I often see on here that someone that says they are Center just means they are right wing.

Eg. this post https://piefed.social/c/wikipedia@lemmy.world/p/2492350/centre-party

Center Party = Far right.

And I get that that is often true, but that got me thinking, when is someone actually "Center?"

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[–] 1 point 3 hours ago

Sorry, no. Politics is about tradeoffs. The defining tradeoff of politics is how you balance individual freedom from interference, with public services like public transport, sanitation healthcare. Most people would prefer to be left alone by the government and to be able to get on with their lives, but most people would also like there to be a social safety net and convenient things like buses and trains which can only really be tackled with government involvement.

But in order to have sanitation, say, you need people to drive bin lorries, and so you need to convince people to drive bin lorries (maybe by paying them, or maybe by punishing people who are allocated to driving bin lorries by the government and don't do it) which involves a curtailment of freedom - either because the government is taking money off its citizens, or punishing people who don't do what it says, or whatever. There will always be jobs that people want to be done but don't really want to do if given a completely free choice.

And so, there is a tradeoff: how much does the government interfere to make those jobs get done? Whether it's charging taxes or job allocations, the better you want public services, the more the government interferes.

And because it's a tradeoff, there is a continuum of reasonable positions. It's not that you can only consistently think we should have Marxist-Leninist communism, the state tells you what job to do and if you refuse you are sent to the gulag, or an anarcho-capitalist hell-state where nobody ever collects the garbage because nobody wants to pay for it.

And that's only the most important tradeoff - there are infinitely many other tradeoffs where fulfilling one shared goal impinges on another and how you resolve it can be expressed on a continuum. People tend to have a broad direction on all of these - left wingers prioritise public goods over individual freedoms (but still think both are good), while right wingers prioritise individual freedoms (but still think both are good). Even the MAGA "healthcare is communism" morons still think that there should be healthcare and transport and so on (they just disagree about how it should be provided and paid for and what form it takes). Even the communists think freedom is good as long as it doesn't interfere with some greater goal.

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