The truth is not in the middle

Chait today:

Former Republican aid turned lobbyist John Feehery has one of those “pox on both houses” repudiations of ideological extremism that inadvertently reveals the whole fallacy of the thing:

Reduced to the absurd.

Ideologues on both sides of the philosophical divide fall dangerously into this trap.

Conservatives who believe that government does not need to exist are every bit as wrong as liberals who believe that the private market must be completely controlled by the government.

The truth is not somewhere in the middle. It is exactly in the middle.

Seriously?  As Chait points out, just another example of a belief in a symmetry that does not exist.  Show me these liberals who believe that the private market must be completely controlled by the government.  There’s no such thing.  Those are communists– and there’s not a lot of them left around since the fall of the Soviet Union.  As much as so many conservatives reflexively hate government they just assume that liberals reflexively love government.  Simply not so.  I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again– liberals are interested in the best outcomes for the public, whether those outcomes come from the market or the government.

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