The annoying reality is that there really are no centre parties here. Either one is for some sort of social democracy (eugh) or socialism for corporations/big business (bleh), there’s really no in-between.
Would be nice to be able to have a party that’s both fiscally responsible while also not being a corporate stooge which wants to make things actively worse for folks.
Well, the Left Alliance certainly isn’t social democrat, centrist or corporate stooges 😁 The idea that leftists aren’t fiscally responsible is largely a right-wing fabrication – there’s reams and reams of studies proving that right-wing economic policies rarely do what they claim they do, and more often than not actually have the opposite effect than what was (at least nominally!) wanted.
As an example, if the Sipilä government hadn’t cut taxation 16 years ago and sold off a lot of productive government property, we would currently barely have any debt. But, for whatever reason, the right-wing idea of how to responsibly run a nation-state’s economy is to cut the state’s income in multiple different ways but with nearly zero payoff, and then blame all resulting issues on the left.
If you want to find out more about what the Left Alliance actually thinks about things, check out eg. their pages https://vasemmisto.fi/themes-and-values/. One big issue I’ve run into year over year is that a lot of folks who have a distaste for the left don’t necessarily actually understand leftist political platforms at all, and all their information is basically from at best centrist sources but likely from more right-leaning ones. The most tiring are the same platitudes about how eg. the “left thinks money comes from ATMs and don’t know how to run an economy”, but people can very rarely point to specific policies or let alone even come up with anything resembling a reality-based argument (note that I’m not pointing any fingers at you, just rambling on the topic)
Well I personally range from distaste to absolute loathing of socialism in its many forms, although of course some are more tolerable than others. I find Marxism to be a bunch of pseudoscientific drivel (it is, after all, Hegelian), the utopians are… well, utopian which is also meh, and anarchists lack realism. So I have ideological disagreements with Vas.liitto even outside of any specific policy disagreements. For example, I’m not really convinced about their idea of “a world with justice, equality and sustainability for all, not for the few.” and what that would actually mean. Also, the general populism is just annoying although it’s ideologically consistent, I suppose.
It’s not like I like the right-wing parties either, but at least they’re (mostly) capitalistic, although they’re not really for actually free markets which is of course annoying. And I feel that there are others that are in a similar bind as me, where there really isn’t a good party for them. It’s frustrating.
The annoying reality is that there really are no centre parties here. Either one is for some sort of social democracy (eugh) or socialism for corporations/big business (bleh), there’s really no in-between.
Would be nice to be able to have a party that’s both fiscally responsible while also not being a corporate stooge which wants to make things actively worse for folks.
Well, the Left Alliance certainly isn’t social democrat, centrist or corporate stooges 😁 The idea that leftists aren’t fiscally responsible is largely a right-wing fabrication – there’s reams and reams of studies proving that right-wing economic policies rarely do what they claim they do, and more often than not actually have the opposite effect than what was (at least nominally!) wanted.
As an example, if the Sipilä government hadn’t cut taxation 16 years ago and sold off a lot of productive government property, we would currently barely have any debt. But, for whatever reason, the right-wing idea of how to responsibly run a nation-state’s economy is to cut the state’s income in multiple different ways but with nearly zero payoff, and then blame all resulting issues on the left.
If you want to find out more about what the Left Alliance actually thinks about things, check out eg. their pages https://vasemmisto.fi/themes-and-values/. One big issue I’ve run into year over year is that a lot of folks who have a distaste for the left don’t necessarily actually understand leftist political platforms at all, and all their information is basically from at best centrist sources but likely from more right-leaning ones. The most tiring are the same platitudes about how eg. the “left thinks money comes from ATMs and don’t know how to run an economy”, but people can very rarely point to specific policies or let alone even come up with anything resembling a reality-based argument (note that I’m not pointing any fingers at you, just rambling on the topic)
Well I personally range from distaste to absolute loathing of socialism in its many forms, although of course some are more tolerable than others. I find Marxism to be a bunch of pseudoscientific drivel (it is, after all, Hegelian), the utopians are… well, utopian which is also meh, and anarchists lack realism. So I have ideological disagreements with Vas.liitto even outside of any specific policy disagreements. For example, I’m not really convinced about their idea of “a world with justice, equality and sustainability for all, not for the few.” and what that would actually mean. Also, the general populism is just annoying although it’s ideologically consistent, I suppose.
It’s not like I like the right-wing parties either, but at least they’re (mostly) capitalistic, although they’re not really for actually free markets which is of course annoying. And I feel that there are others that are in a similar bind as me, where there really isn’t a good party for them. It’s frustrating.