"Stuart & Kathryn Fields" wrote in message
.. .

"Ed Huntress" wrote in message
...

snip

Now, don't get carried away. The impulse behind libertarianism is a
perfectly good one. It's the thought that's lacking.

Ed: You criticize the Libertarians for the lack of thinking thru their
ideas. Where is there any evidence that the other parties have thought
thru their ideas?

Over 200 years of successful governance. And if you don't think it's been
successful, compare our legal, economic, and other situations with those
of almost any other country.

Well lets see. I've heard that said before. Lets use some measures:
The Human Development Index (HDI) is an index combining normalized
measures of life expectancy, literacy, educational attainment, and GDP per
capita for countries worldwide. It is claimed as a standard means of
measuring human development, a concept that, according to the United
Nations Development Program (UNDP) refers to the process of widening the
options of persons, giving them greater opportunities for education,
health care, income, employment, etc. The basic use of HDI is however to
rank countries by level of "human development" which usually also implies
to determine whether a country is a developed, developing, or
underdeveloped country.

HDI is another arbitrary UN project that consists of weightings pulled out
of a hat. 'You want to boost the US HDI? Try universal healthcare.
Whoops...that isn't part of the libertarian program, is it?

You can give it another boost by shooting all the cows. But, if you *really
* want to get us on top, the long-term solution is obvious: Bulldoze the
inner cities flat.

HDI is as much a measure of social and political choices as anything. Most
of the things that would boost our HDI are the exact OPPOSITE of what a
libertarian program would lead to: socialized healthcare, more government
employment, etc. I'm surprised you would even bring it up in this context,
Stu. It leads in a direction opposite to the one you're advocating.


The US has been shown as a country that is expeirencing a decreasing HDI
In fact since 1980 the US has never been ranked as the top Nation.

The HDI has only been around since sometime in the early '90s.

Canada, Norway, Switzerland and even Japan has outranked us.

They all have universal healthcare.

We are sliding down a slippery slope.

If there's a slope, it leads in a direction opposite to the one you're
suggesting.


The present method of dealing with problems is called "Knee Jerk". I'll
repeat what has been ignored: Get on the internet and look into the
Democrat and Republican parties. Try to find a statement of philosophy.

Thank God, they really don't have one, beyond a few things that might
better be called attitudes.

A better name is "Situational Ethics". Take our Bill Clinton and his
sexual pecadillos. If I as a Civil Servan had engaged in sex with a
subordinate I would have immediately lost my security clearance because
of an increase in vulnerability to black mail and without the clearance my
ability to perform my job would be severely curtailed and thence probably
my career be ended. Bill as Commander in Chief of the Military allowed
others in the Military to lose their careers for having sex with a
subordinant. Yep we have attitudes.

So what does that have to do with libertarians or Libertarians? Don't they
have sex?


The Libertarian party is the only one willing to state theirs clearly.

Deliver us from ideologues who have a philosophy. Philosophy is for
college classes and books. When it comes to governance, it's a
prescription for disaster. Every time. No exceptions.



I'm not an registered Libertarian, but I'm sure a supporter of smaller
less intrusive government.

So is 90% of the US population -- until you try to make *their* favorite
project smaller.

Yes I agree here and as the guy said the death of democracy is assured as
soon as the people find that they can vote themselve money.

They found that out 200 years ago, but there are still plenty of rich people
around -- more than ever, in fact. I guess the "guy" was full of it, eh?

Again since we are not governed by principles, then the rule is grab what
you can for yourself. Isn't this what you complain about in the big
corporations??

No. It's what I *expect* of greedy and overly ambitious people who are given
the opportunity. My complaint is that we give them too many opportunities,
thanks to our semi-libertarian approach to (de)regulation of business, and
financial business in particular.

Ed: You don't like monopolies. I agree they tend to run away with
themselves in an unbridled manner. The Federal, State, County and to a
lesser extent even City governments are simply monopolies.

No, they're democratically elected governments. That's the exact opposite
of a monopoly. You can get rid of them as easily as by voting them out.
That's our job.

Now this surprises me. It is as naive as a Junior High School student.
It is one hell of a lot more difficult than "easily by voting them out"
You have to compete with the two or is it one political parties who have
the machinery and the money that I don't.

If you want to exert leverage, you join the party you like better and work
within it. I dabbled in that at the state level, becoming a Republican
county delegate. You want to get into the game? You can. First off, you have
to stop bellyaching and make some phone calls.

This is a PARTICIPATORY democracy, not a stage show for critics. And it
isn't a parliamentary system. It's a two-party system with a strong
president. That keeps it a two-party system.

The candidates that we get to vote for are pretty much selected by the
parties.

Then join a party. By the time the candidates are selected and you have to
vote, 90% of the decision-making is done. You're getting into the game too
late. That's why you don't have a hand in making the choices.

I watched Ron Paul get ignored when he wanted to discuss things like the
legitimacy of the governments foreign policy.

As soon as he opened his mouth about "dietary supplements" as a model
solution for our drug industry, I knew he was a crackpot. Then I read more.
Paul is out of his tree.

He's so far into the outfield that it's no surprise he's gotten ignored.
There's a realm of political debate that gets attention. Then there are the
nutballs around the fringes. Because we have free speech and open
candidacies, the nutballs always show up. But we've learned to filter them
out because they're a waste of time. That's why Ron Paul was marginalized.

You may not like this because ideas you favor are among those that are
marginalized. That's a shame. Either find a way to get them considered, or
stand on the sidelines and watch the real game.


They have no competition.

Of course they do -- every politician who wants their job is a
competitor.

They are not held accountable by any other than themselves for their
actions.

That's why we have a tripartite government with a distribution of powers
and an institutionalized system of checks and balances.

God I wish I could have the belief and faith that you apparently have
inspite of all the fraud waste and abuse being done by the governments.

Fraud, waste, and abuse are endemic to large institutions, especially
governments. Oversight helps. Turning your back on it, as Reagan and Bush
have done, and as libertarians would do to an even greater degree, just
makes it worse.

I wish I could just ignore the insane laws and rule makings that I see
everyday.

Your complaints seem to be mostly technical, Stu, but your supposed solution
is essentially to eliminate the problems by ignoring them. That's
libertarianism. It offers a panacea in the form of a government that just
ignores everything. It's like making the trains run on time by turning back
the clocks.

Larry even thinks that libertarians would be more honest. Talk about blind
faith; I know of no reason to believe they would be any more honest. In my
estimation, exactly the opposite would be true. By eliminating regulation
and oversight, you'd may as well be offering the crooks and pirates an
engraved invitation.


I wish I had a job where I could vote myself pay raises and create my
own retirement system that someone else pays for.

So do I. d8-)

No it has been said that no alternatives have been proffered. Wrong.
Ron Paul offered up some alternatives, granted not all would be
acceptable or work, but he evened offered a method to fix that:

Ron Paul is a half-baked crackpot who should stay in Arizona, where
nothing destructive that he could do matters very much. If he goes out in
the sun much, maybe he'll be fully baked some day.
Well your light bulb just dimmed. Ron Paul is a Representative from Texas
not Arizona.

One stinkindesert is as good as the next. d8-)

Constitutional Amendment. His ideas of restricting the government to
those powers granted by the Constitution would be a big step in the
right direction to at least curtail some of the Federal Governements
monopolistic behaviours presently viewed as the way of doing business.

Bull.

What do the Centrists offer...

Government that works.

...to get us out of our current Morass?

What morass? Are you starving? Are you threatened by some other country?
Did you have to sell your children into slavery? What in the hell are you
talking about, "morass"?

I'm talking about the Morass of restrictive laws and rules such as the
FEMA telling me that I might have to raise my entire 40X72 steel building
because of some bureacratic derived flood plain that there exists no
evidence, historically or otherwise to support.

That sounds like your primary gripe.

I'm talking about the 3 star general in charge of the Strategic Defense
Command responsible for the Star Wars stuff getting his hand caught in the
cooky jar setting himself up with BDC for a post retirement job.

How would libertarianism fix that, or any of the other things you've listed?

It all looks like some kind of blind faith. What kind, I have no idea.


What are you, a radical who has a program for overturning tradition? g
Of course it's to wait and see what happens.

What is it you want, Stu? Is it 6,000-pound, 6-liter SUVs and pickup
trucks forever? A McMansion for everyone, with a 40-mile commute? Didn't
you realize 10 years ago, or even 20 years ago, that we were sliding
downhill on a waterslide into a swamp?

Is this the great society that you were talking about? Which is so much
better than other countries?

Even when you look at the biased, often silly, ratings systems from the UN
and others, we're near the top. That, despite a heterogeneous society (note
that the "leaders" in HDI are all homogeneous -- most of them even have the
same hair color) that has much less government involvement in our lives than
they do. The difference in HDI rating between the US and the "leader"
(Iceland), on a 0-1 scale, is 0.017.


I have no idea what you are talking about here. I do not own or think that
an SUV is the car to own but based on statistics it seems that the
majority of the people who are supporting the political parties running
the US do. Another example of thinking things thru.

Talk to Larry. He has a 6,000-pound truck to haul 500 pounds of tools. g

We get caught by our own wretched excess from time to time. That's the
product of a hot economy and an....uh, expansive attitude. That's the US.
It means we'll swing up and down, and drive ourselves silly, probably
forever. I happen to like the system, and the people in it, silly or not.

I was told that the pendulum swings in the DoD service when I saw them
removing work benches and putting desks in their place. This was in 1975.
The pendulum is still swinging to the crazy extreme. The people that
replaced me in the Navy R&D are all spending their days on airplanes going
to meetings. Meetings that no one can detect the benefit or purpose.
Their "smart buyer" status is being eroded at a fantastic rate. They have
no hands on experience to support their college education. It doesn't
take much listening to them to find the efficacy of the term Morass.

Your morass is not my idea of a morass. Even so, I hear nothing from you
that suggests libertarianism would make your morass better. In fact, it
sounds like you'd make it worse.

What is it you want to eliminate here, Stuart? Airplane R&D? Or the Navy?
What is it?

But spare us the talk about "morass." There is no morass. There is only
the roller coaster. Hang on tight.

I wouldn't get on a roller coaster that had no tracks or some effort at
purposeful design. I wouldn't get in an airplane when there was no
statement of the purpose of the flight. I wouldn't get on an airplane
where the pilot just said I'm here to see what is going to happen and our
emergeny plan is based on the widely accepted Knee Jerk method.
Yep we don't have an agreed to destination so where ever the Democrans or
Republicrats are going to take us I guess we are just the kidnapped
passengers and Take us they will.

So, what is it, industrial planning? You want something like Japan's MITI?
Just what is it that you think will cure these "ills"?

--
Ed Huntress