I am a Conservative Anarchist or perhaps an Altruistic Libertarian.
I agree with most tea-baggers that we need a small and efficient govt that can organize and administer the national infrastructure and resources as envisioned by the folks who have to live in it.
I also agree with most progressives that these public services should be paid for by taxing the citizenry progressively according to net worth. The more you own, the more you owe.
Above all, this govt must be transparent. All foreign and domestic policy debates on CNN along with SCOTUS deliberations. No “Mr. Transparency” Obama doing backroom deals with Big Pharma or Wall Street foxes regulating the hen house by encouraging fraud.
WAG, 90% of the cost of govt is corruption and 90% of that is enabled and encouraged by the corporate control of our three branches of govt at the expense of the people and the environment.
Tea-baggers think it’s the progressives, as exemplified by Obama, who have fucked things up with big spending.
Progressives blame Bush’s wars and the tea-baggers’ socially and fiscally regressive agenda for our plight.
Obama and Bush are merely the latest in a long line of corporate hucksters. Cheered by their corporate media led supporters, vilified by their corporate media led detractors, they do their public dance to the corporate tune. They blame partisanship, misinformation, mistakes and, as a last resort, outright incompetence for the obviously criminal outcomes of corporate malfeasance, our wars, our corporate Wall Street crime families and the nearing collapse of our infrastructures, financial and material.
The trouble with Tea-baggers and Progressives is that they don’t realize that they’re all in the same boat.
The old “Both Major Parties Are Equally Corrupt, So Vote Libertarian” Fallacy, again? While it absolves you of going through the time and effort to examine candidates most likely to come out on top and pick the one that will come closest to accomplishing goals you agree with, voting for a fringe candidate will get you absolutely nowhere, unless “Well, you can’t blame me!” is something you actually take pride in.
In real life, compromise will get you a lot farther than an All Or Nothing approach.
What a nice story about you. But what confuses me is why you think this particular story should be more interesting than the 300 million other possible stories. Indeed, so much more interesting that other people should make voting decisions on the basis of nothing more than a list of your own political conclusions.
I’ve voted twice in Presidential elections. The first was in '72 against Nixon. When he won 49 states I decided that either they didn’t count the votes or the electorate was simply nuts. I gave up on politics until '08 and voted for Obama. Anyone who promised change and transparency after 8 years of Bush had my vote. The idea that he was a Constitutional lawyer was also attractive. Fool me twice, shame on me.
I compromise by allowing the govt to direct deposit my SS check. That is the extent of my trust in it.
I disagree with this. Your vote is not going to be the difference regardless of which party you vote for. If more people voted along their lines of their actual beliefs, you might see the major parties moving in the directions of the people’s will to pick up those votes. Both parties right now are more beholden to corporate interests than to the people because most people feel they must vote for one of the two corrupt major parties.
There might be times where it is prudent to vote for the lesser of two evils (ie Florida in 2000. I reluctantly voted for Al Gore.) but most of the time you know in advance it won’t be that close, so why not vote your conscious?
If the OP has a hard time telling the difference between Obama and Bush, I think that’s a result of his own shortfalls in identifying the differences between two politicians with very different (but not mutually exclusive) views of the world.
I’ve met similar people who say things like, “Car, schmar: anything with four wheels and a radio is equally fine, whether it’s a 1979 Ford F-150 or a 2009 BMW 745i. All I want is transportation.” That’s a hard view to argue against.
Except in this case it is the opposite of the example in which every car is acceptable: every politician in the mainstream is unacceptable because they are not outside the mainstream, regardless of the variations that exist within the mainstream.
Bush and Obama have different views on taxing the rich, but it doesn’t matter, they’re in the mainstream of American politics so it is bad. B&O have different views on health care, but it doesn’t matter, they’re the same. B&O have different views on abortion, but it doesn’t matter, they’re the same.
The refusal to accept that there are differences between Bush and Obama means that the OP has zero perspective on why Teabaggers and MoveOn types will not agree on very much. If the notion that Teabaggers and MoveOn are the same is fundamentally held in opposition to overwhelming facts, I’m afraid there are no facts to offer that could falsify the proposition in the OP’s mind.
That’s sort of like being a free market, private ownership Communist. There is nothing ‘boilerplate’ about it, since there is a fundamental and basic contradiction. You aren’t a Libertarian (or even a libertarian)…you are a guy who seems to like (in theory) some of what you think are parts of Libertarianism and have squished them together with some of what you think represents Progressive-ism into a mish mash all your own. That’s fine…my own political philosophy is just such a mish mash, taking what I consider the best (or at least most compatible to my own worldview) aspects of conservatism, liberalism, free market capitalism, libertarianism and a few other -isms tossed in for good measure. But it’s hardly ‘boilerplate’ anything.
WAG, 90% of Americans would disagree with at least parts of this statement.
What do you mean by “corruption” anyway? Are you saying that a strict anti-lobbying law would cut government spending by 90%, yet still allow the government to provide all the services and benefits? I.e. same amount of payouts for Medicare and Social Security, same level of national security, same level of infrastructure construction and maintenance, same amount of money provided for science research, etc.?
Or are you saying that, for example, the entire Medicare system is “corruption” because the health care industry had some influence in how it was created?
Who really needs lobbyists when Congress is in your pocket anyway? I’m saying that the high cost of govt is due to corporate profiteering, both “legal” and under the table.
Certainly not. I’d like to see it grow to include everyone from conception. The corruption comes in when profit trumps human need at taxpayer expense.
Medicare and Social Security together account for about 40% of the federal budget. If you don’t consider these to be “corruption,” how can 90% of the cost of government be “corruption”?? (By the way, last I checked, the administrative overhead for the Social Security Administration was less than 1%. Not much room for corruption in there.)
I’ll take your word for the figures. Corruption? What about the 30% administrative “overhead” of our private HMOs. How come Big Pharma gets to dictate drug prices and policy in 15 yo Pub health plan vetoed by the Dems then and now barely resurrected by the Dems over the objections of the Pubs?