Government policy has gone from who can best manage our communal affairs to who will promise to transfer more from our communal wealth to those with the power to vote themselves a larger share. It is the major issue in the presidential election in the United States and it will be just as large an issue here in 2013. I have an article at Quadrant Online that looks at the contrast between the parties of the right and left both here and in the US. This is the central contrast discussed in the article:

The right has a vision of how a world can be best constructed by leaving each of us the freedom and opportunity to find our own way. It is always an adventure and nothing can be guaranteed, but there are satisfactions in being allowed to build our own lives ourselves and in our own way. But it comes with fewer forms of open-ended government support.

BY contrast, the left is filled with plans for what it will do for us: for ‘the poor’, ‘the disadvantaged’, for women, migrants, Aboriginals, or whoever can be transformed into a victim group and induced to become dependent on government programs, grants and handouts. Socialism is a drug of dependence. It is a narcotic addiction very hard to break.

They used to say about heroin that you shouldn’t try it because it is so incredibly good and then when you’re hooked it sets about ruining your life. It pulls you in and then never lets you go. Same again for socialist non-solutions to our problems. There are communal ways to deal with some of our problems and governments can sometimes help. But it is hard to think of proposals to fix things that came from the collectivist side of politics that actually left things better than they had been before. They may actually exist, I just have trouble remembering what they are.