Politics 3: Open letter to my friends, the hippies and the fascists

I'm always ending up defending right wing viewpoints to my many socialist friends and acquaintances, not because I enjoy it, but because they often have absurd views. The opposite happens when I'm with my right wing friends and family members. Whereas I'm a socialist black sheep with them, everyone I know from college tends to put me squarely on the privileged rich bastard side. Actually, I believe in neither. The older I get, the less use I have for defining myself or others as left or right wing. Conservative vs. progressive is a workable dichotomy, it's an axis you can stake a place along, for every subject even. But left vs. right? Les extremes se touchent. The amount of times a conversation about politics has lead me to argue against a friend or family member with an absurd point beggars belief.

As a shorthand: You can't fix the economy by privatising everything, or nationalising everything. Freedom of speech applies especially to people you don't agree with, also to people who don't agree with freedom of speech. Immigration only adds more different people to your country, this is a totally neutral process, they should adapt enough to function and eventually (a century or so) will be indistinguishable from other inhabitants, i.e. will probably be anti-immigration themselves. It's not even remotely feasible for everyone to have all their basic needs taken care of, without a dynamic capitalist economy to pay for that, and even then some injustice is inevitable, unless we build an economy not based on money, like on star trek. It's stupid to start wars, but when you have, it's your responsibility to fix the country you invaded. Saving the environment is so difficult, we should make it the driving force behind fixing the economy. Governments should govern, businesses should do business, when they work together just as many good things happen as bad, but they are both entirely ineffective without individuals, who should have as much say in anything they do together as reasonably possible. Most of the people on the planet do not live in the U.S. or Europe, it's completely fair that they should have a bigger say in the stake of the planet then we do. Since the vast majority of the problems we have to tackle in the next hundred years are completely global in nature, it's our responsibility to use the advantage we have to get a result we can all live with.

I guess that makes me a romantic.