no sense in any event, whereas the liberals (some of them, at least) offer solutions that are unpopular (higher fuel taxes, and funding alternate energy technologies).<br /><br />You can take virtually any economic situation we face and parse it the exact same way.
