You obsession with gold won’t “maintain the value of the currency”, and libertarians want to hand all freedom, money and power to the wealthy. I have no interest in living in your dystopic hell.
That’s silly, as has been pointed out to you before. First, there’s not enough gold, second because if the government isn’t trustworthy what make you think it’ll give you that gold on demand, and third because what use to you do you expect that gold to be? Most people would respond to your attempt to pay for something with gold with a demand that you come back with real money.
Pure nonsense with no evidence behind it. A faith statement.
Wrong; they are the only kind that works. Which is why you oppose it; like all libertarians you talk about freedom and equality, but you want to create a neofeudalistic state of lords and serfs.
They were slaveowning genocidal scum. Freedom and prosperity only for rich white christian men may be libertarian but it isn’t progressive.
Hardly; we’d be a plutocratic hellhole, with millions starving and millions more enslaved. Or we’d just collapse into Somalia on a larger scale. As a libertarian I’m sure you’d prefer either result over what we have now.
I have one question – has there ever been a time in history in any modern post-industrial state in which the economy and public policy operated reasonably close to Austrian principles? If not in what time and place did the economic system and public policy get closest tonoperating under Austrian principles?
Because people should pay what they owe. And everyone owes society in general; even the existence of money itself depends on the larger society. And because such an individualist position is logically inconsistent; if he shouldn’t pay because he doesn’t owe other people any consideration, then those same other people don’t owe him any consideration and might as well take whatever they please from him. Of course, such “rugged individualists”* hypocritically only want such a lack of concern for others to be respected when it’s how they treat others; not when it comes to how other people treat them in return.
Quotes, because in reality they are neither rugged nor individualists, just parasites who want the government to protect them from their victims even while they refuse to pay for it
From the same place as the wingnuts on the other side who think they ‘deserve’ ever dollar they can take (from someone else, and in the name of the people, of course). Luckily, cooler heads have prevailed so far, and so we get to meet somewhere in the middle of those two ridiculous extremes. Happy days, ehe?
I have several questions about the OP. I hope he can explain himself in depth.
While not all Tea Partiers are racists, why does it seem that racists attracted to the Tea Party?
What are your views on Michelle Obama taking a vacation in Spain?
Name three issues that Ron Paul has been wrong about.
What is your favorite American movie?
If the OP were a member of Congress, and a bill came up to extend the Bush tax cuts without offset, so that the deficit would continue to increase by trillions of dollars, and the OP was the deciding vote, would you vote for or against the bill?
Does the OP believe that the Federal Reserve is guilty of “criminal” acts?
Another point: You want to be able to trade in your paper money for gold, since you don’t trust the government? Fine, you can do that. Private industry has already seen to that problem: In any city in the country, you can find a place that’ll give you gold in exchange for your paper money.
What’s that? You want the government to take over that function from private industry? What do we call it again when the government takes over functions from private industry? And you want to always be able to get the same amount of gold for your paper money? Why, don’t you have any faith in the free market? That’s what determines the price of gold now.
Actually I’m saying that starting from axioms and wandering to conclusions without empirical evidence in a social science is much like mental masturbation - pointless.
By the way did you Austrians (cheeky labeling yourself in such a grand manner) notice that the territory to the north has reduced it’s debt and run a surplus for about a decade before the economic collapse? The fact is US politics and global commitments (and temptations) makes it very hard for any government to restrict spending. Presidential authority means nothing in relation to domestic spending. Coherent party platforms and programs barley crawl out of their cradles before being consumed by the political reality that the legislative branch is run by hundreds of independent actors, not 2 or 3 parties.
Here;s where I think a lot of people have it wrong and panic. With cries of socialism and wealth redistribution they assume that taking care of everyone is the ultimate goal. The goal is for society to function better as a whole and sometimes that means those that have helping out those who have not. It means creating more jobs that pay some kind of living wage and education and health care available for more people.
There are no easy answers or idealisitic principles that solve the problems. We have to adjust and react to a changing society.
I have to agree with others that it seems suspect that we didn’t get this outrage over a years long god awful war as the deficit rose. Now a little over a year into a crisis he didn’t cause we get tons of outrage.
I do understand that for a lot of people it’s for he government in general and I agree. Too many elected offcials are bought and paid for in both parties. However, I also see a lot of blame heaped on the democrats by people who mistakenly think restoring corrupt republicans to power will fix things. It won’t. The GOP has demonstrated that many of them don’t give a dam about actually solving problems.
I would really like to debate some of the points in those posts, but they’re presented in a format that discourages serious discussion. I guess I’ll start at the beginning.
In the 1/3 post, you said you attended a Tea Party rally that was 15% black. If we are to accept this as true, you’ll have to give us something more than your word to prove it. I have seen tea party rallies, as my state (Nevada) is particularly active in tea party politics, and I saw nothing but a sea of white people. I have never seen a youtube video or news media photograph or video depicting a tea party rally as having more than a seriously tiny minority of nonwhites, and I am unaware of even a single black person with a significant leadership role in any tea party organization. This doesn’t make the tea party a necessarily racist movement, of course, but it is certainly not significantly representative of nonwhites.
In the same post, you make observations that seem to imply the tea party movement is outside of demcorat/republican politics, and has equal disdain for both sides. This is not unusual for political movements. So many of them claim to be bipartisan or nonpartisan, but as is typical for such movements, the tea party can not make that claim legitimately. The only data available for the political beliefs of tea party members is a group of studies done by the Winston Group, which doesn’t even deny its Republican bias. Even those studies show tea party members are three times more likely to self identify as Republicans than Democrats (about 57% vs about 17%). Tea party members are 8 times more likely to self identify as Conservative than Liberal (about 66% vs about 8%). 71% of Tea Party members have a “favorable view” of Republicans in general. 75% of Tea Party members have an “unfavorable view” of Democrats in general. Tea party members are astronomically more likely to get the majority of their news from Fox and talk radio than the average person. And all of that was found in a study performed by an organization with a conservative bias, who were doing the study for the purpose of proving Tea Party members were just average citizens! They are absolutely not representative of average Americans. They are representative of Conservative Americans.
So now the question is, why would a Conservative, primarily Republican group even WANT to portray itself as nonpartisan? Why do people arguing for the Tea Party deny the purpose of their movement? Is the Republican or Conservative label so poisoned that Conservative Republican groups don’t want to wear it?
I think it’s more a matter of trying to look unbiased. By claiming to be nonpartisan and independent, the Tea Party makes its complaints about the Democrats appear to be made of some higher principle than party politics.
But as I noted above, it’s no coincidence that the Tea Party sat quietly at home through the eight years of the Bush administration and then started calling for public demonstrations sixteen days into the Obama administration. There’s a lot of astroturf showing through their grass roots.
