The upcoming elections have me thinking about the different approaches to social economics.
Democrats tend to talk a lot about being for the little-guy, the middle-class, the worker, and doing things that will rescue people from poverty. Republicans have the same desire to help the little-guy, the middle-class, and the worker, but they take a different approach. Democrats tend to talk about the people and the goal. Republicans tend to talk about the task and the means. That’s not to say that Democrats don’t talk about the tasks they will undertake to help people or the means of accomplishing those tasks, or that Republicans don’t talk about the people that will be helped by the tasks they hope to accomplish or the goals that will be achieved by the processes they hope to use.
Not only do people at different ends of the political spectrum communicate differently, they have different ideas about how to accomplish their (shared) goals. And this is the difference that really matters. If Democrats and Republicans were going to do the same things, and just talked about them differently, then it wouldn’t really matter what your political views are, we would get the same results in the end. However, since they mostly have different ideas of what it will take to reduce poverty (the shared goal, in this case), it is important to evaluate whose techniques actually work the best.
(Note: I’m using the words “Democrat” and “Republican” in this article, because those are the two major political parties in the US, and they represent ideologies that tend to be distinct and in opposition. There are other words that could convey similar distinctions, like “liberal,” “conservative,” “socialist,” “capitalist,” etc. If you like some of these or other words better, feel free to substitute them in your mind as you read this article.)
