So young liberals are incapable of complying with the law? That doesn’t exactly help the argument for rationality.
Of course they’re capable. Yes, they overstepped boundaries. But if you comply with every law, there’s no way to stage a protest of any kind. Even if you did, it would shortly be made illegal anyway. You can get stomped for standing still, saying nothing and carrying a sign in some contexts.
Then there’s the irrationality of protesting against something the party you nominally side with expended a lot of capital fixing. I kept on asking supporters of OWS, “Haven’t the Democrats already solved this problem with Dodd-Frank?” Apparently not.
Trashed the area? Cite?
Also, the civil rights protesters purposefully broke laws, too.
They did sit ins or marched when they weren’t supposed to because racist mayors and governors wouldn’t give them permits. They didn’t break random laws against vandalism, theft, and assaulting police.
and in Wisconsin, guess who came to help pick up all the trash left behind:
The Tea party.
What will probably happen is what’s already happening… they will take their existing hatreds and strawmen and cultural-warrior bullshit and repackage it as deep, passionate concern for economic issues that all happen to strongly favor rich people, and if not rich people, then white straight people.
It remains to be seen whether the Republican party can pull off this metamorphosis, or whether its supporters will have to flock to another party to make this happen. The Tea Party is one version of this, where the nutty cultural fringe barely conceals itself behind the fig leaf of fiscal responsibility. The Libertarian Party is being hijacked as a lifeboat for people jumping the Republican ship, who understand that they must reluctantly toss the cultural baggage overboard if they want any hope of preserving the existing unfair economic system.
Well, that economic liberalism stuff is as surely on its way to the scrap heap as social conservatism. We are always moving towards more and more freedom. Those that want to control people, either in the name of puritanism or fairness are going to be awfully disappointed over the coming decades.
Then it is inescapable that the property-centric parts of libertarianism are also headed for the scrap heap. Feudalism didn’t survive the Renassaince for the same reasons you have outlined; people crave freedom, and will not stand for a system that only guarantees the freedoms of property owners, while relegating the rest of the population to the status of serfs, bound through poverty to landowners.
Except that our system has made most people property owners.
So it’s OK to subjugate the rest?
No one is subjugated. It’s a free country. Targeting rich people for restrictions on their liberty won’t make us any freer.
Is justice served when taxes are collected from property owners at the point of a gun?
No, it doesn’t, actually; because that is not to the purpose.
So what? OWS is not a branch of the Democratic Party, not even in the very limited sense that the Tea Party is a branch of the GOP.
Don’t see how “hijacked” really applies there. The LP needs a much broader base to have any hope of success.
[shrug] How else were they ever collected? The gun/sword is almost never used but is always in reserve and implied. That does not make taxation theft, no more than it makes any other form of law-enforcement slavery.
Come on, now, be honest, is that really what you see when you look around you at the country and, more importantly, the world?
She’s right. The rich are going to fuck everybody else over big time. Hooray!
At the risk of hijacking this thread into another libertarianism debate, too many people seem to have fallen into the trap of using the following logic to assume what libertarianism means:
[ul]
[li]most libertarians favor individual property rights, as opposed to classic anarchism, and maximum freedom from government interference.[/li][li]the rich and powerful possess the majority of property today.[/li][li]therefore, libertarianism is simply a shill for the disproportionally rich to maintain their privilege free from the requirements of social welfare for a humane society.[/li][/ul]The fact is that this is largely a strawman. This sort of Dickensian system, or even worse some formal sort of “corporate feudalism” simply wouldn’t work. When it happened in the 19th century the result was a near-revolt by the working classes; you really would have the workers manning barricades and seizing property if anyone was foolish enough to try it; and the rich themselves are well aware of this. The system we have now is the result of modifying the previous laissez-faire system to something humanly sustainable. What conservatives and libertarians hold is that the pendulum has swung too far the other way, towards an almost Chinese view of civilization as the total adminstration of society by the government.
The main difference is that conservatives mainly want to turn back the clock to maybe what existed before the 1960s, while libertarians propose something different: that the answer is the maximum personal empowerment of individuals. To be neither “the masses” in a collective, nor subjects of an all-encompassing quasi-socialist nanny state, nor exploited workers kept in line by cops and goon squads.
I would argue we are as close to that as the working class will allow. Unions are destroyed, corporations are people, and moneyed interests have consolidated power at a level not seen in over 100 years. To the contrary, government is the weakest it has been in decades.