Right wing politicans want the following:
- Tight immigration in or out
- Low prices
- Low wages
- High profits
Here is why this is an impossible combination of policies.
If you pursue low immigration policies, that will reduce supply of labor, increasing wages.
If you pursue a policy of a tight monetary supply in order to reduce wages and other prices, this will cause a recession, hurting profits.
If you pursue increased productivity to increase profits this can lead to more competition for workers in the market, leading to higher wages.
The only way to make this work to have high profits and low wages is to greatly restrict the market so it is more difficult for new businesses to be created. The problem is this leads to lower economic growth for the economy as a whole.
The other issue is that if you are pursuing low emigration for your workers, and you pursue low wages you are trapping them in the country fomenting distrust of your government and feeding your opposition.
Italy has a really bad case of this. Italy is the most unequal country in the European Union when measured by Gini coefficient, and young workers struggle to get by. Since they have options they leave the country, and many never return. The Italian government wants to fix this and stop having their young people leave, but any policy fix they could implement to fix this problem would certainly anger part of their governing coalition, or cause economic destruction.
- Leave the European Union, would slow the emigration of young Italians, but kill the tourism industry.
- Clamp down on wage theft, would slow the emigration of young Italians, but anger businesses.
- Immigration from the Middle East, would fix the worker shortages, but anger social conservatives.
These are the three most obvious fixes to Italy’s economic woes. There are many other potential solutions. But the issue here is that basically any solution to Italy’s woes coming from their right wing government will hurt them politically, so they are stuck in a doom loop.
You find the same problem in the United States. If Donald Trump chooses to deport all of the illegal immigrants the way he has promised, he will basically kill the agricultural industry. Given how angry people were when eggs became more expensive because of a bird flu pandemic, imagine how angry people will be if everything on the shelves becomes more expensive!
We find the same problem with Trump’s desire for domestic manufacturing, economic growth, no foreign workers, and low inflation. If he wants to bring manufacturing home quickly using tariffs, this will be by making things more expensive. The jobs that he wants to create offer lower wages than the wages a lot of Americans already have. On-shoring manufacturing will almost certainly lead to higher prices, breaking his inflation promise. With unemployment at 4% (it was under 4% when he became president) where are the workers going to come from? We are not in the middle of an unemployment crisis right now. We haven’t been since the last time he was president. He can’t expect to tell early retirees to stop enjoying the beach life and go work at a factory in Saginaw? That’s crazy. Like Meloni’s problems and potential solutions, Trump’s plans to on-shore manufacturing without breaking one of his other promises is impossible.
We also have the standard tax cuts for everybody, lower debt, but keeping existing social programs as we see in Donald Trump’s platform. This is a basic math problem. You want to cut revenues, keep expenditure, but not borrow more money? How’s that supposed to work?
It doesn’t matter what right-wing platform you look at, you will always end up with impossible combinations of policies.
The truth is that no matter where you look, right wing politicians are grifters. There is no real similarity between right wing and left wing politicians. While right wing politicians go back and forth between policies which are of dubious value and undoubtable contradictions, left-wing and centrist politicians generally have pretty good consistency. There are still a few issues left-wing politicians marry themselves to which appear to me as being problematic, specifically the obsession with maximum benefit pensions which hardly ever produce the value they claim they will receive, but when it comes to being dedicated to quality health care, education, and good infrastructure we end up with a platform which can actually work.
The key to building an economy which actually works really does come down to building productivity. That means we need to pay for investments, like health care, infrastructure, and education. We need to consider that when building a project that the benefits outweigh the costs in the long-term. Strong Towns has an important point when saying infrastructure should pay for itself. It is right to call for the defunding of police and other wasteful programs, because their benefits do not outweigh the costs. Cities often spend the largest portion of their budget on policing in the United States, and have few results to demonstrate that money actually works to make us safer.
Centrist and left-wing politicians across the world work towards building better trade routes and expanding the ability for their citizens to travel, while also encouraging tourism in their own countries by reducing barriers for citizens from safe countries. They push for open border treaties which allows for open labor markets while also pursuing policies which improve their productivity, raising the quality of life for all. Investing in infrastructure is not just done during recessions, though it will likely be increased in counter-cylical policies, but maintaining infrastructure is simply part of the cost of having a society, as long as that infrastructure provides more benefits than its costs.
This is a system that works and is mostly internally consistent. Real left-wing politicians focus on growing productivity while ensuring the rich pay their fair share, and everyone has the opportunity to get ahead in life if they are willing to do the work. Protecting the environment is necessary for many reasons, and this is the type of government we should elect.
Vote for AOC in 2028.