Water and gasoline are both liquids, right? So they are indistinguishable if you are only looking at them to answer the question"is this a liquid?," but they are quite distinguishable if you look at them with other questions in mind.
Same thing with small government. Two people can both believe that a government should nly (say) fight wars and enforce criminal laws, but one may want that government to outlaw all economic activity and be ruthlessly expansionary whle the other wants only minimal criminal laws and favors isolationism.
I think you are suffering from the same misperception a lot of people here are. You want the government to do certain things that you think will help people, I don’t want the government to do those things, you think that means that I actually want to hurt people. But that’s not true–I just have a different opinion than you about the effects of the government programs we are discussing.
That OP is nothing like the all-caps text. Are you sure you linked to the right thread?
I’m trying to do good as well. This is the part where you are divorced from reality–you think I actively have the intention to hurt people. That is ridiculous and is born of a warped view of everything I’ve ever said.
Yep. I keep fighting ignorance, but it keeps fighting back. You, for one, don’t understand very simply concepts, like how two things can be very similar when viewed one way and very different when viewed another.
We wouldn’t be having this whole interminable debate if you could just accept that “fiscal conservative” is not the same thing as “small government conservative”. Somebody who wants low taxes and no deficit spending, but who also wants blasphemy laws and sodomy laws and sedition laws and sumptuary laws and wage and price control laws and population control laws and drug prohibition laws and laws against trans fats might by some definition be a “fiscal conservative” but he’s not advocating for “small government”.
“Water and gasoline are both liquids”–“OK, right”–“also known as ‘beverages’”–:smack:
All you are doing here is beating the shit out of a strawman. You have decided what Republicans must mean when they say they want small government and are then beating on them when they say something inconsistent with what you have decided they must mean. As I’ve pointed out, the two things are absolutely not inconsistent when “small government” means “restrict government only to certain spheres.”
Then it’s inaccurate and misleading to describe both of them identically as advocates of “small government” with no qualifiers.
Conservatives who favor low levels of spending and taxation but lots of government regulation of people’s private lives don’t qualify as “small government” conservatives in any meaningful way.
They can reasonably be called “small-government conservatives on fiscal issues and big-government conservatives on social issues”, but that’s not the same thing.
Likewise, it’s not inconsistent to say that a horse is a meat-eating animal when you use the word “horse” in the sense of “large four-legged carnivore”. But that is not a recognized or generally meaningful sense of the word “horse”.
Furthermore, blurring the distinction between “small government conservative” and “fiscal conservative” is not only inaccurate but dishonest.
Conservatives who say that they advocate “small government”, but hide the fact that they’re making exceptions for particular spheres in which they actually favor big government, are trying to pull a fast one.
To claim to favor “small government” without any qualifiers connotes a general preference for having government leave people alone. If you want the government to leave people alone only when it comes to taxing and spending, but to get all up in their business in a very bossy way when it comes to their private lives, then you do not actually share that general preference, and your claim is deliberately misleading.
I am an advocate of Small Government. All I want government to do is provide for national defense, enforce laws against actions which infringe on other people’s lives or safety or property, provide for a system of courts to fairly try people accused of breaking those laws as well as adjudicating disputes between private parties, build and maintain streets and roads and bridges, operate or make provisions for and regulate other critical infrastructure like water and sewage systems or electric grids, provide emergency services such as firefighting, operate universally accessible public schools, protect the environment, provide public parks, deliver the mail, enforce reasonable protections of intellectual property, explore outer space, support basic scientific research, forecast the weather, protect the public health (especially against communicable diseases), make regulations for workplace safety and the protection of workers (minimum wages, child labor laws), enforce standards for consumer protection, protect the rights and safety of children and other people incompetant to protect their own rights and safety, and provide universal health insurance, unemployment insurance, and old age and disability pensions.
Government has NO BUSINESS making laws regulating people’s religious beliefs and rituals, preventing people from freely communicating their views about all topics from politics to artistic expression to random chatter, preventing people from peaceably gathering together or from joining formal or informal associations of all kinds, denying law-abiding people the means of defending themselves, regulating the private sex lives of consenting adults, excessively regulating the commercial sex lives of consenting adults, telling consenting adults what kind of mind-altering or mood-altering substances they can take into their bodies (providing they aren’t harming anyone else), telling businesses what prices they can charge for the goods and services they provide, forbidding businesses from paying their workers whatever salaries they agree upon (beyond a bare minimum wage established by law), providing agricultural subsidies, owning and operating the primary means of economic production (land or factories and other industrial establishments) except on a temporary basis in cases of dire national emergency, or forbidding people from wearing clothing or ornaments above or below their “stations”.
Some of these things I want government to do should be done by state or local governments rather than the national government; many of them should be shared responsibilities of multiple levels of government. Also, there are probably some things I forgot about that the limited Small Government I favor should do, and some other things that I think the limited Small Government I favor should not be doing that I forgot to mention.
Nitpick: Economic activity – which includes all production, distribution, and/or exchange of goods and/or services, whether public or private or family – always exists if society does, and not even the Khmer Rouge ever wanted to outlaw it. Some political movements have wanted the state to control economic activity to a total or near-total extent; and there is no state that does not control it to some extent, however light its touch on the purse and marketplace.
It’s not “you” making that decision, it’s the English language. “Small government” means not expanding government. If someone claims to be for “small government” and advocates expanding government, he gets called out for being either an idiot or a liar, depending on whether or not he appears to know better.
Really, someone who takes such a position is an advocate for big government across the board – sure, he says that the government shouldn’t collect quite so much money in taxes, but without adherence to a general principle of limited government this is a mere policy prescription subject to change at any time.
Did you not notice the entire point of the post you’re responding to? It addresses this very issue. I’m not sure if you’re being intentionally dense or retardedly dense.
Quoting myself:
You keep saying “just because people don’t want the government to do everything it can to help people doesn’t mean they’re mean!” and I’m saying yes, I get that. I totally, totally get that, because as I described at length, this has been the dominant philosophy of my adult life.
However, I am also saying that doesn’t mean everyone who advocates for smaller government does so for such noble, well intentioned reasons. Lots of people do it because of pure self interest - they’re rich or think they’ll be rich, so they want to empower that class. Lots of people actually have an actively evil world view in which they actually get some satisfaction from a world in which an overclass crushes an underclass. And many other reasons in between.
What I’m saying is that you, personally - not all libertarians, not all fiscal conservatives, etc - are not part of the well intentioned group
Oh please. When these issues come up, you never have a tone along the lines of “yeah, it sucks that a lot of people suffer under the current system, but the proposal will ultimately be worse”, it’s always gleeful. HAHHHAA FUCKTARDS, TRY TO GET MY MONEY NOW FOR YOUR HEALTH CARE. HAHHAA NONE OF YOU ARE GONNA BE ABLE TO SEE DOCTORS, I WIN, EAT MY ASS!
That was just one example. This is the tone you pretty much always take in regards to when your side wins these sorts of battles.
I actually don’t know if you’re interested in actively hurting people. I know such people exist - people who would hypothetically give up 10% of everything they had if it meant that eveyone else had to give up 30% of everything they had. Their interest is more in how much better off they are to everyone else than any absolute measure of the material quality of their own life. There people who have a deep, active hate for anyone they view as having a shitty life because it’s always their own fault, so they wish to see them suffer.
I can’t ascertain from your posts whether you subscribe to that particular form of evil.
You are, however, gleeful at the prospect of people who you view as your lessers suffering. I sincerely doubt that you would ever actually help such people even if it were a very minor cost to you and a great help to them. You’ve never faced a difficult point where you had agonize over your views to advocate for something you knew would cause harm even though it was part of your ideology - because at the very least, you don’t give a shit. More likely, you take some satisfaction in it.
So your point about how I’m just like every other authoritarian who wants to force people to live their way is that I’m concerned about the powerful being able to use the law to enforce their already powerful position, to keep others artificially weak, reduce class mobility, etc.? Proper libertarianism requires that you advocate not for a meritocracy, but for a system in which the already powerful can shut everyone else out?
It sure is nice when someone is so full of shit that their full-of-shitness shows up right out in the open for everyone to see. Your only support for your contention that I’m evil and want to hurt people is one post that you have misread so terribly that it’s ridiculous.
Here’s my post:
And here are the two ways you’ve characterized that post in this thread:
The two are nothing alike. First, you seem to think that I gloated about Obamacare not passing, whereas that post was about Obamacare passing. Second, I never gloated about people not having access to healthcare, I simply laid out all of the problems caused by Obamacare that its proponents on this board continually ignore.
I think you really must have another poster in mind. Any fair reading of my post above shows that it is nothing like what you are claiming. If you had any integrity at all, you would take back your assertion that I would let society burn if I could profit from it.