Francis Foster

That would be the steel man argument, I think.

Probably because you can't achieve the level of redistribution you want without applying some level of force.

No, but that's bullshit.

But that's the promise.

No, the point of government is to make people do shit they don't want to do.

Well, right.

I mean, any government is about the, I mean, the thing that really defines a state is the legalized use of force.

It's all about the use of force.

Yeah, of course.

But see, I think if we want to have a discussion about progressives being idiots, like we're going to be on the same page of that one.

But we were talking about distinction between

the center left, I guess, and the progressives.

And I was saying, isn't there quite a lot of reasonable people on the center left who, like, would agree with us that the state is about shaping human behavior and making people do stuff, but what they want is well-motivated and actually based on some rationale that we might agree or disagree, but it's kind of logical, which is about a higher level of, like, I don't believe in zero taxes and no government redistribution at all personally, right?

So therefore, it's just a matter of degrees.

And it's about, is it 5% taxes or 20% taxes?

But once you start getting into the high 80s, that's where I'm at.

You know what I mean?

Do you see where I'm getting at?

So that's where I think sometimes in these arguments, the existence of the reasonable center right and the reasonable center left gets lost because we're constantly arguing with the extremes of the other side.

What do you mean by dialectical?