also: i've been over this before...

if you're a free market libertarian type, you might misunderstand a lot of my arguments as being socially conservative. but, that's the restricted spectrum at work. i'm usually pretty good at pointing out why my arguments are on the actual left, rather than the pretend left that the restricted spectrum presents, but i'll admit it gets tiring to repeat myself. at the least, there's enough material here now that you should be able to put the logic together, if you've been reading this for any extended period of time....

the simple statement is that leftists find themselves more concerned about things like resource management than liberals do, because we reject the premise of infinite growth. we try to avoid scaremongering around artificial scarcity, but we're far more serious about the realities around actual scarcity, and consequently far more conscious of how to utilize scarce resources in ways that ensure everybody has access, not just those that have the financial ability.

as liberals tend to promote markets, they react to the problems around scarcity by merely increasing prices. that reduces access, thereby saving the scarce resource by only making it accessible to an elite. the more scarce the resource, the more expensive it becomes. leftists tend to argue that this doesn't seem very liberal, really; we insist that everybody should have access, which means we need to manage it better than just setting a price on it.

well, almost everybody should have access, anyways.

some restrictions are going to be necessary. and, this is the ideological breaking point between liberalism and the left: do you want access to scarce resources to be determined by wealth, or would you prefer it to be determined by need? and, if so, are you willing to put reasonable restrictions on access to scarce resources, to ensure that they are available to most - or will you allow those resources to be accessed at will by those that have the finances to pay for it?

in between liberalism and the left exist the hippies. in the distant european past, the hippies were actually fundamentalist christians; a little further back, and they become heathen peasants. marx called them "utopian socialists" and contrasted them with what he called "scientific socialism". these people want universal access to scarce resources, and the only argument they present to justify this is in the realm of magical thinking. they deny that scarce resources are actually scarce. these people are unfortunate, but they are also rather numerous, and they're largely outside the realm of meaningful discourse.