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)
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)