What is the difference between the Left and Right?

This is a broad topic that I want to learn more about. The Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty, the second link, from the Mises Institute is a good place to start to understand the differences between the Right and Left. This or most of what I talk about is not going to be of any immediate concern for the average person, but it does provide a glimpse into where we are headed as a nation and a world. Most of our dreams of being successful, wealthy, and having a good life all hinge on a society and a governmental framework that will make this possible. It is still possible to go out and live one's dream, but this will be much more difficult to do with the changes-- the growth of government and the negative effects that go along with this, tax increases, inflation, and a debt driven crises to name a few-- that are occurring in the world. Having an ideal of the direction the country and world is headed as opposed to just blindly stumbling along will help one to achieve their dreams. So how does the differences between the Left and Right matter to you? In America we have a two party system. The two choices that we have before us when determining the leadership of the country and the direction that this leadership is taking us is a false choice in terms of the size of our government: in reality we don't have a choice when it comes to smaller or bigger government. If one explores the difference between these two political parties, one will find that they are leading us towards the same direction: bigger government, and that the two parties are at the core the same. This is in part due to the electorate that would not stand for a party that would make any real shift away from ,a general statement, big government. What is happening in the political realm must be reduced back towards its primary as it is a symptom of our cultural decay, not the cause of our troubles.

From the link above we can see that the right has been just as guilty as the left in moving America towards bigger government,

For one thing, the income tax amendment, which he[right-wing libertarian] deplores as the beginning of socialism in America, was put through Congress in 1909 by an overwhelming majority of both parties.

It goes on to state that most conservatives view the New Deal as a liberal plan, but the foundations for the New Deal were laid by Hoover, a Republican. Much of the New Deal was just an expansion of what Hoover started.

I have been covering Theodore Roosevelt in my history class. He was America's first progressive President and he greatly expanded the government and was instrumental in starting fundamental transformation of our country away from limited government and towards the welfare state. It was Nixon who took America off of the gold standard, although a real gold standard did not exist at that time. These are just a few examples that show that there is little difference between the Left and Right.

I read this article that is written by a liberal. It is an interesting read on what the movement by the electorate's opinion and shift towards conservatism, or the rise of the Tea Party, might actually mean for the long term prospects of a real shift away from bigger government. The main point of the article is to illustrate that the movement by the right towards libertarianism, or the principles of Ayn Rand, will actually lead back towards a rise of the Left. The main points that I found interesting were the ones showing that conservatives do not support or espouse what we would consider conservative values: they are not that different from the left,

The media is building Ryan up as a serious thinker.[He was influenced by Ayn Rand. He wants to privatize social security and replace Medicare with vouchers.] Build him up even more, I say. Give him a Nobel Prize, like Obama's. Make him the face of the Republican Party. Progressives should want Ryan and Paul and the Cato Institute to define the next American right. That will ensure its minority status for decades.

Before Buckley and the movement conservatives took the right in another direction in the 1950s, this country had a libertarian, isolationist right, the right of Robert A. Taft and Alf Landon. Thanks to their opposition to the New Deal, U.S. entry in World War II and the Cold War, the libertarian isolationists turned the Republicans into the minority party between 1932 and 1968. The only Republican to be elected in that era, Dwight Eisenhower, ran for the presidency in 1952 to save the GOP from Taftian isolationism and dismissively rejected suggestions that the Republicans try to repeal New Deal programs like Social Security.

Richard Nixon, like Ike, was a modern Republican whose formula for a Republican majority was big government on behalf of the middle class plus a hawkish foreign policy and moderate social traditionalism. The neoconservative writer David Frum has argued that this is the only possible combination that can produce an enduring Republican majority. I agree, and it is therefore with delight that I observe the rise of radical libertarianism in the GOP.

True, thanks to the popular backlash against the bailouts and the unpopular healthcare bill, the Democrats will suffer losses in the midterm elections. The Randian right will claim that Republican gains in Congress are proof that the American people share their goal of abolishing Social Security and Medicare. They should be encouraged in that belief.

After all, the public has repeatedly rejected any attempts to privatize Social Security or slash Medicare benefits. Reagan denounced both entitlements, but as president he raised taxes to support Social Security and refused to touch Medicare. Under George W. Bush, a Republican Congress passed the Medicare drug benefit, which, for all its concessions to the pharma lobby, was the biggest expansion of socialized medicine in the U.S. since Lyndon Johnson signed Medicare into law.

When Bush supported the partial privatization of Social Security, the proposal was so unpopular with the public that the Republican majority in Congress never allowed it to come to a vote. Bush touched the third rail of American politics -- and was promptly electrocuted. Last but not least, one of the arguments that Republicans opportunistically used to mobilize popular opposition to the Democratic healthcare bill was the claim that it would lead to cuts in Medicare for the elderly.[All emphasises mine.]

I agree with the main point of the article in that a move towards classical liberalism or libertarianism(if libertarianism is really classical liberalism?) will not mean be a long term winning strategy for the right and that there will be no long term movement away from big government because the electorate will not stand for this. These quotes illustrates how what we consider conservative does not necessarily lead to a smaller government. Government will continue to grow until it reaches the oppressive stage or a command economy. Only when we reach this stage much later down the road(maybe not that much later)will the system collapse and real change can occur. This is a very short introduction to the detailed look at the Left and Right. This provides a look at where America is headed.