Politics for dummies

K, I am about to reveal just how much I know about politics, which, if I am actually learning something from this diagram, means is almost nothing. It's very basic. But I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one out there, and I do find it interesting, so I thought I'd share. Last week in Macroeconomics, we began talking about how politics are intertwined with the economy. We drew a very very rough diagram of how things traditionally work, shown below:



Let me explain some things we discussed. You can see the United States falls right in the moderate area, as we are neither anarchists nor communists. It may seem strange to pit pro-socialism and pro-business against each other as though they were opposites, but what that means is that the far right is basically in favor of letting the economy take care of itself; that the market should be allowed to equalize itself, whereas the far right is in favor of governmental control and involvement, usually for the protection of people.

An example of this would be minimum wage. If we were at the far right, you would be paid what you were worth, regardless of how much, or how little, it would be. If an employer paid too little, he would lose employees to someone who paid more, therefore causing him to have to raise the salaries he pays. The system would equal itself out. Moving toward the middle then, there is a belief that there should be a minimum standard of living, therefore a minimum wage, which is set by the government. And if we were at the far left, all of our earning ability would be completely controlled by the government.

We talked about many situations in which politics and the economy intertwined; that is but one. But you can sort of see how they are closely linked. Which seems a little scary when one of the presidential candidates admits he doesn't know much about the economy (McCain). But moving on...

Conservatives are generally thought of as being on the "right-wing", while liberals are generally thought of as being on the "left-wing." Conservatives are of the if-it's-not-broke-don't-fix-it policy, and liberals want change! This isn't set in stone however, as there are such things as liberal republicans and such. (It seems that a conservative democrat would be more rare, but like I said I know very little about this.) I think I would be more a liberal in my social views, but I am robably walking the fence as far as declaring republican or democrat. I need to research more.

Anyhoo, just some food for thought if you are also in the infant stages of learning about it. Maybe now someone should do "computers for dummies", because it was easier for me to sketch up a diagram and scan it in to the computer than it was to make one on the computer, convert it to a usable image, and crop it to the correct size. (Believe me, I tried. For way too long I tried.)

In other news, my co-worker's son got his mission call in the mail today. He and his mom brought the white envelope in, unopened. The reason we all cared about this was because we've heard all about his journey of going from the initial decision to go, the struggles of getting to where he is able to go (of which there are many and took a long time to clear up), and how much he really really wanted this. So naturally we were excited for him. So he pretty much had about 20 women flocking all over him (most middle-aged and married so nothing fishy) wanting him to open the envelope at our office. They called the rest of his family in so everyone could watch, then he ripped it open with excitment and read aloud, Argentina Bahia Blanco mission. Of course we clapped and cheered. He read the whole letter out loud, and when he got to the part that says "you have been found worthy to serve" (or something to that affect), he choked up. And of course several of the women were tearing up too. (We are women, we do that.) It was so exciting. I just love watching people open their mission calls, it's just so exciting and emotional. I don't know him well - I've just heard about him for the last year or so - but I wish him luck. He seems like he'll be really great.