Am I left or right wing?

When I was younger I thought I was left wing. Certain appealing morals seemed embedded within left wing ideals. Due to my limited perspective of one I am afraid of bias and so have spent much time since coming to understand the right wing ideals to be able to better see past the bias. It is said that those who are not left wing when young lack heart and those who are not right wing when old lack brains. While too cut and dry to be accurate I can appreciate the sentiment behind the saying. Over the last hundred years or so right wing politics has done better on average for society than the left, excluding a rough patch in the late 30's and early 40's which is not something I care to try and compute the total effect of. This is another broad claim that could be discussed at length and that I have no intention of explaining or justifying. It is simply an opinion I have found that I now have. It is not so much the right that trumps the left, more that it is cohesive with capitalism and thus more naturally successful. Capitalism is the thing that has most driven improvement in society over the period in question and it has best done so under the bareback riding right than the reins clasping left. This is an economic, infrastructural and technological measure of improvement rather than a moral or happiness one. I would argue that left wing governments in democratic capitalist states do a better job of increasing the morality and content of society but this is even more subjective and harder to demonstrate than an economic difference and again, I have no intention of doing so.

The more I look at right wing policies and my theoretical ideas of how to run a perfect society the more I find that I am not left wing but right wing. Most of my methods of utopian governance would be derived from right wing economic principles. They have an air of left wing about them because I have overlaid the highly practical workings of capitalism with my moral code so that they are less open to abuse. It is always powered by capitalism but tempered by some notions of equality. The free right wing capitalism is alike to a train engine while left wing ideals are just the tracks that keep it going in the direction you want it to safely and smoothly. All the magic happens in the train, the tracks are just a dull, static necessity.

When I probe this idea even further I find that left and right distinctions lose much of their meaning. You want both, but you want them for different reasons and acting in different ways. Treating them like they are the two sides of the same thing, both fighting for the controls, simply feels inefficient. The difference between the political left and right, certainly in the democratic capitalist west, feels really rather minor in the grand scheme of things. In terms of political alliance I have typically favoured those I find morally most acceptable however the older I get the more I find I am drawn to those who seem like they would be most capable of running things.

Much much more relevant to me than a right or left wing slant on your ideas on how to run things is the idea of efficiency. Certainly there are two clear ways to divide up the pie, equally, a slice each, or not equally. The only half sensible non-equal method is upon some measure of merit and there we have the two main ideas of modern governance - communism and capitalist meritocracy. It seems pretty much over for communism and even slices of pie and the debate is all about how big the big slices should be, how small the small ones can be and who should get which slices. The main focus should not be so much on slice sizes and distribution but on making more pie. Simply put, if we make enough pie then everyone can have as much as they want! Humanity is quite a long way off the technological levels that would make Ian M Banks Culture utopia of infinite pie a possibility but we can certainly make a lot more pie than we presently do. Every wasted resource and unnecessary job done ultimately means less pie. A lot of things we commonly do or that capitalism encourages are not the most efficient way to do things, usually just the most rapid. A lot of the choices we make as people and the conflicts we have lead to a lot of inefficient things being done. Making more pie and being more efficient should be the centre issue for any political party, for any company and for that matter each and every one of us. In answer to the original question, I am right wing mechanically, left wing morally and above all I am into the idea of the efficient production and consumption of pie!