> > LOL, despite the subject you chose to sport for our "civil" debate > (which > > I've taken the liberty to correct for civility), sure, I'll give it a > whirl. > > It'll be a refreshing departure from the norm. :) > > > Sorry, old habits die hard.
S'OK, I'm taking the civility a step further per the NEW subject title, in light of our glasnost or kumbaya or whatever we got going on here. > > > > Is that the question on which you'd like me to opine? Or is it > something > > else? I may be injecting my own assumptions here. > > > If that were the question then we'd first have to go into defining the > "goals" of said free republic. Indeed! > So let's keep it as simple as possible. The question is, do you state > that reducing administration, health, and education whilst enlarging > military and police is better for a republic than the opposite? > Now you are an educated man Bob, so you can keep complicating the issue > or give a straight and honest answer. Which will it be? The simple straight answer is that I believe a contractual system based on private property rooted in the rule of law under a republican form of government is the one least likely to fail at providing all of the above services, in whatever proportions are necessary for the times, and most likely to be accepting of and responsive to remedial changes. Other modern forms of government based on command and control cannot, and have not, succeeded on any appreciable scale, and in fact have been unmitigated disasters, both fiscally and in terms of human rights (communism/socialism are responsible for 200 million deaths in the 20th century alone). Your phrasing of the question I cannot accept because I don't presume to know the correct "proportion" of this or that allocation of resources that "optimizes" happiness. It is presumptuous to believe any one person can. Moreover, it is dangerous. I trust simple individuals acting in an adjudicated contractual system to better their lot as they perceive it any time over committees of professional mountebanks with the monopoly force behind them, to enforce whatever lunatic schemes they devise in their power-hungry hearts. > Let's rephrase. I see the involvement of the state in the welfare of > it's citizens in two levels which often get thrown together. How much > involvement there should be, and in which areas. There is also the question of constraints on that power, which usually involve devices like bicameral legislatures, separation of powers, federal vs. state vs. municipal power, and measures to reduce or at least mitigate the debilitating effect of majority faction. As the last two presidencies and their respective Congresses have demonstrated, we are breaking all of those safeguards down here in America, and are ripe for tyranny. > Now, to treat > socialists as a different species you should answer "there should be NO > involvement of the state in the welfare of it's citizens" in which case > the question would be "Then what IS the function of the state?". OTOH > if > you would describe an amount and manner of involvement I would ask > "Then why do you consider socialists inherently different from you? You > just disagree in the 'amount' of involvement.". It is not a mere disagreement by degree. They don't fall on that continuum as you suppose that they do. Marxism is an ideology of power, based on a view of man that reduces individuals to so many disposable ants, and cares not a whit for the masses as a whole, either. It's an evil, cancerous ideology that appeals to the basest instincts of envy and hate and revenge. Attempts to put lipstick on the pig by making it hip -- I love all the Che Guevara t-shirts that are in vogue again, by the way, or the faux-Soviet nature of Obama "art" -- or give it "relevance" (like all those pathetic, mind-numb, ridiculous "studies" in college today... gender studies, black studies, etc.)... None of these are anything more than frontal assaults on the affective domain, the softest spot of just under the medulla oblongata, and has resulted in an entire generation of young adults that cannot, in fact, think for themselves or survive anything more intellectually rigorous than a sit-in at Borders listening to their favorite Marxist poet wax on about, ah, the injustice of it all. It's insidious, and ultimately guided by a spirit--the spirit of the god of this world--that is at war with everything good. But I risk descending into theology now, so I'll stop with that. That said, such people are amusing in small doses, or when relegated to their koffee-klatches and collegiate sit-ins. But when they are in power, bad things invariably happen, things that take generations to heal, or may never mend. > I know I'm leaving a lot of gaps, this is not my native language, I'm > at > the office, and I don't have the time to write a 2000 words essay. > Let's > see if you can get what I mean and answer straight up. To summarize, I don't accept the framing of the question. I believe that a free system is better than one in which the party in power has absolute control to allocate resources beyond those explicitly given to government by the people, consistent with private property and individual human rights. No government of men is perfect, but some manage to channel mankind's negative impulses in more or less constructive directions. There is no way to create a utopia on earth, at least no earthly way. I don't care about "social justice" as an abstract proposition but as a real, tangible thing that I, or you, or anybody can achieve on our own individual scales, despite the very real existence of bad people who do bad things. There are times real injustices occur. Tragedy is a fact of life. Uneven "distribution" is a natural effect of letting the good, the bad and the ugly interact in a free society, but it's alternative has never, and cannot possibly, be more just or fair or free. Socialists and communists have a far worse actual historical track record creating (vs merely confiscating and consuming) wealth, providing for basic services, and respecting the rights of individuals, than the system we have, and are presently destroying because of the forces of deceit that have overwhelmed our media and educational institutions. This is no blanket accusation, one need only peek under the hood of Obama's new and ultra-stealthy czardom for clues about what's really at work. Most people who voted for Obama after a relentless propaganda campaign funded by oligarchs like George Soros had no idea what they were *really* voting for, and many of them are starting to recoil at the unfolding reality. The catastrophic deficit spending currently going on is *intended* to break the bank, and destroy our system. It's is orders of magnitude larger than anything that preceded it, yea, even by that reckless spendthrift George W. Bush, whose biggest deficit in all eight of his years is eclipsed, by a trillion dollars, the first one out of this administration. For the $787 billion "stimulus" package all we got so far, allegedly, was some 30K jobs.... and some people are for some reason surprised by this. I'd like to turn the question around on you and ask you how it's possible to fix the horrors of deficit spending by quintupling the amount of deficit spending? How does pumping taxpayer money to corrupt and dying institutions help the average person? How is eviscerating our military capability while massively exploding the debt to fund enormously complex bureaucracies better for a republic, than increasing its ability to defend itself and decreasing its unfunded liabilities? -Bob _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/[email protected] ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
