Neo-Luddites

On 9/9/06, Xenophile wrote:
(...)
> I get the impression that in Australia and Brazil, the "liberals" are
> much what we in the States would call "libertarians."

Yup, that's a pretty accurate approximation. Although our liberals
tend to consider Libertarianism as an unreachable utopia - but we
should nevertheless struggle to get asymptotically close to it. ;-)

> So what are
> left-of-center-but-not--to-the-point-of-being-socialists called?
(...)

Social Democrats, which I call "Diet Communists". ;-)

In practice, though, it does not matter if a so-called socialist from
the worker's party or a social democrat is in power - they all
practice what I call "Compadres' Capitalism", where government gives
artificial incentives and advantages to a close group of capitalists,
which in return finance the elections of their compadres at
government, and so on.