They go into public domain. That’s how we used to do it, with publicly funded research.
I just noticed that polling is now enabled in the Elections forum. Mods, could I trouble you to move this thread there? Thanx.
I wonder who the Constitution Party supporters are-the Libertarians are fairly obvious though.
Only on globalization issues, on other economic issues (like say taxes or welfare programs) the Constitutionalists are far more hardcore than the GOP.
As for me I’d probably waffle between the Republicans and the Democrats based on tactical issues. Although perhaps the Whig Party will be stronger after this.
You mean, the Modern Whig Party? I find, and I think most Americans would find, little to object to in their policies, but I don’t think they’re going anywhere – even if we had a PR system. They appear to be a veterans-based party, and veterans are neither numerous enough nor homogeneous enough to form a consistent general-issues voting bloc.
Other than the fact they appear to be based around the fallacy of the mean.
I would probably vote for whichever party had the strongest pro-education policies. Since that’s not the defining issue for any of the parties you list, I’m not sure which tent it’d fall under, and it could easily vary from election to election and candidate to candidate.
I don’t think this is true. The founding fathers were essentially pre-capitalist in notion, relying on liberal enlightenment philosophy like that of Locke rather than Adam Smith or Ricardo. They did subscribe to the notion of private property, but that was common in feudal systems too.
I really recommend reading Wigan Pier, where Orwell discusses the charges laid against Socialism that it neglects man’s spiritual side by reducing him to an agent of scientific progress. I think such charges were common enough that they informed the disgust for scientists and materialists evinced in Atlas Shrugged (as if ideology were informed by the individuals one chooses to adulate).
I’d also recommend checking out this video by Amartya Sen. In it, he espouses support for what I consider to be syndicalism. Competition between non-essential industries (greater choice for consumer, natural collapse of unproductive industries, training and welfare for those unemployed so people are less likely to cling onto outdated technology), no overweening state actor (something repudiated by the left-Communists and anarchists, which Lenin attacked in this work)
As for homeopathy, the Green Party in the UK have been amenable to evidence on that issue at least (they’re not just the party of any and all disaffecteds). In fact, the homeopaths and other assorted charlatans have been cosying up with the Libertarians in the US as far as I’m aware, since Libertarians have always taken a stand against regulations.
Perhaps, but there are significant environmental impacts which ought to be studied freely, don’t you think? Some of the opposition may be mere NIMBYism, but I think there would be room for scientific evidence if fracking operations were to be considered democratically.
This is one of the reasons I support direct democracy – local autonomy. Who is to say someone from within 10 miles of me (or in Texas, hundreds of miles) represents my interests on national policy more than a guy who shares the same last name as me, for instance?
How do you interpret Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?
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It’s worth reading this part of Capital too (take it with a pillar of salt, if you will).
Would this include public education? What do you think of Rick Perry or Ron Paul’s stances on education?
I’m not sure what you mean.
Isn’t it? Feudalism in any culture adulates the warrior-aristocrat; European Christian feudalism adds the saint alongside him; mercantilism adulates the merchant; Jeffersonian democracy adulates the yeoman farmer; Marxism adulates (the Marxist intellectual’s conception of) the proletarian factory-worker; etc.
As one of Heinlein’s author-avatars remarked in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, “Surely where a man lives is the least important thing about him.”
Nevertheless, if that’s important to you, there is more than one form of proportional representation, and the principle of geographic/community representation can be preserved in some of them. Some forms have a “multi-member district” – e.g., take our present districting system but merge five districts into one, then the larger district elects a five-member delegation by P.R. – every one of them has a geographic connection to you, and at least one of them probably represents your politics as well. Other forms have a “mixed-member” system combining district-representatives and party-representatives in the same house. In the U.S., since we have a two-house legislature to start with (which IMO is a bad idea in and of itself, but that’s another discussion), we could, e.g., keep the House as it is, representing single-member districts, and elect the Senate by straight national party-list PR; or vice-versa.
In this article from 1992, Michael Lind argues that we could adopt a multi-member-district PR system for electing the House of Representatives without even amending the Constitution.
Now, there is a problem with that, since some states are so sparsely populated that they elect only one member to the House – the whole state being one district-at-large – and the Constitution guarantees each state at least one representative (Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3), and I don’t think there’s any constitutional provision allowing two or more states to have a shared delegation.
I think if they strategized by focusing solely on electing one candidate to Congress (in the current system), they could serve to attract moderate Libertarian types who are not total laissez-faire advocates.
Although I’ve never belonged to any political party myself, I’d still do what I’ve always done: Vote Democratic if there’s a candidate of that stripe, vote Green if there’s one of those but no Dem candidate offered, and wipe my ass with the ballot if there’s a Libertarian candidate.
Perhaps, but, in the current system, actually electing a third-partisan or an independent to Congress is almost impossible. The only one now there that I know of is Bernie Sanders.
Not necessarily :p.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognises marriage as a fundamental right. I’m not sure if this predicates state recognition of marriage, but I have no problem with absolutely no recognition of marriage on behalf of the state or states. It’s the discriminatory application of recognition I have a problem with.
Edit: Those voting Libertarian, do you think the party can survive in big tent phase with paleolibertarians like Hans Herman-Hoppe or Pat Buchanan represented alongside the bleeding heart utilitarian libertarians like Roderick Long, or will there be further factional splits?
I’m thinking that the Hans-Herman Hoppe types aren’t that big on the whole democracy thing in general. I’d guess the basic split would be between the Ron Paul folks and the crowd over at mises.org on the one hand, and everyone associated with the various tentacles of the Kochtopus on the other. Or between the cranks and the shills for plutocracy might be a better way to put it.
As for me, I suppose I’d go with the WFP. Contrary to what Astorian thinks, there are decidedly a few of us working class people who are down with a leftist social agenda. My goal, I suppose, would be to return to the days before labor purged all its radicals in the Cold War, and they got left with pro-war anti-communists like Georg Meany. The WFP seems like the best vehicle for a stronger and more progressive labor movement, and a left that recognizes labor as a central issue. The division between labor issues and social issues has probably been where the left has been shooting itself in the foot most consistently over the past seventy or so years.
Fair enough.
I had not heard of Hans-Herman Hoppe before. Is he some kind of Social Darwinist, who sees total surrender of legal authority to “private” interests as “the natural order”?
Meh. Looking at the relevant wiki pages, I suspect I just deny all his majors.
As far as I can tell, he’s the sort of anarcho-capitalist that agrees with Loius Brandeis’s statement that “We can either have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” But then he decides that it’s democracy that’s got to go. The whole thing ends up as a sort of privatized neo-feudalism. Let’s say that I’m not exactly a fan, but I do have to give him some credit for being honest about the sort of dystopia that’s simply the logical conclusion of taking libertarianism all the way.
His theory that Keynesian economics is an error caused by the fact that Keynes was a homosexual, and homosexuals have a shorter time preference than heterosexuals is simply bullshit, imho.