In Defence of Labels

Did you ever think about why we have labels?

It's similar to tagging, or the dewey decimal system, or alphabetizing. We have labels so that we can easily find and deal with large amounts of data, objects, and, yes, political theories.
That's why I'll just drop a label:

Socialist, Liberal, Progressive, Nazi, Communist, etc...

These labels describe different flavors of failure. Of course these are failures that have actually been tried. I guess you can call libertarianism a failure because we can't convince enough people to actually try it, but that's not quite my point.

My point is, the labels let you know what's been tried, or, if someone is trying to describe a policy to you, it lets you know if its likely to work.

Labels help you properly order your thinking. For instance I've generally not had a problem with the idea of net neutrality, but I've heard proponents of net neutrality say very liberal things, so I started thinking about it. I applied my knowledge of freedom and property rights, and realize I've been listening to a bunch of cranks. Not only are they liberal, they tend to be in the content business, so they have self-interest in keeping their costs low. But, in order to have an internet we need infrastructure. In order to keep and grow the infrastructure, we need to respect the property rights of those that own the infrastructure.

There is a simple way to give the content providers what they want. Go into the infrastructure business and sell nothing but infrastructure. No email, no home pages, nothing but infrastructure, with a commitment not to distinguish between packets. Something tells me this would be very popular, and it could be done with out using the government to infringe on other people's property.

And I figured that out mainly because some stupid liberal took a moment during a conversation about net neutrality to say that republicans should go to hell. By listening to him, I knew there had to be something inherently wrong, probably with every position he holds. I don't agree with the republicans on everything, but I know they don't need to go to hell. In fact I don't mind having them around, assuming we could get rid of the democrats and have a viable christian-libertarian party. Then we would actually have meaningful debates about policy in this country.

All thanks to labels. Maybe if that nut didn't literally hate republicans I might have continued along, assuming the joker knew what he was talking about. He was into technology after all, and we have a bias in favor of "experts" especially when we aren't on our guard.