Liberal US dopers.

[elucidator]

@Cisco

…Maybe there’s just no one word you could apply to my complicated set of beliefs.

Wanna bet?

(I keed, I keed…)

[Little_Nemo]

Sounds like you’re more like a libertarian, or a old-school ‘liberal’ in the pre-WWII sense of the word.

So a libertarian is somebody who wants to take our economy back to the prosperity we were enjoying in the thirties?

[Quartz]

@Nobody

I won’t comment on the contingency, but I will on paying the other party’s cost.

I’m not sure how the legal system works in the UK, but the loser paying would be a disaster here. Let’s say you want to sue a company, I’ll use Walmart as an example. You go out to Lawyer’s are Us and pick out a lawyer. You go to court and face Walmart’s very expensive legal team. Who do you think will win?

You’re mistaking me: I’m not suggesting that the person hiring the lawyer be liable but the firm of lawyers being hired. They should face the risk of taking on the case. Currently, there’s no risk to the plaintiff’s side. Now, cases on a contingency fee are good for the man in the street, but currently they’re bad for the small and medium-sized businesses because there’s no comeback against nuisance suits and they are put to legal expenses they can ill afford.

[SteveG1]

@Ruminator

[ul]
[li]free college tuition[/li][li]free day care for children[/li][li]free nursing care for the elderly[/li][li]30-hour work week instead of 40-hour work week[/li][li]guaranteed job security for life[/li][/ul]
[I think everyone including hard core Ayn Randians would like to have all of the above. Who wouldn’t want free stuff?]

Other items:

[ul]
[li]salary caps[/li][li]corporate profit cap[/li][li]inherited wealth redistributed[/li][li]less military spending[/li][li]more environment spending[/li][/ul]
I’m not sure what value there is in itemizing the liberal agenda. I think everyone already knows what the list is. Sorta like itemizing the seven days of the week – everybody already knows it’s Sunday, Monday, Tue, etc. Am I missing the point of this exercise?

guaranteed job security for life - No. I’m sure many (or all) of us have seen those people who are so disruptive, so abusive, or just so useless, that they NEED to get fired. It’s not right to expect other people to do their work for them and put up with their crap. Some people need and deserve to get canned. I’m a local union VP, and I still have to say there have been a few people who just. needed. to. go.

corporate profit cap - No. So long as the profit was made honestly and ethically, there is no reason to set a cap. It opens the door to endless auditing and inspecting of the books, looking for “gotcha’s” that may not be there. It drives up the cost because companies have to devote time and effort to answering these audits.

salary caps - Again, no. It might sound like a nice rallying cry agaiinst the “robber barons” and evil genius types, but in the end it would hurt all the wrong people. I don’t want some low level bueraucrat deciding how much I’m entitled to (and I myself could be considered a low level bureaucrat of sorts).
Some people consider me to be fairly liberal. But there are limits.

As for me, I think we should add a revocation of the Patriot Act. Wiretapping without warrants is wrong. Looking to see who is reading what books is wrong. Holding people without charges and without trial is wrong. Rendition is wrong. Secret orders from secret courts is wrong. The whole thing is wrong.

[MichaelQReilly]

@Quartz

You’re mistaking me: I’m not suggesting that the person hiring the lawyer be liable but the firm of lawyers being hired. They should face the risk of taking on the case. Currently, there’s no risk to the plaintiff’s side. Now, cases on a contingency fee are good for the man in the street, but currently they’re bad for the small and medium-sized businesses because there’s no comeback against nuisance suits and they are put to legal expenses they can ill afford.

Yeah, but that nuisance suit thing is somewhat of a myth. It cost a whole lot of money to litigate. No competent plaintiff’s lawyer is gonna front a big sum of his or her money on a case that has no chance of success.

[Whack-a-Mole]

@MichaelQReilly

Yeah, but that nuisance suit thing is somewhat of a myth. It cost a whole lot of money to litigate. No competent plaintiff’s lawyer is gonna front a big sum of his or her money on a case that has no chance of success.

Nuisance suits I think would generally come from already established businesses who want to limit competition. They are likely to have the resources to throw at a nuisance suit and limiting the competition can easily pay off for them versus their litigation costs.

Additionally, there are lawsuits from the likes of Personal Injury attorneys. They may demand, say, $20,000 on behalf of their client. Even if the company defending it thinks they are likely to win if they challenge it they calculate it will cost them $50,000 to challenge the lawsuit (not to mention business disruption). Makes fiscal sense to just pay the $20,000 to make it go away.

[MichaelQReilly]

@Whack-a-Mole

Nuisance suits I think would generally come from already established businesses who want to limit competition. They are likely to have the resources to throw at a nuisance suit and limiting the competition can easily pay off for them versus their litigation costs.

Additionally, there are lawsuits from the likes of Personal Injury attorneys. They may demand, say, $20,000 on behalf of their client. Even if the company defending it thinks they are likely to win if they challenge it they calculate it will cost them $50,000 to challenge the lawsuit (not to mention business disruption). Makes fiscal sense to just pay the $20,000 to make it go away.

Right, I didn’t say they don’t completely exist, just that I don’t think the contingency fee is the cause because no plaintiff’s attorney is going to front money on a contingency-fee basis if there isn’t at least a colorable claim.

[BrainGlutton]

I’d like to see a reversal of the Supreme Court’s 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision, followed by legislation banning any and all private campaign contributions and any and all paid political advertising. There are democracies where broadcasters required by law to give free equal time to every candidate in the race, and that’s all they can have; and those countries remain democracies with free speech. Money != speech.

From The Next American Nation, by Michael Lind (The Free Press, 1995), pp. 256-259 (from before the McCain-Feingold Bill, but I don’t think the picture has changed all that much since it passed):

Campaign financing is by far the most important mechanism for overclass influence in government. The real two-party system in the United States consists of the party of voters and the tiny but influential party of donors. The donor party in the United States is made up of an extraordinarily small number of citizens. In 1988, according to one study, only 10.2 percent of the American public made a contribution to a candidate, party, or partisan group. . . . The group of large political donors is a still more exclusive club. According to a study by Citizen Action, in the 1989-90 election cycle only 179,677 individual donors gave contributions greater than $200 to a federal candidate, political action committee (PAC), or party: “Thirty-four percent of the money spent by federal candidates was directly contributed by no more than one-tenth of one percent of the voting age population.” One may reasonably doubt that this one tenth of one percent is representative of the electorate or the population at large.

<snip>

Special interests buy favors from congressmen and presidents through political action committees (PACs), devices by which groups like corporations, professional associations, trade unions, investment banking groups – can pool their money and give $10,000 per election to each House and Senate candidate. Today there are more than 4,000 Political Action Committees (PACs) of various kinds registered with the Federal Election Commission; in 1974, when they were sanctioned by law, there were only 500. PAC money is driving campaign costs to new heights. In 1992, the average Senate incumbent spent more than $3.6 million for re-election; that is the equivalent of raising $12,000 a week in a single six-year term. Members of Congress, by comparison, spend only an average of $557,403 to be re-elected – a “mere” $5,000 a week for a two-year term. The average cost of a House campaign has risen to this level from $140,000 in 1980 – and $52,000 in 1974.

The chief beneficiaries of rising campaign costs and PAC contributions have been incumbents. In 1972, 52 cents of the average PAC dollar went to incumbents, compared to 25 cents to challengers (the rest went to candidates for open seats); in the 1988 House elections, incumbents received 84.4 cents of each PAC dollar and challengers only 8.6 cents. It makes more sense for lobbies to buy access to established members of Congress and senators – particularly those with important leadership positions – than to fund challengers, who, if elected, would have no seniority and little influence. . . . Former Senator Barry Goldwater has lamented, “The Founding Fathers would frown in their graves if they saw us rationing candidacies sheerly on the basis of money: who has – or can raise – the millions necessary to run for office.”

Democrats, when they were members of the majority party, received more PAC money than Republicans, though both parties are saturated with it. Contrary to conservative claims that liberal lobby groups dominate Congress, PAC funds come overwhelmingly from business: in 1990, 65 percent of PAC contributions came from business PACs, compared to 24 percent from labor and only 11 percent from ideological groups (including conservative as well as liberal pressure groups). “At one point,” John Judis has pointed out, “the American Petroleum Institute employed more lobbyists in Washington than the entire labor movement.”

One of the effects of the postpartisan PAC system is to weaken the link between members of Congress and senators and the districts and states they are supposed to represent. Out-of-state money from special interests often flowes into House and Senate elections. This means that many senators are, in effect, at-large representatives of free-spending national business constituencies.

Some argue that special-interest expenditures have no significant influence on public policy. If all of this money is not buying special favors from congressmen and senators, a great many groups and individuals who are otherwise careful with their resources are acting in a highly irrational manner, year after year.

They don’t come much more libertarian than Goldwater, and even he was appalled at this state of affairs.

From the same book, pp. 311-313:

Today’s U.S. government is democratic in form but plutocratic in substance. . . . In a misguided 1976 decision, Buckley v. Valeo, the Supreme Court held that Congress could not limit spending by rich Americans promoting their own candidacies. This decision was to the equalization of voting power what Dred Scott was to abolitionism. In The Yale Law Review, Jamin Raskin and John Boniface have argued that political candidates in the United States must win a “wealth primary.” Candidates without enormous amounts of money, either from their own fortunes or from rich individuals and special interest groups, cannot hope to win the party primaries – much less general elections. Indeed, the Buckley decision is one reason why more than half the members of the Senate today are millionaires. . . .

It is time to build a wall of separation between check and state. Curing the disease of plutocratic politics requires a correct diagnosis of its cause: the costs of political advertising. The basic problem is that special interests buy access and favors by donating the money needed for expensive political advertising in the media. Elaborate schemes governing the flow of money do nothing to address the central problem: paid political advertising. Instead of devising unworkable limits on campaign financing that leave the basic system intact, we should cut the Gordian knot of campaign corruption by simply outlawing paid political advertising on behalf of any candidate for public office. The replacement of political advertising by free informational public service notices in the electronic and print media would level the playing field of politics and kill off an entire parasitic industry of media consultants and spin doctors.

An outright ban on paid political advertising and the imposition of free time requirements on the media are radical measures, but nothing less is necessary if we are to prevent our government from continuing to be sold to the highest bidders. The argument against strict public regulation of money in politics is based on a false analogy between free spending and free speech protected under the First Amendment. The analogy is false, because limits on campaign finance do not address the content of speech – only its volume, as it were. It is not an infringement on free speech to say that, in a large public auditorium, Douglas will not be allowed to use a microphone unless Lincoln can as well.*

*A much more compelling analogy would be between the electoral process and the judicial system, with the electorate playing the role of the jury. In our system of trial by jury, there are elaborate rules governing the presentation of evidence to the jury by plaintiff and defendant (the “candidates”). If our judicial system were organized the way our judicial system is, then rich candidates would be allowed to buy time before the jury. Texas Senator Phil Gramm, in one Senate election, outspent his opponent by 300 to 1; the equivalent, in the judicial system, would be allowing a rich defendant to buy, say, six months to present his side of the case, while the poor plaintiff might be able to purchase only twenty minutes for his side.

[Least_Original_User_Name_Ever]

I agree and disagree with various parts of everyone’s lists, but I’d like to change public school and have students go to school for two months, then off for a week, and keep that up the whole year. The finals period could be 5 weeks on and then 2 off.

[MichaelQReilly]

@BrainGlutton

I’d like to see a reversal of the Supreme Court’s 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision, followed by legislation banning any and all private campaign contributions and any and all paid political advertising. There are democracies where broadcasters required by law to give free equal time to every candidate in the race, and that’s all they can have; and those countries remain democracies with free speech. Money != speech.

From The Next American Nation, by Michael Lind (The Free Press, 1995), pp. 256-259 (from before the McCain-Feingold Bill, but I don’t think the picture has changed all that much since it passed):

They don’t come much more libertarian than Goldwater, and even he was appalled at this state of affairs.

From the same book, pp. 311-313:

Agree completely. And more to the point, we do place limits on speech when there is a compelling public interest in doing so (yelling fire in a theater, obsenity, etc.) I can’t think of a more compelling interest than ensuring the fairness and integrity of our electoral system.

[Desert_Nomad]

@xtisme

I’d go for everything on the list except UHC and legislation of stronger unions…does that mean I can be a liberal too?

-XT

UHC is my absolute #1 priority. After being denied health insurance by every company licensed in my state (pre-existing condition), I sold most everything and moved overseas 7 years ago. I now have insurance through a UK company for $200/mo. that is valid everywhere in the world except the USA.

I’d like to be able to live in my own country and not be an American Refugee. I am sure my state would rather I employ Americans too.

Other than than I am mixed:

Against: gay marriage, social/welfare rights for illegal immigrants (other than fair trial etc), ambulance chaser lawyers and a wonky legal system

For: Smaller military, abortion, death penalty in a few cases, easier legal immigration