Whenever somebody starts talking about how great and free libertarianism is, I always like to post this quote from the game Bioshock:
“These sad saps. They come to Rapture thinking they’re gonna be captains of industry, but they all forget that somebody’s gotta scrub the toilets.”
If you’re a libertarian, imagine yourself as the one scrubbing the toilets. No government to help you, no social welfare to boost you up, every chance at upward mobility denied by these captains of industry. Do you still think its a good life?
When our founders wrote the Constitution back in 1787, they knew full well that taxation without representation and the resulting act of politicians making up new taxes out of their rear ends was one of the EXACT reasons they had fought an 8 year war of independence. Unfortunately, the DC Dunderhead Division is doing EXACTLY that today with 500 + changes to the tax code a YEAR.
The cuts I would make are:
One, the defense budget. There’s NO reason the US military should be spending 128 dollars on ONE HAMMER. (The same hammer at Home Depot: 9 dollars.)
Two, the welfare and food stamp programs. Those can be devolved to either state/local governments or to churches/private charities. Either or, doesn’t matter to me.
Three, corporate subsidies. Those gotta go. Enough said.
Four, no more foreign aid (excepting natural catastrophes: i.e. the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.)
Five, Eliminate Dept. of Education. Devolve their duties to state/local government, the way it should be anyway.
Six, an end to Congressional pensions and limits on their pay. (174K per yr for a part time job? What the ****?!)
Those j*******s can get a job after they leave office, just like their constituents have to. Besides, the notion that term limits means Congress full of novices and putty in the hands of lobbyists is ridiculous. Lobbyists themselves even admit that it takes twenty years before a Senator or Congressman is in their pocket completely. By limiting it to twelve, we’ve effectively cut their power almost in half.
The money we have is backed up by our whole economy. It is created on demand, whenever the economy needs it, such that it supports growth instead of hindering it. Fiat currency is the best kind of money to have, in that every other kind of money has been proven to be doomed to failure.
I also hear that planes whose pilots have just crapped their pants are less likely to make a safe landing. The solution is obvious: Make all pilots wear diapers!
You’ve got causality exactly backwards and you’re spouting nonsense. Zimbabwe tanked because their economy was shit. Their hyperinflation was a symptom, not a cause.
The Federal Reserve doesn’t coin money, by which the Constitution means print and mint currency. The Federal government does that. The Federal Reserve exists because Congress created it. Where does the Constitution say Congress couldn’t create a Federal Reserve System?
Would you rather it didn’t exist? Do you also think things go away when you stop looking at them?
True, but a good part of that prosperity was relative prosperity: We looked amazingly good in comparison to countries which had been getting the absolute shit bombed out of them for the majority of a decade.
OK, then explain why we have had fewer depressions and bank runs and panics since the Federal Reserve System went into effect than we had before it.
OK, I was a bit sloppy. FDR made private ownership of gold illegal, revoked gold’s status as legal tender, and took us off the gold standard domestically. He also unpegged the dollar from gold, but that only lasted a year. Nixon took us off it for good.
Yeah, remember the whole Whiskey Rebellion thing where some Americans didn’t think they had to pay taxes? Remember what side of that issue the Founding Fathers came down on? Hint: it wasn’t the anti-tax side that you assume.
Well, basically no mainstream Republican will agree with you on cutting the defense budget. Cut waste, sure, but then use the savings to increase weapons purchases. And increase the defense budget even further. Your whole concept of Republicans joining your cause hits the shoals four words into your platform on what to cut.
By the way, everything you have proposed for this libertarian-Republican alliance is party line libertarian nonsense. What’s in this deal for Republicans? Where’s the ban on abortions? Ban on flag burning? The anti-gay agenda? The favors for corporations?
I got a better idea. I propose a Democratic-Republican-libertarian alliance. The platform includes single payer health care, gun control, equal pay for women, tax increases for the wealthy, and a Manhattan Project to promote the adoption of alternative energy. Who else is with me? What else can we add to the list to get libertarians and conservatives on the right track.
…Do you seriously not see the substantial differences between the US and Zimbabwe when it comes to increasing the money supply? I mean, really? There’s so much wrong here I don’t even know where to start.
The Federal Reserve is a government agency. The fact that they are *largely *independent within government has no bearing on that.
The US government is (and kinda has to be) a massive enterprise. Having a department solely dedicated to patrolling for waste and fraud is absolutely reasonable in a system that large. That’s not bragging about their ridiculous spending, that’s recognizing an important need and solving it.
And yet, because the cause of the recession is the same (liquidity trap), stimulus still worked. Why is that?
Okay, first of all, you really need to start sourcing your claims, because I couldn’t find the hammer you’re talking about. I did find a story of a $400 hammer, but it turned out that was not actually the government being woefully incompetent, it was just a bookkeeping error. Just like that story of the $16 muffin, it comes down to booking a bunch of different components, then counting the overhead of one item in the package towards the other items in the package, so that a hammer seems to have as much R&D costs as an engine. Pro tip, you want a quick way to check if a claim like that is likely true? Ask yourself: “is this something a sane person would actually do?” The answer in the case of the hammer is clearly “no”. So maybe it’s time to dig a little deeper, and see where we’re going with this?
Although, it sure is a shame there’s so much government waste. Maybe they should get someone on fixing that?
Oh wait, they have an entire department for fixing exactly that, and you think that’s disgusting.
I think it’s disgusting that they LITERALLY DO NOTHING. All they DO is write stern letters and reports. That’s IT. The GAO doesn’t FIX ANYTHING. That is the problem. If they had the power to FIX things, then “Don’t you know its gonna be? All Right! All Right! All Right!”
Out of curiosity how old are you? Your user name implies you were born in 1959 (although on the other hand Hawaii was admitted into the Union in 1959 so it may just refer to that fact) but then you mentioned bringing up these oligarchic proposals of yours in your Poli Sci class.
You’ve obviously never had to answer to a GAO audit. Let me assure you that they dig into everything and like a pit bull, they don’t let go until they get the answers they need. The definitely do hold others accountable for their agencies, which is how it should be.
Well, you’ve missed the point of my post. I’m saying that you are asking whether conservatives will give up 75% of their political views in order to form an alliance with libertarians. This alliance - at least as described so far - gives libertarians 95% of what they want to accomplish.
I’m saying there isn’t much compromising going on in your proposal.
Right, just like the scientist who develops the drug to cure a deadly disease doesn’t actually do anything, because he’s not actually putting it in each individual patient’s mouth.
Without their help, we wouldn’t know where the waste was to begin with. In discovering this, they provide a valuable service, allowing and strongly encouraging those who can fix the problem to do so. It’s a necessary evil, with the emphasis on necessary. Or do you think that Government Accountability Office actions are just ignored? Because that’s just straight-up wrong.
Do the annual cost-savings recommendations made by the Government Accountability Office “go ignored” every year?
Congressman Sam Graves (R) of Missouri stated in a September 28 press release that they do.
We looked at an internal audit conducted by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), and it suggests that most of their recommendations manage to spur action. The audit shows that almost 80 percent of its recommendations between 2011 and 2014 have been either fully or partially implemented. Meanwhile, 20 percent have so far been left unaddressed.
There SHOULD be restrictions on the franchise. There are people, ADULTS, no less, who think we fought against FRANCE in the Revolutionary War or RUSSIA in the Second World War. Are you saying that those people’s votes should count as equally as mine? There are people who don’t even know their congressman’s position on the hot-button issues. I see the oligarchic implications, but honestly, my vote WILL AFFECT MY NEIGHBOR. My neighbor’s vote WILL AFFECT ME.
How is it fair that stupid people like the above are able to cast votes that can have negative effects on me, my family, and my friends and I can’t do jack about it? Rudyard Kipling actually wrote a story about this: “As Easy As ABC.” It’s actually pretty spot-on.
*Democracy is not freedom. Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to eat for lunch. *-Marvin Simkin
*Democracy is a belief in the collective wisdom of ignorant individuals. -*H.L Mencken
Look, if you want to argue that some sort of test should be required before voting, you should pause one more time to consider that I’ve already designed a question for a test that would exclude YOU from voting.
All very frustrating, I’m sure. Now, how would you put these ideas into practice? Who would you trust to set and administer the standards without giving in to their own self interest, and how would you feel if you were deemed ineligible?
It’s because nobody knows the word “paleoconservative” anymore.
The somewhat more intellectually honest among them are members of what’s sometimes called the “Dark Enlightenment”, which is essentially a movement full of Ignatius J. Reilly impersonators who honestly believe some form of dictatorship or outright oligarchy (anything from Technocracy to Feudalism, with Feudalism being more common) is better than “demotism”, which is the catch-all term they lump everything based on mass support into, from direct democracy to representative democracy to fascism and state communism. They apparently really believe in some pseudo-Nietzschean “natural aristocracy” whether or not they fall in line with traditional monarchist thought.
To mention that the Dark Enlightenment merges with frank Neo-Nazi tendencies would be to belabor the obvious. What’s surprising is how many of those people aren’t explicitly racist.