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Libertarian Presidential Candidate Michael Badnarik Answers
Re:Question (Score:5, Interesting) by celeritas_2 (750289) (#10237051)
How can we change the system so people have the choice between multiple candidates and not just two?
It's a long, hard, uphill battle. A lot of Americans don't know that until the 1890s, the government didn't print ballots at all. Voters wrote their own, or used pre-printed ballots provided by the party of their choice. The adoption of the "Australian ballot" gave the politicians control of what choices were put in front of voters.
Today, the Libertarian Party -- and other third parties, of course -- have to fight to get on the ballot. In some states, we have to gather enormous numbers of signatures. In others, we have to drag the state to court. We've been very active on this front. In 1980, 1992, 1996 and 2000, the Libertarian Party's candidates appeared on the ballot in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. This year, it's 48 states and DC -- we missed the signature requirement in New Hampshire and are in court in Oklahoma.
A better question, of course, is how do we offer the American people REAL choices -- choices they can vote for without fearing that their vote will be "wasted" on a candidate who "can't win?"
There are various alternative voting systems that address this problem.
Instant Runoff Voting allows the voter to assign a rank to each candidate; if no candidate gets a majority of "first place" votes, then "second place" votes are counted, and so on, until someone gets a majority. This allows people to choose a "third party" candidate as their first preference, but still get a vote between frontrunners if their candidate loses.
Personally, I prefer Approval Voting. In this method, each voter can select as many candidates as he likes -- he can vote for all the candidates whom he can live with. All of the votes are counted, and the candidate with the most votes wins. The result is that the winner is not necessarily "the most popular," but "the one that the most voters are okay with."
Of course, the "major" parties don't approve of anything that might threaten to break their shared monopoly on power. That's why they've instituted the Australian ballot and draconian ballot access laws. But we'll keep fighting them until we win.
timing (Score:5, Interesting) by j1mmy (43634)
I fully support the Libertarian platform and ideals and I have every intention of voting for you in November. My only beef with the libertarian approach is timing. You've stated that in your first couple months of holding office you'll eliminate the federal reserve, kick the U.N. out of the country, and bring as many of our troops home as possible, among other radical (but good) changes. My question is this: how do you plan to handle the societal impact of these changes? Eliminating the federal reserve is not something I'd expect to go over lightly in the financial markets, for example. Much of the Libertarian platform is a severe departure from the current state of the nation -- I feel that society would need time to adapt to these changes.
I guess my first response to that has to be that for a Libertarian to be elected to the White House right now would indicate massive social upheaval already. Yes, my ideas are radical -- but my election would prove that America is ready for radical solutions.
You're right, though. It isn't as simple as that. Stating my goals and what I'd attempt to do is not the same as stating what would happen. The presidency is an office of limited power, and I'd actually spend a good deal of time struggling with Congress and the courts to get my solutions implemented, giving Americans time to prepare for the changes.
Of course, with some of the changes I'm proposing, I've set a longer timeline on anyway. With American troops in more than 135 countries around the globe, I don't plan to just buy them all airline tickets and tell them to catch the next plane home. My plan for Iraq is a 90-day phased withdrawal concentrating on the physical security of the troops. For drawing down the US military presence in Germany, Korea, Japan and elsewhere, I've proposed a two-year timeline, with the first actual troop pullouts beginning at the end of the first year. That's quicker than George W. Bush's 10-year timeline, but it isn't unduly hasty.
My expectation is that if we eliminate the Fed's monopoly on currency provision, the Fed will continue exist -- it will just have to compete with other currency options on a truly level playing field without the government demanding that its currency be accepted instead of others. People can decide whether they want to hold their wealth in green pieces of paper backed only by seven trillion dollars in debt, or in currency coined of, or backed by, some scarce commodity. I'm not planning to haul Alan Greenspan and the Board of Governors off to Indiana for death by lethal injection or anything like that.
My job as a candidate is to articulate a vision of the changes I propose and to argue forcefully for their implementation. The checks and balances which our nation's founders wrote into the Constitution provide a framework in which those changes can be implemented with the minimum possible chaos.
How to reform Electoral College? (Score:5, Interesting) by code_rage (130128)
There have been proposals to eliminate the electoral college. Notably, Slate has run a series of pieces calling it "America's worst college." Slate's coverage has examined some of the political difficulties in trying to change the system and has proposed some possible solutions.
It's clear from the results of 1992 that the electoral college, as currently implemented at the national and state level, tends to turn small spreads into large ones, and eliminates 3rd parties altogether. As a 3rd party candidate, this must be an important issue to you (after ballot access, perhaps the most important one).
How do you propose to address this? Would you support an amendment to the US Constitution to abolish the Electors in favor of direct popular vote? Or, would it make more sense to address it state by state, using legislation to split the electors proportionately within each state (as Maine and Nebraska do)?
I have to tell you that I'm skeptical of electoral college reform at the federal level. Yes, the system has flaws, but I haven't seen any alternative proposals that don't have serious flaws themselves.
On the state level, I do advocate choosing electors by congressional district as Maine and Nebraska do, with the two non-district electors going to the overall winner of the popular vote. That would be more reflective of overall American voter sentiment.
Going to a straight popular vote would, perversely, represent the end of American democracy. Candidates would be inclined to cater to a few urban areas where they can buy the most votes for their buck (or their promise), effectively disenfranchising rural voters. To the extent that the presidency is a representative office, it should represent Peoria and Birmingham as much as it represents New York and Los Angeles.
"Should have gone to..." (Score:4, Interesting) DrEldarion (114072) (#)
When somebody you strongly dislike is running, it's very tempting to vote for the person who is more likely to win against them rather than the person whose views you agree with more.
What is your response to the people who say that a vote given to a third-party candidate is wasted and should have gone to one of the main two parties, if only to make sure that the "bad candidate" doesn't win?
If the "wasted vote" argument ever held any water, it doesn't any more. The two major parties have moved toward a weird, non-existent "center" for the last 50 years, to the point where it's difficult to tell them apart.
We could argue all day about whether Bush or Kerry is the "lesser evil." The fact is that they both support the war in Iraq. They both oppose gun rights. They both supported the PATRIOT Act. They both support the war on drugs. They both support confiscatory taxation. They both support ruinously high levels of spending, huge deficits and increasing debt.
It's hard to tell them apart on the real issues. They spend their time scrapping over "swing votes" in the gray area of the "center" -- which means, in practice, "how do I not make too many people too angry to vote for me?" That's no way to do politics. Politics, in my view, should be as unimportant as possible -- but where it's important, it has to value freedom, remain rooted in principle and be forward-looking.
All I can tell the "lesser of two evils" folks is that if they keep voting for evil, they'll keep getting evil. If you don't like the way things are, how do you change it by voting for more of the same?
Ideology vs pragmatism (Score:4, Interesting) by Charles Dodgeson (248492)
Libertarianism certainly is an appealing ideology, but are you concerned that ideological based politics (whether yours or others) often precludes the adoption of pragmatic solutions to real problems?
I guess that depends on the ideology ;-)
Seriously, all politics is ideology-based. Unthinking majoritarianism, Machiavellian strategizing and centrist compromise are ideologies too. If they weren't ideologies 100 years ago, they are now, because they are the lodestones which guide our politicians' every action. And you see where that's gotten us.
I'm not an impractical man. I know that I can't snap my fingers and get the results that I want without consequence. I realize that my ideas will face resistance in implementation. The extent to which I am willing to compromise is that I'm willing to fight for what I can get, and wait for the rest only as long as absolutely necessary. What I'm not willing to do is abandon my goals or trade them away.
My approach is geared to a single criterion -- does this policy or that action serve freedom? I'm willing to be pragmatic in pursuing policies that affirmatively answer that criterion. I'm not willing to compromise that criterion away.
Are some free trade restrictions necessary? (Score:5, Interesting) by toasted_calamari (670180)
Regarding your description of free trade vs. state corporatism at your website, How can we prevent the propagation of Multinational corporations without resorting to government regulation? Is that form of Government regulation a necessary evil, or is there a method for preventing the formation of huge multinationals and monopolies without the government restricting free trade? If so, how would this method be implemented?
"Free trade," like any other term, is often coopted to mean something other than what it should. In the context of modern America and the globalization phenomenon, it is often used to refer to a web of regulations, restrictions, subsidies, government-created monopolies and privileges. That's not free trade.
First, let's look at the nature of corporations. They come into existence with the grant of a government charter. They sell stock under the auspices and pursuant to the rules of the Securities and Exchange Commission. In court, they are treated as "persons" with "rights" -- and for purposes of liability, their stockholders are held harmless beyond the value of their stock itself.
A market in which single proprietorships and partnerships must compete against what are essentially mini-branches of government, with all the attendant privileges and immunities, isn't a free market. It's a rigged game.
I don't oppose growth or success. I support unrestricted trade across international borders, and I support companies developing themselves internationally. But the fact is that corporate growth today isn't natural market growth. It's growth encouraged and enhanced by government-dispensed privilege. It's artificial, and it distorts rather than serves the market.
We need to restore justice to the system. Stockholders are owners, and should be liable for the consequences of that ownership like any other owners. I have no doubt that the market will come up with "portfolio insurance" to protect the stockholders from ruinous claims, but that in itself will provide a market check on unrestrained, unaccountable growth -- companies which act irresponsibly will find that their stockholders can't buy, or have to pay unreasonably high, insurance premiums, and therefore aren't interested in having the stock.
Corporations don't have rights and don't face consequences. People do. Tinkering with that has been disastrous. It's time to get back to full responsibility for individuals instead of government privilege for corporations.
Intellectual Property (Score:5, Interesting) by geoff313 (718010)
As the official Libertarian party candidate for president, where do you stand on the issue of intellectual property? Should it be considered the same as traditional property, or should IP be not subjected to the same protections that physical property is? And do you feel that your personal views on the subject reflect the views of the majority of the party itself, or is this an issue that has the potential to polarize your party much the same way that abortion does for the Democrats and Republicans?
I think the issue is moving too fast for true polarization within the Libertarian Party. Libertarians hold disparate views on intellectual property, but we also realize that it's an issue that will resolve itself as time goes on.
The Constitution empowers Congress to protect intellectual property with copyright and patent laws. Sans a constitutional amendment, they'll continue to grapple with the problems that the new technologies represent. And they'll probably make mistakes, like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
But, ultimately, the marketplace will decide how intellectual property is handled. The "file-sharing wars" are proving that. How much money have the older firms put into trying to pour new wine -- MP3s, CD burners, peer-to-peer networks -- into the old skins of copyright law? They've done some damage, but they've been completely ineffective in forcing the market into their preconceived notions of how it should operate.
I can't give you a more substantive answer about intellectual property. It's an issue that I've thought about a lot, but the only conclusion I've come to is that freedom will out -- and that we'll know what that freedom looks like when the smoke clears.
Induce our vote (Score:5, Interesting) by tod_miller (792541)
What are you views and hopes for privacy and security for the citizens of the internet age, and how do you proactively aim to safeguard and give back our rights that have been eroded away. (INDUCE act, PATRIOT act, et al)
I'm firmly on record as opposed to the PATRIOT Act and the INDUCE Act. As president, I'd veto those acts or renewals or extensions of them, and I'd direct the Justice Department not to avail themselves of their unconstitutional provisions and to fight them in court where necessary.
In the larger realm of privacy, it's already apparent to me that the good guys are going to triumph. Strong crypto, a robust movement to provide privacy solutions to ordinary people by the Free Software Movement and others, and ongoing resistance to invasions of privacy are winning the battle. It's just hard to see that right now, when there's so much blood on the floor.
As a politician, my job is to sign the surrender papers -- to get government to stop trying to ride roughshod over your rights. You're going to win either way. I'm just the candidate who recognizes that, who thinks it's a good thing, and who's ready to proclaim the ceasefire.
How do you enforce rights in an ownership society? (Score:5, Interesting) by zzyzx (15139)
As we've learned over the past few decades, free speech only applies to public property. Private owners can evict anyone they want for whatever reason. If there is no public property, how are free speech rights protected? Would there be any free speech rights at all in a Libertarian world for people who aren't well off enough to buy property?
You seem to be referring to what we call "real property" -- land. There are all kinds of property. The Internet connection I'm using to post these answers is my property in the sense that I have purchased that part of the bundle of rights attached to it for the purpose of sending my answers over it.
Even in a libertarian society where all property is privately owned, there will be distinct incentives for its owners to allow, even encourage, free speech. It's not a matter of me owning an acre and telling you that you can't talk there.
If I want sell you a piece of pen and paper, will you buy it if I say "you can't write a political tract on it?"
Will you buy your Internet service from me if I prohibit you from pointing your web browser at Slashdot?
And if I do either of those things, do you think it unlikely that you'll be able to find someone else to sell you those things without those restrictions?
In a libertarian society, more people will own more things than ever before. But owning something doesn't reduce it to a static, unchanging quantity. Things are used -- they're traded on the market -- and the desire to profit from doing so is the best guarantor of all that property owners will encourage free speech. It's just good business.
PATRIOT act (Score:5, Interesting) by keiferb (267153)
What's your view on the Patriot act? What, if any, parts do you think need to be changed, and why?
The whole thing needs to be repealed.
The PATRIOT Act removes the "governor" from the engine -- it lifts needed restrictions on the use of government power. It makes law enforcement and the bureaucracy unaccountable for their actions.
In my view, the bounds set by the Constitution are entirely compatible with the powers that law enforcement legitimately needs. Letting government run outside those bounds doesn't enhance our security -- it just compromises our liberty.
Where are we headed? (Score:5, Interesting) by QuantumRiff (120817)
Where do you see America in 5/10/15 years under its current leadership? Where do you see America in the same timeframe with you as the president? What broad steps will you take to get us there?
David Nolan, the founder of the Libertarian Party, is fond of pointing out that history seems to run in cycles of 70 years or so. We rebelled against the British and set up our own nation. 70 years later, we fought the War Between the States. 70 years after that, the Depression and the New Deal. If Nolan is right, and I don't find any fault in his logic, we're about at the end of a natural societal cycle. Barriers are breaking down and new things are coming.
To put it bluntly, I don't think that sticking with "our current leadership" is an option. Look at the questions you're asking me. Do we ditch the electoral college? How do we handle intellectual property? What about globalization? How do we reform our method of choosing those who govern? Those are questions that reflect a society in the throes of change.
As my friend L. Neil Smith puts it, "a great explosion is coming." As a matter of fact, we're right in the middle of it and it's hard to see what shape things are going to take when the smoke clears.
I see the next decade or so as a time of change, whether we like it or not. If Americans try to stick to the old way of doing things, the dislocation will last longer, be more disruptive and possibly tip us over into totalitarianism or some other nightmarish societal paradigm. If they adopt the libertarian way of doing things, it will be shorter, not as disruptive -- and usher in a better era to follow.
The broadest step I've taken is to run for the presidency. With the support of my party, I'm offering Americans a chance to peacefully transition back to policies that served America well for more than a century -- free trade, a non-interventionist foreign policy, minimal government, minimal taxes, maximum freedom -- rationalized into the paradigm of the 21st century.
If I'm elected, I'll do my utmost to implement those policies.
If the current leadership continues in power, they'll continue their efforts to snuff out what remains of American freedom in the name of national security, health security, job security, social security. They're offering you the security state. I'm offering you freedom.
War on Iraq and other dictatorships (Score:5, Interesting) by philipdl71 (160261)
Do you believe that the U.S. Government has the right to invade countries run by dictators like Saddam Hussein and liberate the people by establishing a free society even if those countries do not threaten the United States?
In a nutshell, how does the libertarian principle of non-initiation of force apply to foreign dictators? Who or what has the right to unseat these dictators?
If Iraq had posed a clear and present danger to the United States, and if Congress had declared war and thus empowered the president to act in the nation's defense, that would be one thing, although some of the corollaries to that action might still be problematic.
But Iraq didn't pose a clear and present danger to the United States. It didn't pose a danger to the United States at all. And the US has not, in fact, "liberated" the people of Iraq. They still have a dictator. For awhile, his name was Bremer. Now it's Allawi. And the US has the innocent blood of thousands of Iraqis and more than 1,000 of its own young men and women on its hands.
If you or I want to unseat or kill a thug like Saddam Hussein, we're morally free to do so. He's a tyrant and a murderer. We'd only be acting on behalf of his victims.
Once we bring other people unwillingly into the equation, it gets more complex. We don't have a right to kill the innocent. We don't have a right to pick our neighbors' pockets to finance the project. We don't have a right to conscript their children into our army, as some in Congress are now advocating.
As an aspiring president, my interests have to be the interests of the United States. As a Libertarian, my priority has to be pursuing those interests in a manner consistent with freedom and without initiating force -- against anyone.
One of the questions above mentions pragmatism, and this is an issue where it comes into play. From both a pragmatic and principled perspective, the best foreign policy is one of non-intervention: Refusing to interfere in the internal affairs of, or intervene in the disputes of, other nations. From a pragmatic perspective, it's the best approach for the security of the United States. From a principled perspective, it avoids violating the rights of others.
That doesn't mean that I have to like Saddam Hussein. It just means that the legitimate interests of the United states are not served, nor are the legitimate rights of Americans and Iraqis respected, by invading and occupying Iraq.
Nuclear proliferation (Score:5, Interesting) by SiliconEntity (448450)
What would you do about the spread of nuclear weapons and other WMDs? Iran is now working on the bomb while Europe wrings its hands. North Korea has the bomb. What is the Libertarian position? Would you ever support attacking Iran to prevent them from going nuclear?
I think the nuclear issue is somewhat overblown -- no pun intended.
The nuclear cat is out of the bag. That's the way it is. The world is therefore a more dangerous place, but let's not lose our heads.
If you look at history, only one country has ever used atomic or nuclear weapons in war. That country is the United States.
The Soviet Union had nuclear weapons and considered itself the arch-enemy of the US. Yet they never unleashed nuclear weapons on us. Ditto for China.
Pakistan and India have a history of 50 years of conflict. They're both nuclear powers. Yet they haven't used those arms. Israel has nuclear weapons, is surrounded by enemies and has had to fight for its very survival, yet has not used them.
The fact is that becoming a nuclear power entails a certain "growing up" on the part of nations. They suddenly realize that the stakes aren't a transient gain or a temporary loss, but the destruction of their entire nation. And so they keep those weapons as a deterrent and those weapons are never actually used.
I don't see any reason to believe that North Korea or Iran will be exceptions. They'll rattle their nuclear sabres to enhance their influence in their respective regions. They'll hold them up as a deterrent to attack by their enemies. But they won't just start popping nukes because they have them.
The real proliferation problem is the possibility that terrorists will acquire nuclear weapons. And the best solution, although not a perfect one, to that is to not give marginal nuclear powers reason to fear us and to want to support those terrorists.
The Environment (Score:5, Interesting) by Sotogonesu (705553)
Mr. Badnarik, I see that the Environment didn't make your web site's issues list. If elected, what would you do to help preserve the planet?
Actually, there's a section on my web site which specifically addresses environmental concerns:
http://www.badnarik.org/Why/Environmentalists.php
I also have a new position paper on these issues. It just hadn't made it up on the campaign site yet when you asked the question. Here's a URL for it at the League of Women Voters' site:
http://www.congress.org/congressorg/e4/dnets/?sid=103952&id=119699
The short answer to your question is that I'd work to get the government out of the business of polluting, selling "rights" to pollute and protecting polluters from suits for damage. I'd also work to get wilderness lands into the hands of private groups who want to preserve them.
Privatizing Education (Score:5, Interesting) by EvilJello203 (749510)
The Libertarian Party platform advocates separation of education and state. How would you go about reforming the nation's educational system without a massive disruption to a student's schoolwork?
I don't think that a transition from government schooling to market schooling would be particularly disruptive in that respect. "Public" education has been such an unmitigated disaster that most children would almost immediately be well ahead of where they had been when the transition took place.
Ever since the inception of government schooling in the 19th century under Horace Mann, the US has been on a downward trend in literacy, numeracy and science learning. Sometimes that trend is briefly halted, but it always continues. To the extent that there might be some mild upheaval, it seems to me that the more quickly we exit the downward spiral, the shorter the climb back up will be.
What's your position on outsourcing/immigration? (Score:5, Interesting)
by Whatsmynickname (557867)
What's your position on illegal immigration and/or outsourcing? I would think a libertarian would say "keep the gov't out of it". However, at some point, doesn't having too much of either outsourcing or illegal immigration ultimately impact our national socio-economic stability?
We have two -- actually three -- separate issues here. I'll handle outsourcing first.
Capital migrates to where it is most profitably invested. That's just a fact of the market. If I can get a 10% return in Country A and a 25% return in Country B, you know where I'll be investing.
We can deal with that reality, or we can fight it. If we fight it, we'll lose. The future is not in trying to restrict trade or outlaw outsourcing -- it's in allowing innovation and competition, and in removing government impediments, like high taxes and expensive regulation, to keeping jobs here.
When a particular job or skill _does_ move offshore, all other things being equal, it merely frees Americans -- the most productive workers in the world -- to develop the NEXT job or skill or to come up with a more efficient, profitable way of providing the old one. And those innovations are make us the wealthiest country in the world. Instead of wondering where our jobs sewing soles on shoes went, we should be looking to what we can do that the sewing machine operator in Korea CAN'T do yet.
People also migrate to where they can make the most for their labor. Once again, that's just a fact of the market. One can hardly expect a Mexican agricultural laborer to work for $2.00 a day in Guadalajara when he can make $8.00 an hour in the San Joaquin Valley.
And, once again, we can deal with that reality or we can fight it -- and if we fight it, we'll lose.
Legal immigration is a net economic benefit to our country. The fact that workers come here to pick our crops, work in our poultry plants, -- even take coding jobs at computer firms -- lowers the cost of the goods and services we buy, and frees us up to pursue ever more profitable opportunities. That may be cold comfort to a particular worker who's just been sent home while an Indian on an H-2 visa sits down at his old workstation, but it's a fact. If that worker hadn't come to the job, the job would have gone to him via outsourcing -- or it would have gone undone because the profit margin was unattractive by comparison to other investments in labor.
I advocate lifting all restrictions on peaceful immigration. Immigration is not something we can stop. We might as well get the benefit of it instead of tying ourselves into knots fighting it.
This brings up the third issue: Borders. Some people believe that lifting immigration restrictions implies "open borders." That's like saying that an invitation to my house means it's okay for you to crawl through my bedroom window at four in the morning.
Immigrants should be welcome to come here -- as long as they're willing to come in through the front door. They should enter the US through a Customs and Immigration checkpoint, identify themselves, and let us verify that they aren't terrorists or criminals.
People who come across our borders at remote locations under cover of darkness, when they were free to enter through the front door, aren't immigrants. They're invaders. Illegal immigration creates an industry of "coyotes" to guide people across, and it provides cover for the non-peaceful -- terrorists and criminals -- to enter the country.
The border is a national security feature. I propose to treat it as such. In tandem with lifting immigration restrictions, I'd free our military to defend the border against invaders. And those invaders would no longer have a place to hide among real immigrants, or an underlying infrastructure of support for getting them across, because the peaceful immigrants would be entering legitimately.
Thanks for the chance to respond to Slashdot's members. It's been a pleasure!
Michael Badnarik debates David Cobb (the Green Party presidential candidate) on C-SPAN
I support all his views (I don't) or would vote for him (still thinking about where my vote is best placed), there is definitely some well thought out answers to these questions. Is it just me or does he sound better than either Bush or Kerry? Though I suppose he has to, being the underdog means being the one that needs the louder voice to be heard...
...in bed
Badnarik has no argument why we should vote for him in 2008 except "I'm not Hillary Clinton". Is this any way to run a presidential campaign?
Definition of a Democrat
Walking along a beach he sees a man drowning 20 yards off shore. A democrat will throw a 20 yard line to the man and walk away to do another good deed.
Definition of a Republican
Walking along the same shore, throws the man a 10 yard rope and holds the end. Expects the man to after all save himself!
Definition of a Libiterian
Same shore. No rope. Dives in to help.
drowns both of them.
He is the best sailor who can steer within fewest points of the wind, and exact a motive power out of the greatest obsta
Interesting chap, I'll give him that.
You want to know who isn't running Firefox 2.x? They spell it "definately" and "rediculous".
Because those groups would pay so much more than those would would drill for oil, or dump garbage, or build massive hotels, etc.
Thanks for the laugh!
I fully support Badnarik, and I even placed a banner(even though I hate flash) on my site supporting him. The best thing we can do is promote something other than the 2 party system and Mr. Badnarik is what America needs.
He wants to government out of our lives as much as possible and that is what we need. Our nation was started with a system of checks and balances, and the last 2 administrations(2 different parties) have stripped away many of the liberties we used to enjoy under the ruse of "protecting intellectual property"(dmca) and "terrorism"(patriot et al).
Please vote for him. We need the percentages to go up to convince people to vote outside of the 2 party system. He may not win this time but if he gets more and more and more, it may become a 3 party system.
Don't look at it as throwing away your vote, but rather as placing your vote with the person that you agree with. It's not a horse race; you don't have to bet on the winner, but rather choose who you would like to see in office the most and let the counts fall where they may.
</rant>
Chris
I'll own everything, and use my absolute power to install a sane political system with public property. Bo-yeah!
Too bad he has no, and never will have any, real power
I was reading yesterday, from before the 2000 election:
"My vote for Nader will send the people of this country a strong message: George Bush is a bad president."
How true that came to be (along with "Our Long Era of Peace and Prosperity is Finally Over").
Sigh....
Wow, that's a small state, but one that's the most libertarian (at least by reputation). Too bad. At least they are on in Texas (I signed the petition). - Hook 'em
--- http://davidnehme.blogspot.com
Unlike Kerry, and even unlike Bush-- Bush at least had a couple of years in a weak governorship-- Badnarik has no political experience whastoever, only two failed attempts at running for the Texas State House of Representatives.
This is the general problem with third party candidates. They tend to offer amenable political views, but no solid evidence of leadership, capability to serve in a political office, or past track record we can use to judge how they actually act when in political power.
But then again seeing as Badnarik won't concievably be winning this election, I guess how he'd actually do in office shouldn't factor into your decision whether or not to vote for him... right?
Sorry.
From this position paper on Industrial Hemp:
while the government contends that hemp can be useful as camouflage for marijuana growth, even laymen can easily distinguish between the two.
Are you going to provide the funds for the manpower required to manually search help fields? You can't exactly fly airplanes/helicopters over the area and expect to make easy identification without some on the ground work.
Raw hempseed oil can be used, without any modification, to power diesel engines.
Yeah, I have heard it can. It supposedly is a lot more efficient than canola/vegetable oil. First big problem I see is that not many respectable news outlets are promoting this fuel alternative. Google returns a page of hits that includes many sites showing off hemp leaves as their backgrounds.
As your President, I would open the way for free-market exploration and exploitation of industrial hemp. I'd veto legislation funding enforcement of laws against it, and I'd lobby Congress to repeal those laws.
We live in a time that supports conservative views and this would certainly not go over well. You won't get into the White House with this on your ticket and you certainly wouldn't win anything if you ever got there. As someone mentioned on a different thread: put a frog in boiling water and they will jump right out but put that same frog in cold water and slowly raise the temperature...
Honestly, if you want some advice... Tell me what you are going to fix and exactly how you are going to fix it. Do not gloss over important issues with a simple "I am going to do X for the American public!" It doesn't hold water anymore. We have heard enough bullshit fluff from the main parties. You aren't going to walk into the White House and successfully veto anti-Hemp legislation. Tell me how you are going to get Congress and the rest of the public to support your ideas.
Give me something to believe in other than the typical 10 word canned lines. You would get my vote if your plans were thorough and possible.
Considering that the public education system in other Western countries is much better than the United States', I have to wonder if removing it entirely is the right approach. Making it non-compulsatory would remove the people who don't want to be there, yes. It'd also make it easier to permanantly kick people out who are disruptive. Yet it won't necessarily do much to change the fact that we've already gone through at least several generations of public education, with most of our current teachers having been in it themselves. We wouldn't really see much of an improvement for at least a generation or two, if that, IMHO.
US businesses that currently accept chip and PIN/signature
He says people are ready for radical change. If that is the fact why doesn't his party get > 1% in the general election? They need to skip the national elections and work from local elections up. A top down approach doesn't work (a la trickle down). They need some more state representatives, govenorships and congresscritters first. President is a stretch.
Definition of a Green Party member
Walking along a beach he sees a man drowning 20 yards off shore, so he immediately drops whatever he was doing to protest the ocean
that they're not on the ballot in NH. Wasn't that their proposed "free-state" that they were to (or are?) colinize?
this party will never come to power because of our current voting system. the libertarianism ideas are so far from Democrats and Republicans, that the necessary changes to the voting system that would allow them to be contenders will never see the light of day. He nails it right on the head when he says they don't want to give up their shared monopoly. I disagree with his "wasted vote" comments. Any libertarian vote right now IS a wasted vote, there's no question. >2 party voting must start with a reform of the voting system. then you should consider other parties. But for now, get rid of the puppet and puppeteer in office because it's despicable what they've done.
I know I'm going to be modded up on this
Anyone have a reference for this?
I don't agree with him on all the issues, but he's damned sure a better advocate for the Libertarian party than the average /.'er.
You've given me some things to seriously think about, Mr. Badnarik. Thanks!
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
I'm sure a lot of Republicans have more in common with Badnarik's "The market can and will solve all problems" approach than the the Bush administration's combination of big-spending on unnecessary conflicts, corporate welfare for drug companies, and violation of our individual liberties. I would encourage those of you who are Republicans to take a good look at Badnarik.
If the Libertarian Party's main platform is real freedom, then does that mean that spamming would be legal?
Opera Watch - An Opera browser blog.
Please, mark this as flamebait, libertarians can't handle reality. Thanks.
2 years and no mod points. Join reddit. Because openness is good.
Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, says that runoff voting will necessarily be unfair in one of 5 different ways. However, just about any runoff voting scheme would be more fair than the Australian ballot, which by design keeps anyone from voting for a third party.
I guess that depends on the ideology ;-)
You have to like a Presidential candidate who uses a winkey smiley.
-Colin
We could continue with the current system wherein the groups who want to tear our wilderness lands apart are allowed to do so for free
It has been this way forever. We have two parties, and they don't want any competition. My feeling is anyone who can get X signatures on a petition should be put on a ballot. In some ways, getting on a ballot should be just as important a right as the right to vote, otherwise we are like China when they have free elections, but only one candidate.
Having said that, I would never vote for a libertarian. They fail to see one aspect of humanity. Power corrupts. There is greed. If left unchecked, the powerful will enslave the rest of us. It is human nature. For example, around the time of the revolution 1% of the USA population owned 10% of all wealth, today that 1% owns over 40% of all wealth. There is something wrong when wealth can be concentrated into so few people, that the rest of the USA is left with less. Someone mentioned earlier that the previous generation could survive with one income. Today many families need two incomes to make ends meet.
Come and say hi. http://forum.penpals.com/index.php
The fact is that they both support the war in Iraq. They both oppose gun rights. They both supported the PATRIOT Act.
So the guy doesn't think we should continue the war against terrorism, he's not for any gun restriction, and he thinks we can just ignore that, yes, terrorist cells are/were operating in this country.
Third parties aren't marginalized because of some collusion by the major parties. They're marginalized because they're radicals out of touch with the American will. (Well, that and the major parties to a great job of co-opting any legitimate issue the smaller party might have, which is really how democracy works.)
I'd also work to get wilderness lands into the hands of private groups who want to preserve them.
That sounds like government intervention. Who decides which private group really wants to preserve a wilderness? What if they are just lying about wanting to preserve it? What if the private group that does not want to preserve it offers the most money for it?
Looks like really preseving a wilderness area would require government intervention and regulation. Which goes against this party's policies.
Are you going to provide the funds for the manpower required to manually search hemp fields? You can't exactly fly airplanes/helicopters over the area and expect to make easy identification without some on the ground work.
Don't they have to do this already with, say, wheat, or corn?
Industrial Hemp and marijuana are different plants. You tell whether industrial hemp growers are growing marijuana in the same way you tell whether any other piece of farmland in the U.S. is growing marijuana.
This is where he completely lost me. Despite the flawed list of "similarities" that he presents, it's more than obvious to anyone who even casually follows current events that the two major parties have quite different views as to the direction this country should be headed in.
Badnarik loses all credibility with me when he throws this tired line out there, which is clearly just a lame attempt to defeat the "wasted vote" scenario.
>> "What would the robut do? Frame someone!"
I think you meant "...to protest against littering the ocean."
See the Political Compass for a visual representation of where Michael Badnarik actually stands. Their quiz will also place you visually, and from reading their FAQ it really sounds like they have an appreciation for statistics, be that what it may.
Also found in the FAQ is an interesting tidbit about Americans and our seemingly skewed idea of just what a libertarian is (they are Brits):
You can't be libertarian and left wing
This is almost exclusively an American response, overlooking the undoubtedly libertarian tradition of European anarcho-syndicalism. It was, after all, the important French anarchist thinker Proudhon who declared that property is theft.
On the other side of the Atlantic, the likes of Emma Goldman were identified as libertarians long before the term was adopted by some economic rightwingers. And what about the libertarian collectives of the mid-late 1800s and 1960s?
Americans like Noam Chomsky can claim the label 'libertarian socialist' with the same validity that Milton Friedman can be considered a 'libertarian capitalist'.
The assumption that Social Darwinism delivers more social freedom is questionable. The welfare states of, for example, Sweden and The Netherlands, abolished capital punishment decades ago and are at the forefront of progressive legislation for women, gays and ethnic minorities - not to mention anti-censorship. Such established social democracies consistently score highest in the widely respected Freedom House annual survey on civil liberties. Their detailed checklist can be viewed at http://www.worldaudit.org/civillibs.htm . Similar social developments would presumably be envied by genuine libertarians in socially conservative countries - even if their taxes are lower.
Interestingly, many economic libertarians express to us their support for or indifference towards capital punishment; yet the execution of certain citizens is a far stronger assertion of state power than taxation.
N.B. The death penalty is practised in all seriously authoritarian states. In Eastern Europe it was abolished with the fall of communism and adoption of democracy. The United States is the only western democracy where capital punishment is still practised.
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
What a horrendous idea. It's not enough that a shareholder lose their investment. They have to lose their house as well.
Although this might improve accountability, this would drive the small investor right out of the stock market.
Adding to the problem is the arbitrariness of law suit damages that are now being awarded. They often have no relation to the actual damage done. There is no way an investor can accurately assess the risk.
One thing that constrains law suits is that you can't get a billion dollars out of a million dollar company. Removing limited liability, so that the lawyers can sue the shareholders, would make the Oklahoma land rush look like a trickle.
Since your name is Badnarik, I'm assuming you're not George W. Bush. Is that correct?
Yes? Ok. You've got my vote.
I don't know much about Libertarians, but what exactly do they suggest we do after we pull our troops back home out of half-ass-baked countries?
Build really tall walls along the borders?
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
I was planning to vote for Kerry or Alfred E Neuman (whats the difference?). I want Kerry to win over Bush but being in MD, its pretty likely that Kerry will murder him here so I may as well vote my conscience.
I was not too sure about you since I had not seen any Ads and have not been very active in watching the LP as opposed to last election when I voted for Spear Lancaster for governor.
Your views on the unnecesary protection afforded to corporations is a 100% match for my view on the matter. In fact your words were almost precisley the same that I wrote in an essay recently arguing that corporations are by nature unnaccountable sociopaths.
I will be voting Badnarik for President.
It is a horse race, and I'm not going to throw away my vote by blinding myself to the realities of the situation. I along with Badnarik would also support approval voting, and giving third parties more of a voice, but it isn't going to happen before November 2nd.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I think that Mr. Badnarik's agenda is not correct for this (or any) country.
Certainly there needs to be some sort of structure implemented by the people to govern themselves. While I do believe that both the Democrats and Republicans are (for the most part) greedy, corrupt and power-hungry, I don't think that a radical Libertarian agenda is correct. What we need is enlightened leadership, which acts in the interest of the people.
Let's face it; our society has many, many problems, not only with education, but with outsourcing, distribution of wealth, government invasions of privacy . . . anyone could go on for hours. The simple fact is that this country needs leadership which is interested in working hard to solve those problems.
The Democrats won't do it, neither will the Republicans, but I'd rather see a slightly stronger government that imposes some regulation and control over corporations, rather than a government that is so powerless that it cannot act in the public interest (which is what I believe would be the case under a Libertarian leadership.)
In the end, it's all about balance.
Badnarik wrote:
I have to tell you that I'm skeptical of electoral college reform at the federal level. Yes, the system has flaws, but I haven't seen any alternative proposals that don't have serious flaws themselves.
How about one person, one vote? Too democratic for you?
Also, he wrote:
Going to a straight popular vote would, perversely, represent the end of American democracy.
This is why I (a former Libertarian myself) say that the Libertarian Party is just a more extreme version of the GOP.
Also:
Candidates would be inclined to cater to a few urban areas where they can buy the most votes for their buck (or their promise), effectively disenfranchising rural voters. To the extent that the presidency is a representative office, it should represent Peoria and Birmingham as much as it represents New York and Los Angele.
Why not just have the president represent PEOPLE? Too democratic? Oh, the horror....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
I have only ONE beef with the libertarian party (not going to mention it here), however, this guy's well thought our responses are a clear indication of WHY he will not be invited to the debates. George Kerry, and John Bush wouldn't have a clue how to respond to thoughtful answers.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
They're pretty much all over the board when it comes to issues like that.
One of the questions above mentions pragmatism, and this is an issue where it comes into play. From both a pragmatic and principled perspective, the best foreign policy is one of non-intervention: Refusing to interfere in the internal affairs of, or intervene in the disputes of, other nations. From a pragmatic perspective, it's the best approach for the security of the United States. From a principled perspective, it avoids violating the rights of others.
There is definitely something to be said for this approach.
Unfortunately, it allows things like the genocide going on in Sudan right this minute to continue.
This is the NFL, which stands for "Not For Long" if you keep making those bulls*** calls.
... But first, teach him that to start with a fish smaller than a great white shark.
... he'll still have to get his proposals through Congress.
I could buy into a lot of what the Libertarian Party has to say. I realize that a lot of it only borderline practical for the real world, but I *could* buy into it to see what it's realization would look like.
Unfortunately, the Libertarian Party (and other third parties) consistently go about their goals the wrong way. If America truly is ripe for change, then the Libertarian Party should be working from the ground up. Start with the local/state governments. The worse consequence of Ross Perot and Jesse Ventura's quasi-success is that the Libertarian Party still hasn't figured out that once it controls mayors, county councils, and governors, it'll always be a fringe movement.
I mean, let's say we do end with a Libertarian President in 2004, somehow
Were actually invited to the Cobb-Badnarik debate linked in the grandparent post, but for some reason declined to come.
If self-made ballots were better than the Australian ballot, who gives a crap if the third-pary/Independent candidates are on the ballot or not? What's wrong with write-in?
I'm going to vote for this man. It's very interesting to me that he used the term "surrender" in regard to what he wants the government to do.
"As a politician, my job is to sign the surrender papers -- to get government to stop trying to ride roughshod over your rights. You're going to win either way. I'm just the candidate who recognizes that, who thinks it's a good thing, and who's ready to proclaim the ceasefire."
That is exactly what I want from my government. If my government is not at war with me against my rights, if it's a government of the people (of which I'm one), by the people (of which I'm one), and for the people (of which I'm one), then it ought to surrender to the people.
Here's where it gets interesting. I think the US should adopt a white as its official flag, thus officially signifying this surrender. This is not a sign of weakness. It is the beginning of strength. It shows that we are all connected citizens with nothing in between us except our own behavior towards others.
If that means that it also has to fly a white flag to other nations and surrender to them, then so be it. I want liberty for me, my people, and all the people in the world, and will not sacrifice this because of my fear of the stranger. This whole "nationalistic paradigm" is so intellectually shallow it's a joke, much like "tribalism" and "racism". We should have moved on by now. We should have directed our efforts to more productive and noble aims of the human species and civilization than advancing one particular nation at a time.
May the world surrender, at once to one another.
Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
... so you don't like the guy because his party would eventually legalize it and all your kids would grow up to get strung out on the heathen-devil-marijuana-weed ...
Well, he's better than Nader...
> we eliminate the Fed's monopoly on currency provision
> repeal PATRIOT act
This guy is a true popularist, he promises people what they want even though there is no chance of realizing the promises. Well, there is also no chance of getting elected, so that's even :)
His most interesting stance is the elimination of the IRS. How could they not have asked the legal issues surrounding the elimination of taxes and why he personally doesn't pay. Ugggh!
Are you going to provide the funds for the manpower required to manually search help fields? You can't exactly fly airplanes/helicopters over the area and expect to make easy identification without some on the ground work.
Shall we ban bleached flour, because it resembles cocaine? Aspirin because it resembles Xanax?
C'mon, Bill -- you know this is a logical dead-end.
-Waldo Jaquith
Someone who is supposedly about the empowerment of individuals and the removal of archaic government "filters" between people and government goes on record supporting the ELECTORAL COLLEGE?!?
Oh, it'd be the end of American demoracy as we know it, he says. Candidates would spend more effort on New York than on Peoria! "Tyranny of the majority" is a problem in any democracy. The electoral college simply replaces it with "tyrrany of the minority" -- which, in my opinion, is worse.
Yeah, god forbid a large group of people has more influence in a democracy than a small group of people. That would never happen in a democracy!
Other than that, he actually sounds surprisingly good (esp. regarding the Iraq war, etc). Nevertheless, he's just not going to win. I could vote for him to feel good about myself for not voting for either major party pro-war candidate, but I'd achieve the same thing by simply staying home and not voting.
If you or I want to unseat or kill a thug like Saddam Hussein, we're morally free to do so. He's a tyrant and a murderer. We'd only be acting on behalf of his victims.
Does this mean that he'd repeal the (not so carefully followed) US policy of not assassinating foreign leaders?
All in all, he sounds pretty intelligent.
Fellowship 9/11
in presidential elections, and turnout in local or congressional-only elections is even less.
I am not sure that you can meaningfully say what the "American Will" is just based on who's been voted into office.
How, exactly, do you propose the president represent people? By voting on something/anything and letting the popular vote win? Okay, the problem with that system is that people typically vote for what's best FOR THEM. That means that state/federal funds would go to the majority population/areas, and the minorities would get NOTHING. Farm subsidies? Screw that. Minority rights? Screw that too. Unless you're a member of the majority, living where the majority typically lives, you're gonna get fucked.
--trb
Who's being naïve here? Do you really think those companies are more afraid of the FDA than they are of ruinous lawsuits? The FDA is a captive agency, it shields them from liability and leaves them far less afraid to screw up and kill people. On top of that, take away the ridiculous immunities vested in corporations qua corporations, as Badnarik discusses above, and you're talking about a situation where the consequences would be far more deterrence than anything the FDA could ever provide.
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I thought you said he "answered".
"When the smoke clears" "When I'm elected my job will be to fight for change"
blah blah blah
Same shit, brand new bag from the Gap.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I think this is the general problem with politics today. We seem to think its the norm to have a career politician. I think the founding fathers would have intended a baker, a butcher, a sailor, and a bank owner to all be equally feasible politicians. These individuals don't like something so they say their ideas and if people like what they say the office selects the person. The way we have it now, the politician(which is a valid "career") looks around for offices that he/she is likely to win and they go for it.
Example: In the old days Americans,"founding fathers" decided that George Washington would be a good president. Washinton wasn't really interested in the position but support for him to become president was just so overwhelming that he was forced to take office. This is how we find a good president someone who gets the position not because they dog it relentlessly in order to gain power and influence but a person who solemnly accepts it because Americans demand that this person have the job.
This notion that experience matters is utter crap what we are doing is just facilitating the current power structure and making it harder and harder to affect meaningful change. If you want someone to continue giving us the status quo with no innovation and no passion for the position continue to select someone with "experience" I however will not.
Of course, the "major" parties don't approve of anything that might threaten to break their shared monopoly on power. That's why they've instituted the Australian ballot and draconian ballot access laws.
Not entirely. The Australian ballot is important in order to have a secret ballot. In the age of party-printed ballots (where you would put the party's ballot into the box), you could be observed putting a ballot that was clearly belonging to one party or another into the box.
If you want a secret ballot, then they can't be distinguishable. This does present a problem of ballot access (since now we have the government printing the ballots, and therefore, determining who will be on it when it comes time to print them), but I think that this can be rectified without compromising secrecy. For example, we could merely have a deadline, which was the last possible date to go to press and print enough ballots, and let anyone on who who was eligible, if they filed prior to the deadline (probably in October). And permit write ins for anyone that missed the deadline.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
One more question, you state that you would remove our tr oops slowlyfrom Iraq. But what if the new elected government asked you to provide troops to help with protection. Would it make sense to offer the troops, maybe request that Iraq attempt to help with some of a cost, on a purly humanitarian side. Afterall we did destroy their country we do have an obligation to help.
Is there any plan in the works for interviews with other 3rd party or major Candidates?
Mikey
I've always been the kinda guy to fall for the girl dressed like an eskimo.
We could argue all day about whether Bush or Kerry is the "lesser evil." The fact is that they both support the war in Iraq.
I might've voted for him if he didn't lie like that.
Just a cursory look at the two candidate's views on the war show that their support differs quite a bit. Such a smart man as Badnarik, as evidenced by his other answers, should see that. Too bad he chose to lie.
It's actually in the constitution. THAT is what our representatives are really supposed to be doing --promoting the GENERAL welfare.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Convince me, then. Why should I trust the same government that has conducted secret syphilis and radiation studies to watch over the food I eat?
A hard-core libertarian might call you naive for apparently believing that government is more trustable than private industry. Instead, let's all grow up and acknowledge that things are complicated and that people (gasp!) can have different views without needing at least one of them to be stupid.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
The Fork in the Road: A Political Morality Play in One Act
MORTAR COMBAT!
My plan for Iraq is a 90-day phased withdrawal concentrating on the physical security of the troops.
Didn't the US get skewered for doing this after the first gulf war? And in Afganistan? Which is what lead to the rise of the Taliban. Which led to 9/11. How is this not repeating bad decisions which, as we can see from history, will lead to bad consequences?
I flirted with libertarianism when I was in college, but soon realized the fundamental problem with it: all success is predicated on people behaving a certain way, a way which 10,000 years of human experience shows is antithetical to human nature. (This by the way, is true of many ideologies - communism, facsim, etc.) As an example, the libertarian view on pollution (in a nutshell) is that government should not be involved. The marketplace will triumph because people collectively will boycott companies that pollute, and individually sue companies that pollute their specific air or land. But how does word get out that a specific company is polluting? Easy enough to make sure newspapers and television that do this kind of investigative reporting don't get ad dollars - under libertarianism there would be nothing to prevent corporations generating a blacklist of media outlets to kill. And if a multibillion dollar corporation says, "hey, my twenty highly paid scientific experts say that pollution didn't come from my drainpipe", how does a $30K/year individual marshall a lawsuit against them? Especially if it is legal for the corporation to call in favors from other corporations and have that individual fired, their mortgage forclosed, their health insurance dropped, and their kids kicked out of school. Public approbation? How does the individual talk to "The Public"? If a few people do get wind of it, the polluters will run some happiness-and-fluff commercials about how they really care about the environment and are working hard every day to protect it, and any tiny disturbance in their bottom line will be reversed (anyone else remember those bizarre 1970's era commercials that showed a thoughtful, intelligent Mom making sure her kids got only the nutritionally best snacks: Hostess Twinkies"?)
Bottom line of the libertarians: "Well, if people aren't willing to fight for something, then the market has decided, and they have to accept the consequences." The problem with that is the little guy did figure out a way to fight the big corporations without having to spend all day every day monitoring and coordinating. A strong representational government. But the first thing the libertarians want to see killed is that government.
Just this one statement told me I never need to listen to this guy again:
Ever since the inception of government schooling in the 19th century under Horace Mann, the US has been on a downward trend in literacy, numeracy and science learning. Sometimes that trend is briefly halted, but it always continues. To the extent that there might be some mild upheaval, it seems to me that the more quickly we exit the downward spiral, the shorter the climb back up will be.
This begs to differ. If you are going to argue against public education, AT LEAST get your facts straight. The fact that he was willing to make stuff up just to promote what he already "knew" from his ideology proves to me his absolute worthlesness as a candidate. I think it also says something for the Libertarian movement as a whole. Their whole argument is based on, "Well if a happens b is bound to happen" ignoring conditions c,d, and f. Politics has plenty of room for ideology, but I think that Badnarick needs a heavy dose of pragmatism before he will influence large amounts of people.
Monstar L
I know it's -1, Redundant, but I just wanted to say that this is the closest to honest politics we're ever going to get.
I'm voting for Badnarik. His answers were 50 times better than anything I've heard from the Big Two, who seem to be avoiding the issues with everything they've got.
What have you been smoking? That is the fundamental insight behind Libertarianism.
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I don't know. He seemed to avoid the issues presnted to him in a couple of places.
This question:
How do you enforce rights in an ownership society? (Score:5, Interesting) by zzyzx
Was right to the heart of things and well placed as just a few questions ahead Badnarik had just spoken rather ambiguously about his position on copyright.
Badnarik went from saying it was too early to say what was right in the copyright game to switching around and talking about how important intellectual property was comparing it to the importance of real property as though the latter was a minor point in comparison. Then, to top it off, instead of addressing this glaring issue about how a Libertarian government would protect free speech, he trails off talking about how the market will take care of it. Huh?
Then a few questions later he says that literacy in the US has declined dramatically since the nineteenth century. Wow. I wonder where he got that statistic. Whodda thunk?
I thought I had heard that the LP was growing fast, and that is the case at City and State level, but browsing around on the web for a while turned up very little in the way of National-level statistics.
http://www.my5minutes.com/. com/thumbnails.php?album=sea rch&type=full&search=constitution
http://www.my5minutes
(Use http://www.bugmenot.com to login)
They have a 7 hour (in 1 hour segments) lecture he (Badnarik) gave on the constitution in 2001. You can really see some of the things he believes as well as a really insightful look into the constitution.
Do you really think those companies are more afraid of the FDA than they are of ruinous lawsuits?
Ok so we rely on companies to police themselves. Economic times are good. Then a downturn happens, costs are cut. Hmm, take a loss or cut your testing costs banking on your history of safety. So the company cuts testing, release a bad batch, people die, they file a class action lawsuit and the company gets in line.. Times are good then they get bad, rinse repeat. Corporations don't have memories when it comes to the bottom line.
The FDA is inadequate in a lot of ways but public health is essential and at odds with profit maximization. Companies don't want to divulge whatever their drugs/foods are made up of if it impacts their bottom line, and if you say "Ok, you really should do this, if not we'll sue you!" then that's not really a good guarantee as a consumer. As a consumer I'd like my tax money spent on a stamp of quality.
2 years and no mod points. Join reddit. Because openness is good.
Unfortunately, what the LP (of which I am a member) seems to gloss over, is that the Constitution mandates certain restrictions on trade. Specifically, Copyright and Patents and government issued and backed monopolies on certain goods, methods and properties.
Also, it is quite difficult for "free trade" unless ALL parties participate. We can't have free trade with the likes of China, because of massive subsidation. Not to mention other, less developed markets would not be able to trade "freely" with us because until those markets develop (with gov't subsidation) they would be crushed out of existence.
"Free" isn't going to be "fair", though there is no law in nature about "fair". The bigger guy almost always wins.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I didn't know the war in Iraq had anything to do with terrorism. I thought it was about going after WMDs that were in the hands of Sadam Hussein
I didn't know that opposing the PATRIOT act was tantamount to ignoring terrorist cells. The powers of the PATRIOT act certainly would not have caught the 9/11 killers.
I'm afraid that I don't understand your quip about gun rights, or I'd come up with some wise ass remarks about that too.
I agree it's not a horse race. The top 2 are both jackasses!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
If the "wasted vote" argument ever held any water, it doesn't any more. The two major parties have moved toward a weird, non-existent "center" for the last 50 years, to the point where it's difficult to tell them apart.
I parroted that stance almost word-for-word while explaining why I didn't vote in the last election. Gore and Bush, in my mind, were as different as John Jackson and Jack Johnson on Futurama (by which I mean, not at all). I figured that any candidate that could survive to the presidental level had to be so generic as to be indistinguishable from his opponent.
The past four years have proven me very wrong! Regardless of whether or not you think Bush's radical right policy shifts are good, it's hard to argue that had Gore taken power, that things wouldn't be very different.
So I am viewing this election in a different light. I don't like either choice, but at least now I realize that there is one.
Here is one person that pretty much always voted for a single party and I'm done with both Republicans and Democrats. They are both so screwed up it is unbelievable. The supporters of both sides are beyond belief. So, the 3rd party will be getting 40 odd years of a +1 vote from me across the board. Too bad the typical slashdoter is too scared that his own party will loose if they vote their minds. This has got to be the two worse major choices for president that has ever existed.
Privatise the FDA and companies will rely on people dieing from lethal drugs and the class action lawsuits in order to get themselves together. When economic downtimes occur they will cut their testing costs and more will die until lawsuits keep them in line again.
Possibly. Or maybe...
Time to market for new medications would be reduced, saving many lives that would be otherwise lost while the FDA enforced ridiculous regulations and trial procedures which, by the way, also drive up the cost of R&D and ultimately increase the cost for the consumer.
Not to mention the liklihood that companies whose products had a reputation for killing its test subjects with experimental drugs would soon lose their supply of those willing to be test subjects, thus hampering their R&D and ultimately driving them out of business.
The government isn't perfect but the libertarian view of the world is naive.
Maybe "idealistic" is a better word than "naive." To me, libertarianism is basically natural selection with the idea of respect for personal property added in. And whether we like it or not, natural selection is ultimately going to win out over any other systems we try to impose. If you don't believe me, ask the dinosaurs.
But I guess I could be wrong...
"He hated Mexicans, and he was half Mexican. AND he hated irony!"
I figure if he is in more than 48 states anyway...
if we could use the Slashdot effect to affect change in our federal goverment?
Thats misleading. They have only been nuclear powers for 3 or 4 years (seems like it was 2001 they conducted their tests).
The justification that no-one will use nuclear weapons because they don't want to lose their country only applies to people who are not going to lose their country in another way or even have a country. NK could easily give a nuke to someone without a country. And as Iraq and Afghanistan have demonstrated, people lose their countries for reasons other than using nuclear weapons, (and more over nuclear proliferation coupld effectively keep any country from causing regime change anywhere under the fear of a nuclear retaliation from the soon-to-be countryless. Also, it would only take one country acting irrationally to set off a large nuclear war. And it's my opinion that smaller countries are more likely to act irrationally.
I do security
You obviously live in New York or California, not Kansas or New Mexico. The electoral college does and has done just exactly what it was designed to do.
99% of all statistics are made up on the spot. -- Bruce Karsh
This may come across as a troll or flamebait, but it's not.
To some extent (for better or worse), a I wonder if a candidate with a last name like "Badnarik" can win.
I mean, it's got "BAD" in it, and it's what I'll call "vaguely foreign sounding". Not that you can really point at a name and call it "American sounding".
Most celebrities seem to either have easy-to-handle names, or choose stage names that are easier to wrap your head around. And let's face it, a candidate has to be *popular* if they're to be elected, so there ARE some parallels there.
Someone will undoubtedly point to Arnold (heck, I can't even spell his last name) as a counterexample. But, remember that he and his name gained fame before he entered the political arena; Mike Badnarik has to try to get brand recognition along the way, rather than having some already availble to cash in on.
Xentax
You shouldn't verb words.
The border is a national security feature.
It's not a bug, it's a feature!
What you're doing here is the standard pseudo-intellectual put-down, and what it shows it that you're too lazy to consider a proposal that doesn't fit your world-view.
Ever heard of Underwriter's Laboratories? It's a consortium of companies who have something to lose if accidents happen: the insurance companies.
Ever heard of Consumer Reports? Not a government agency, but a private organization which offers scrupulously independent analysis of consumer products.
When I want assurance of the quality of medicines, I'd much rather see that guarantee coming from the drug company's insurance carrier (who must pay out many millions if the drug is bad), than some bureacrat who is shielded from being sued for incompetence.
Oh, and for future reference: When you start your rebuttal with an ad-hominem like "grow up", you're the one who's being childish. Snotty, even.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
If that's what's available at Staples and OfficeMax, yes. Nobody is going to go out of his way to find special "unencumbered" paper, probably at a higher price. Most people don't want to write political tracts and won't care.
Yes, if you're the only one who can offer me high-speed access. I'm not switching to dialup to improve my freedom. The best-connected parts of the US have two options: cable and DSL. If the phone company exercised its private property rights to kick off all other DSL ISP's, and both cable and phone company imposed certain restrictions, the users would just have to accept them.
I think it unlikely that I'll find the unrestricted version at a reasonable price. Low prices come from economy of scale, which comes from serving the majority. Imposing restrictions doesn't bother the majority at all. A tiny minority that demands the unencumbered version will have to pay much higher prices, even in a Libertarian utopia where that unencumbered version is legal.
This is the same point Cringely made about Microsoft locking Linux out of future hardware.
Wow, I half-way consider myself a libertarian, but that is a pretty grandiose statement to assume the cancellation of the federal reserve bank.
It's been a staple of our economy for over a hundred years, and is a primary player in the IMF and Worldbank. Even to begin discussing this topic would be the subject of multiple PhD dissertations.
While I agree with many of the social stances of the Libertarian party (such as privitization of schooling), I think it is unconsionable to bandy about the elimination of one of humanity's largest financial organizations based on a half-baked ideology.
If you can show me multiple BOOKS written about this subject by pre-emanant financial thinkers, arguing for and against, and would be willing to debate a panel of leading finance/business professors on the subject... then you might have a case.
I can't stress enough the totally unknown effect this would have on the world economy, exchange rates, securities investment, home ownership, the national debt, and almost every other critical aspect of our nation's economy.
It's possible I'm just not familiar enough with the party line yet, but that remark caught me WAY off guard.
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
The presidency is an office of limited power
Don't worry, Shrubya is doing everything he can to change this.
Once again, the libertarians ignore the fact that there are terrorists out there who are willing to repeat 9/11. The libertarians hope the problem will just go away. It won't. Do millions of Americans have to die in order for people to wake up and really fight terrorism?
To do something the president has to go through congress. (ie declare war, get a budget).
Pretty easy for the president to veto every bill coming across his desk.
Hopefully third party candidates such as this can get more political debate going, rather than the 2 party system you guys have going on down there.
I am a "Republican" and was going to reluctantly [loyally] give my vote to Bush, but I think I would rather vote for this guy. Bush has gone way too far to the center and I want to send him a message. My biggest beef is with how big the government has gotten under him and all of his wasteful spending.
Badnarik's foreign policy is unrealistic, but his domestic agenda is largely sound. I'd support Libertarian candidates for Congress, at least until we got instant runoffs legislated. But his desire to keep the Electoral College, because "cities would control the elections", is merely self-serving. The homogeneity of rural and suburban areas makes collecting larger populations there cheaper and easier to manage rhetorically, while the regions straddle state lines, unlike single-state cities. He wants to keep the illusion of landslides that the EC produces, like the 1980 51:40% popular vote producing a 90:10% EC victory for Reagan over Carter.
It's no surprise that Badnarik's positions are entirely consistent with the Constitution, and some of the Declaration of Independence ("no foreign entanglements"). But the world has changed since the 1784 of the 13 new states, largely under American influence. Kicking out the UN (and withdrawing our huge part of it), removing all American troops from abroad, and cutting off the 20,000mi border except at immigration checkpoints are all ideologically sound, but practically destructive. The world is dependent on the current US roles, regardless of the damage they cause here and abroad, and the US is likewise dependent on the rest of the world. Certainly these roles must change, to reduce that damage. But without a new model that retains at least some of the military and economic security for the interdependent population, he'd just pull the rug out from under the world. Not only would he break a lot of furniture, but the vermin hiding under that rug scramble unchecked among the ruins. The US ship of state is very large, and turning it to a navigable course will take a while. Sinking it instead will just create a whirlpool from which the lifeboats can't escape.
--
make install -not war
I can understand Slashdot Polotics, its a good idea, people want to talk/whine about these things, but really, is it neccessary to drop this stuff on to the front page of slashdot, I go to other websites for that stuff (news for nerds, STUFF THAT MATTERS) Since when did a Libertarian candidate classify as mattering.
# Begin soapbox
The "lesser of the two evils" arguement and the anti-"lesser of the two evils" arguement are both holding less and less value.
Though "W" and Kerry may seem pretty much the same, it's the administrations that need changing more than anything else.
We've all seen what the current regime is capable of. They are pure evil. I do not think George W. Bush is pure evil. I don't think he's smart enough for that. But when you have advisors who lead you into evil, then the fun starts. It is worsened by the fact that Bush won't listen to anyone else. Not the "American People" (buzzword!), not the government, and certainly not the rest of the world.
This is where the difference between the two lie. I think Kerry would be more open to suggestion from watchdog groups like Moveon.org, as well as our allies.
Those that hate Bush but say they're going to vote for him because he's the lesser of two evils are either retarted or insane. One definition for insanity is doing the same thing twice and expecting a different result. I am a Green, and this year, Nader is not getting my vote. Nor will the Green Party candidate. Nor will Michael Badnarik. John Kerry is a douchebag but I'm voting for him anyway.
# End of soapbox
The FDA is responsible for a vast number of deaths. Consider - their approval process adds an average of 7 years to the development time for a drug. How many people will die in 7 years?
But of course approving a dangerous drug is bad too. Since drug effects are highly variable in different people and difficult to measure, there is really no good way to objectively decide what is "safe". The only sane solution is to give doctors and patients as much information as possible and let them make their own choices.
If the illusion of FDA protection is removed, people (especially doctors) would suddenly care a lot more about the reputation of a given drug manufacturer, and one that tried to push a dangerous drug would be doomed, because everyone would be afraid to touch their stuff forever after.
"The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern." - Lord Acton
How can anyone vote for this guy? He is liar and populist! You think he will protect the environment? No way! He will leave it to the free market to decide. That means cutting down all our trees and using all the resources available. Free market might be efficient but will never be able to provide everyone with happiness. I am not a communist (though I do lean left) but you have to agree that capitalism requires a poor(er) to look upon in order to create motivation.
RTFA
He didn't just wave his hands and suggest that the Market will Cure All. He also mentioned his intention to place responsibility for corporate actions with the people who decided to take them. The consequences in your scenario would be jail time for some suits in upper management.
Considering I live in the commonwealth of Virginia, which if you didn't know, is a sickeningly conservative state, my vote already does not count.
If Bush loses virginia, I'll dance naked in the street. This is of course, why I vote Libertarian. At 17, I garnered 2 votes for Browne (parents listen to political teenagers surprisingly enough), which was essentially 4 votes since my mom's dem and my dad's rep.
Once again this year I will drop my Libertarian ballot in the box. I think Browne got ~1200 votes in my county last election, it's nice to actually be able to see your vote count.
.cig - what you do after winning a good flame war
I give up. How did you miss the point? You even restated it in your post.
The point is, government should reflect the will of people in all walks and aspects of life, rural or urban, religious and atheistic, etc., etc. Why do you think we have both Senate and House of Representatives? Miss out on your high-school civics class?
America is fundamentally a republic, and as long as the country is shaped the way it is it is nonsense to treat it as anything but a republic.
You're just a leftie, there are parties on that end of the spectrum too.
Many are in power in various countries.
Unless the system allows minority parties some power, they won't have much of an influence.
If the US wasn't so strongly entrenched in the 2 party system they have today they would be better off.
I think he's right that the main parties are crashing into each other in the middle, if there were outside options there would be a pull to the outside.
If the Green party wins 20% of the vote, I'm sure you'd see the current parties either lean that way to get those votes.
Currently they're just chasing the swing votes that they think are on small differences between the parties. If they thought the votes were further out from where they were now, they'd change.
That while Liberal Democrats fetishize the 60's with their free speech, protests, and somewhat successful battles for feminism and civil rights issues ...
and while Republicans fetishize the 50's with their tight nuclear families, single income households, burgeoning economy, and repressed wives ...
that Libertarians fetishize the Wild West where everyone is armed, the main currency is gold, and we shoot unwelcome Mexicans on sight?
Libertarianism is part of what keeps America healthy. But does anyone else think that its "true blue" advocates are often too in love with the simple answers of ideology to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of the position they advocate?
:)
I've often thought a "moderate Libertarian" could do extraordinarily well in a clean race. I've been told that there's no such thing, but still.
One thing that has become apparent to me in studying American political history is that the country's architects clearly expected healthy compromise between not only different interests, but different political philosophies. The idea must have been that representatives from across the spectrum of political theory could each encounter, debate, and learn from one another through the process of governing. That's as opposed to what we actually ended up with in America, where more and more there's a sick, winner-take-all, Civil War II approach to governing.
The Libertarian's gift to us is, in many ways, the best vision of a citizen (self-reliant, tolerant, and fiercely independent) and a state (simple, efficient, circumspect). I respect their rejection of xenophobia, their clear sight on issues of drugs and morality regulation, their concern for privacy, and ultimately I appreciate their vision of humanity. I also thank god Libertarians have never exerted real power in this country, or we would be just like Central and South America, only colder.
It actually makes me sad to say it. I greatly respect my friends who believe these ideas deeply. For my own part, the Objectivist or Libertarian's overweening faith in Laissez Faire markets and free enterprise seems as obviously misguided as the Communist's faith in human morality and generosity. The Libertarian's comprehensive vision of society is as unlikely as a hippie commune - a free market somehow free of monopolies, or the exigencies of geography, engineering, the prisoner's delimma, or any of the other unfortunate, well-traveled spoilers of universal privatization. It is a brutal, thrive-or-die darwinian experiment that I hope we continue, in the future, to have to take a long trip by plane to see first hand.
And yet I love Libertarians, and I am very happy they are here. I want to see them in every debate, and on every ballot in every election. The thing to remember is that perhaps every distinct, unvarnished political philosophy is flawed. But flaws and all, theirs brings us something that is vitaly important, more so now than ever: the profound respect for freedom and independence that (I think) have made America what it is.
The extremes bracket the middle; 3rd parties have always pushed the two in the center, even if they never win. 2004, with its ugly war and its 50/50 race probably won't be the year for independents, but they will always be there, and as they move in the polls, so do the Majors.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
Well, once we've pulled our forces out of the over 150 countries they're stationed in now, we get two big security benefits:
1. Lots of people freed up to guard borders, infrastructure, ports, etc, from the existing terrorists of the world. It is called the Department of *Defense*, after all.
2. The elimination of all the free recruiting propaganda we generate for the terrorists by messing around in their countries.
"The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern." - Lord Acton
I may be missing the point here, but if corporations are no longer considered "persons" in the legal sense then they can be held accountable for their actions. So if someone creates a drug that kills someone, they could be held accountable for that death. That might be a bigger deterent that the current system. Now: Make bad drug, pay lawsuit/higher insurance premiums Proposed: Make bad drug, sleep next to bubba for 10-20years.
That while Liberal Democrats fetishize the 60's with their free speech, protests, and somewhat successful battles for feminism and civil rights issues ...
...
and while Republicans fetishize the 50's with their tight nuclear families, single income households, burgeoning economy, and repressed wives
that Libertarians fetishize the Wild West where everyone is armed, the main currency is gold, and we shoot unwelcome Mexicans on sight?
You must have missed the part where he talks about corporations not being shields for shareholders anymore. Do you think the shareholders of a pharmaceutical company are going to allow cuts in testing if they are going to be held responsible for the effects of such a move?
Forget the whales - save the babies.
I take his point to mean that, since politicians will always pander to groups from whom they want votes, the "one person one vote" method has the potential to disenfranchise too many people.
Hypothetical example. The entire state of Wyoming has a population of around 500,000 people. That's about half of the city of Austin, Texas where I live (and where you-know-who lived as governor). With a one person one vote system, a politician could direct a marketing blitz on an urban area like mine, get his votes, and not even bother with the entire state of Wyoming. How is that democratic?
And of course Austin vs. Wyoming is a silly example. The reality is what Badnarik described: a concentration of power in the most heavily populated urban areas like the Eastern and Western seaboards. Voters in sparsely populated areas would cease to matter. How is that democractic?
Of course there needs to be a balance, which is why the House is represented according to a state's population, and the Senate gets exactly two representatives, whether you are California or Wyoming. Badnarik acknowledged that the Electoral College system has flaws, and has proposed solutions. But the one person one vote is not one of them, and it's very apparent to me why not.
"Stop throwing the Constitution in my face, it's just a goddamned piece of paper!" - George W. Bush Nov. 2005
How does the candidate feel about the recent events in the former Yugoslavia?
Okay, so the candidate does not specifically address these issues. But, does anyone in this day and age really think genocide should be viewed as a viable internal policy by the government of the United States?
Now, I don't mean to imply that the candidate is an apologist, or that he would not take action if faced with ssuch a situation. But the candidate makes the above assertion without qualification. Something I think should make all of our ears perk up, and something that the candidate should clarify his position on.
Because, when I read that statement, it is not an example of pragmatism, but an excuse for moral cowardice. While it may be pragmatic to ignore the internal policies of genocidal dictator, is it right? Is is a desirable policy for the US to take?
Again, I'm not trying to imply anything, but if the statement is an absolute, I am concerned. If the statemnt is not an absolute, why did the candidate decline to define what conditions would make that position less than absolute...
Lastly, I would invite the candidate to consider one more option. Perhaps the problem is less with the ideologies espoused by all the parties, but the inability to divorce the ideal from the possible...
After all, in an ideal world, the Patriot act is an okay piece of legislation, because in an ideal world it would not be abused. But we don't live in an ideal world, and ideology is just another way of denying reality.
As long as politicians stay wedded to an ideology, any ideology, there is little chance of real world improvements. The libertarian ideology while different than the admittedly near identical ideologies of the "main" parties, shares one critical commonality with them, the lack of relevance to the real world.
Ideologies by nature, are internally consistent, but this implies that if one of those internal consistencies fails to work in the real world, than the rest of that house of cards is suspect... Ideology, quite simply is the methodology to attain a Utopian state. Given that we accept Utopia as an impossibility, why do we assign so much importance to the yellow-brick road which purpotedly leads to it?
"Talk minus action equals nothing" - Joey Shithead, D.O.A.
"Talk minus action equals
But we shouldn't rely on companies who care only about the bottom line to ensure public health.
I think your view is lacking. With regards to power, the Libertarian's (or more specifically, Mr. Badnarik's) view is that government and corporation cannot be trusted to ensure the safety of foodstuff and medicine, or even any positive freedoms; however, a proprietorship or partnership, which directly ties responsibility to one or more people, can work, because the bottom line is not the only consideration.
Now, would you care to be mature enough yourself not to go around name-calling? Either that, or finish what you started: where's the proof that libertarians are "social misfits"? I sure don't see any.
Nice black-or-white argument you've got going here. Government good, corporations evil, and the simplistic paradigm you've constructed is the only one that will ever exist.
Here's a newflash: government is often evil. Government regularly sucks the cock of corporations. Even when government does good deeds, it often does so in a ruinously inefficient manner.
In a libertarian state you'd have lawsuits where investors and board directors can't hide behind laws exempting them from liability, *enforced by the very government that's supposed to be protecting YOU*. In a libertarian state non-profits and citizen groups wouldn't be hamstrung by a government constantly trying to muzzle them with rules, regulations, and laws designed to make information retrieval and private monitoring of corporate entities damned near impossible.
In a libertarian state investors and board members could find all of their property seized for deliberately releasing a drug with deadly side-effects to the public in pursuit of short-term profit. In a truly libertarian state the people who knew about these side effects and did nothing to sound the alarm would go on trial for murder.
Your ignorance would be astounding if it weren't so common.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Shut up, stupidhead!
When a particular job or skill _does_ move offshore, all other things being equal, it merely frees Americans -- the most productive workers in the world -- to develop the NEXT job or skill or to come up with a more efficient, profitable way of providing the old one.
n ko rder/2004rank.html
_ cap&in t=-1
u _sch_lif_ex p_tot
The myth that American workers are the most productive (Per Capita GDP) persists...
Actually Luxembourg has the highest PCGDP, nearly 1.5 times the US PCGDP...
The US is nearly identical to Norway, a Social Democracy with universal heatlhcare...
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/ra
Cool graph at this one:
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph-T/eco_gdp
This one's good too, Most Educated:
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph-T/ed
US comes in at 14...We should be ashamed...
Goofy, Geeky Gifts and More!
Franklin said it best.
"Democracy is 2 wolves and a lamb voting on what's for dinner.
Freedom is the lamb with a gunm, contesting the vote."
You cannot have purely popular vote, else you have tyrany of the people.
...he must use the vocabulary of victory. He must speak in terms of what actions ( or lack thereof) he will take upon inauguration. Yet, while there is brief mention of pragmatism and compromise, he doesn't satisfy one of the main questions of the libertarian concept and his potential administration: bi-(or tri)-partisan co-operation. It is the sticking point I have with most libertarian policies, with which I sympathize. No doubt market based systems will be more efficient, but how can a nation be weened from the nanny/welfare state to which it has become accustomed without disrupting or ending the lives of its members? Is the American political machinery, or any related variant thereof, capable in principal of making such an adjustment? How can a libertarian executive facilitate this change, except by not signing laws handed him from the centrist legislature? While advancing these political ideas is of great importance, and stumping for the nation's highest goes a long way towards raising visibility, would not energies be better spent trying to simply get the nation in a position for such a transfer? Perhaps concentrate more on reactive and interpretive posts in the judiciary. I just can't see the use of a highly placed libertarian official right now. What needs to happen revolves around setting conservative judicial precedences and making laws against laws. And of course, the former of these requires amendments and, therefore, lots of seats in congress.
Because, you know, there's no way that a private consumer organization could ever replace government, or provide more value.
Thanks for demonstrating the benefits of public education there. While the government may keep people from "dieing", it has a very bad track record in education.
One could even present the argument that a group of competing private testing companies would provide more value and safety than one centralized body that isn't accountable for the costs when they screw up.
As far as the FDA's real track record, look up the histories of things like Saccharin, Cyclamates...
Look at some of the new science being done about DDT
The he is contradicting himself! The market can't cure shit! It can only provide more profit.
And, conversely, you don't think a dying person has the right to try an experimental medication on themself and only themself because some government beaurocracy hasn't recieved enough money from the pharmaceutical company in question to make it worth their while to run trials on?
The foundation of libertarian philosophy is personal responsibility. Let people make their own choices. Do you honestly think that there would be no FDA-like entity in a libertarian world? You, even as you tout the value the FDA provides don't see a reason something like that would be created for people to be able to know what to trust and what not to? The only difference is that when such an organization becomes a worthless pile of shit that is working against the public interest rather than for it, there won't bebillions of dollars of taxpayer money to keep propping it up.
If wanting to have the freedom to make my own choices makes me a social misfit, and I think it does in this country of whiners and government ball-suckers, then so be it.
Why not get more libertatians in senate and governor roles first? why waste all your money on trying to send a guy to the whitehouse?
That is NOT the smart way to get a libertarian elected.
Two examples: My fiancee worked hospice care for mentally disabled adults. One of them was a guy who got blindsided by an SUV while he was on his motorcycle. He went from being a well-paid metal worker to a grown man with the mental skills of a two-year old. Would the burden of his care be placed on his family, or the family of the person who hit him? Neither of them could support his care.
My future brother-in-law has muscular dystrophy, and has gone from walking around and caring for himself to a wheelchair and complete dependence on others in six months. He gets some help from MDA, but without government assistance my future mother-in-law could not afford treatments for him that could extend his life so he could be cured in the future. Does he deserve to die because he was born with a congenital disease? And I don't trust that a donations-funded organization could provide for him. What happens when they have a bad year? Would his medication be cut? Would his therapy and school aid be dropped because they can't afford it?
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
On everything other than the offshore outsourcing and open borders, I like what he had to say. I'll still be forming a third party in 2008 though- because automation, immigration, and offshoring will need to be addressed, and in a way that doesn't use the free market system- because we're well on the road to having anywhere between 25% and 75% of our workers kicked out of that system entirely, not because somebody in Korea can do the job cheaper, but because robots can do the job even cheaper yet. And if we don't want a violent revolution, we're going to have to do something with those people. What exactly, is the question, and the reason I'm going with a hack of marxism as opposed to libertarianism.
I'm also a Get Bush Out Voter- but I'd encourage all slashdotters whose states are polling at more than an 8% difference between the candidates to vote Libertarian NOW!
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
The Nature Conservancy is a great group - they don't lobby to save important lands, they actually buy them or ensure the lands have provisions attached that make sure they cannot be developed by future buyers.
It's the only environmental group I donate money to regularily.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
how about this senario: if a product (even a life saving one) will not bring back profit a private firm will not want to produce it. Lives aren't the issue here are they?
Look. Libertarianism is another one of those wonderful ideas that is utter impractible -- like anarcho-syndicalism. It ignores sociology all together and the fact, to paraphrase Foucault, that someone will have to pick up the garbage. If they think that competition in the marketplace will take care of the problem of something like public health, then why does an practically lawless/liberated place like a Brazilian favela look like it does? If the principle that a market force would put someone up to cleaning up and charging for it, why doesn't it happen? Because the underlying social structure prevents it. Forget laws and gubmint. When the people are so structurally poor that they can't allow this crackpot view of the world to hold sway, why should we assume it would work anywhere else. I extend this to Free State movement. All of the white folk who are 'Libertarians' would move up there and boom the place would fall to shit because, by God, no one would want to sweep the streets. Answer? Import people who would and make damn sure they don't try to live outside that station. The old saw that 'Libertarianism is freedom for those who can afford it.' is, well, not far from the case. If you make the argument that Libertarianism is the true American political underpinning, I would assert that it is actually pragmatism. Nobody ever hunkered themselves down with their guns over Dewey's notion of work.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
Do you think the shareholders of a pharmaceutical company are going to allow cuts in testing if they are going to be held responsible for the effects of such a move?
So a CEO who is facing going in the red won't, say, "cook the books," decrease QA spending while shareholders are happy that they're now seeing profits, glossing over the decrease? Everything is rosey when you are making money. I think you underestimate the power of greed and its ability to cloud judgement. And I don't think you can rely on lawsuits for public - ie the entire nation's - health.
2 years and no mod points. Join reddit. Because openness is good.
And in 2008, they'll say, "Vote [third party] in 2012. Get [Bush/Kerry] out now, but vote [third party] in 2012."
There's no time like the present.
That is exactly backwards. It is a complete lie.
I confess I have no idea how one would obtain accurate readings on "numeracy," since the very concept was only popularized perhaps 30 years ago. Nor can I fathom how he could characterize "science learning" today as worse than in the days before Darwin, continental drift, and modern astronomy. (I assume Mr. Badnarik is in favor of private schooling, though our private schools mostly ignore or outright contradict Darwin, arguably the most important scientist of the past 250 years. An understanding of biological evolution is critical to epidemiology and genetics, two fields of research that in the years to come I hope will not be hampered by the growing trend of religious schooling.)
But though those claims are perhaps unprovable, his claim about literacy is outright false. It took me about 30 seconds to find this page using Google: Literacy from 1870 to 1979: Illiteracy.
(For those who want to look the numbers up themselves, U-Virginia has a Historical Census Browser. The stats on literacy start in 1870.)
The literacy of every segment of the U.S. population except the foreign-born has grown in every year (except the estimation of 1950, which is likely a statistical blip). It's not a question of the trend briefly halting: the trend is relentlessly toward higher and higher literacy rates.
Probably the most reliable indicator of literacy is that of the white population (since including segments of society largely removed from educational opportunities would bias the numbers). The percentage of illiterate white persons 14 years of age or older was as follows:
1870: 11.5%
1880: 9.4%
1890: 7.7%
1900: 6.2%
1910: 5.0%
1920: 4.0%
1930: 3.0%
1920: 2.0%
1947: 1.8%
1952: 1.8%
1959: 1.6%
1969: 0.7%
1979: 0.4%
If he wants to thrash our public schools, Mr. Badnarik will need a different switch.
The part about how you can be left wing and a libertarian was fascinating. A friend of mine listens to a talk radio show in Boston by Jay Severin (96.9), which claims to be libertarian. I have listened several times. Last week, Severin said he doesn't want to have to vote for Bush. He wishes he could vote for Pat Robertson... Looking for more info on the web, I read that that Severin said that all muslims should be killed. Or that he was for the war, against the peace, Iraqis don't deserve a better system and we shouldn't be giving it to them. So it's very interesting that liberarians can be left or right wing. Or just plain idiots like Jay Severin.
The welfare states of, for example, Sweden and The Netherlands, abolished capital punishment decades ago and are at the forefront of progressive legislation for women, gays and ethnic minorities - not to mention anti-censorship.
Anti-censorship? What about the case of Ake Green? Just this year, he (a Swede) sent to prison for stating an illegal opinion in public.
Those of us who truly believe in freedom of speech will defend even those people who say things that we find disagreeable or distasteful. There is no particular merit in saying that people who we already agree with should not be censored. The whole point of being against censorship is to allow the airing of views that we do not agree with, and which may run against the current of society.
As Voltaire said, "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."
Perhaps Sweden once respected freedom of speech. But it certainly does not today.
woo! Powell-McCain '96!!
Far too much credit is being given to the multi-candidate system. One of the greatest benefits of the two party system is that, prior to the election, all concessions, all negotiations, all compromises between third / non-major parties take place. With the advent of every-day-polling, we are actually allowed to have thousands of mini-elections as candidates choose to incorporate the platform pieces or messages of various outside groups.
Outside a two party system, these incorporations occur largely after the vote. That is, negotiations are not happening between major and minor party in order to woo voters, they happen between major / minor or minor / minor parties to enact some form of change. Thus, the voter does not get to select which items it considers negotiable.
For example. Lets say we have a 2 issue system: military and taxes. There are 4 parties, 2 Major 2 minor - we can call them ultra conservative conservative liberal ultra liberal. In a 2 party system, Conservative and Liberal parties negotiate which issues, military or taxes, they are willing to compromise on with the outside party. Over several months they test these compromises out. If they move to the center on one and the left on another, and gain polling points, they realize that is a good compromise that voters support. In a multiparty system, everyone gets voted in, lets say 15% 35% 35% 15%. Now that they are elected, the voters have little ability to affect which issue gets compromised between the fringe party. An individual who voted for the ultra-liberals may be screwed because all he really cared about was Peace. The complication of compromise occured after the election rather than before. If the dual party system had been in place, he would have discovered that this compromise was going to occur in adopting platform positions
Its a little complicated, but really it amounts to this. Ultimately, all legislation comes down to a single yes / no vote. Opposition and Support. Two parties. It is better to know in advance how many and who will be a member of each - opposition or support - after all the platform negotiations are complete.
Pardon me for referencing a cliched reference, but wasn't Nazi Germany also pretty harmless for a while? There's something to be said for preemptive removal of dictators. The guy violated UN sanctions for over a decade, and nobody seemed to care. After 9/11, the US government isn't taking chances.
Thank you, yes!
It continually steams me that a person who has never held a regular job (such as Clinton), would be considered the person who best serves the needs of all those people out there with regular jobs.
Yes, political experience is good, but a politician with no other experience is NOT to be trusted. I will add that politicians whose only "regular" job has been as a trial attorney or some such is almost as suspect, because they deal in the same currency as politicians.
When the experience of the incumbents is simply a lifetime of learning how to trade more and more of our rights for power, then I agree that experience is crap.
VOTE CPUSA!!
The Communist Party of the United States is the best party for the people.
--
Workers of the world unite!
Can I trust CBS to provide entertaining television now that I know they published false information in the news?
I mean, seriously. The government is made up of a huge number of people in completely seperated bodies. To claim everything it does is untrustworthy because some secretive branch does something wrong is ludicrous.
Well, if I ever had an idea of what the Libertarian party was, it's a little clearer now. Personally I don't agree with the way they want to manage "freedom" in government. It seems too much like another political party with too much drive and focus and not enough common sense. I continue to push my idea of Not Voting At All - essentially throwing the system into a state of anarchy for a short period in order to force a change.
I really like most of the libertarian party's platforms, but I've got three beefs:
1) Their economic perspective is a bit outmoded. Many libertarians want to get rid of things like anti-trust laws. Meanwhile, modern economists say that government regulation is required to counteract inherent deficiencies in the capitalistic model. Their beliefs about environmental regulation also ignore certain economic principles. To tell the truth, all three parties have problems in this area. The libertarians are pretty close, but they also seem so ideological that it'd be hard to move them further in the right direction. I see more promise in this area from fiscally conservative democrats.
2) To them, freedom is the first principle. Maybe I'm just jaded, but I don't think freedom is all it's cracked up to be. It should be valued very highly, of course, but it shouldn't override every other princple. This, of course, ties back to their problems with economics. Fundementally, government should take away just enough freedom ensure the preservation of rights. That's exactly what it does when it says you can't kill someone else. Well, I think our society has evolved to the point where food and shelter should be fundemental rights, and that letting someone starve is just as bad as shooting them in the head. We can afford it --- economic growth is exponental, while minimum required consumption is fixed. I'm willing to trade some economic prosperity to ensure that protection. Of course, social security and welfare are far bigger than necessary to ensure protection from starvation and exposure, although they haven't fixed those problems either.
3) They have no hope of ever getting elected. They seem content to push radical and unpopular views (probably out of fear of diluting their ideology), at the cost of never making a blip on the minds of people. The simple truth is, most voters will never even heard of mister Badnarik. Yes, this is the "throwing your vote away" argument, but in our system, a vote for Badnarik *is*, if not a wasted vote, at least an undesirable one. The probability of your candidate getting elected plays a role in his overall desireability. It has been proven time and time again that people are generally risk-averse: they will choose a less risky path for moderate gain, than take a large risk for large gain. The only case in which it makes sense for a given voter to vote third-party is if he considers each candidate in the first two parties to be equally undesireable (which means he takes little risk in voting for the third party). Of course, most people, unless their priorities are very narrow, don't consider Bush and Kerry to be equally undesirable.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
to the logicall conclusion of your statements, but you missed it. Logically all simplistic statments about anything complex are inhereintly stupid. But does anyone want to know the truth? Does anyone care? Does anyone have time to become experts in governmental versus private industry in the realm of food safety? No, most people don't have the time to spend reading the primary positons of the two major cannadites. So instead of forming an intellegent reason for supporting any cannidate, they rely on the 30 second sound bite to form their opinion. And any opition based upon that vast amount of resaerch is just plain stupid.
In light of that fact, it seems as if the electoral college wasn't such a bad idea after all. However, the problem seems to be that those on elected to the college aren't any more informed about the issues than the general populace. We need an electoral college of philosopher kings!
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
what about a candlestick maker?
(sorry)
You leave everything to the strong, and let the weak die.
I just don't see it that way. I don't advocate leave anything tangible to anyone--only leaving the opportunity (freedom) to do as one wishes as long as no others are harmed to all.
And I don't believe the weak would die. They would receive private assistance instead of government assistance--and I'd wager it would be twice as effective and half as expensive.
how about this senario: if a product (even a life saving one) will not bring back profit a private firm will not want to produce it. Lives aren't the issue here are they?
A fair point. However, doesn't that exact situation exist under the current system?
"He hated Mexicans, and he was half Mexican. AND he hated irony!"
So a CEO who is facing going in the red won't, say, "cook the books," decrease QA spending while shareholders are happy that they're now seeing profits, glossing over the decrease? Everything is rosey when you are making money. I think you underestimate the power of greed and its ability to cloud judgement.
Yeah, it's a good thing we have government to prevent that sort of thing now. Else we might wind up with another Enron.
Oh, wait....
It's good to know that good, high paying jobs will magically appear for me once I'm outsourced. I can't wait! Jobs that can't be done by foreigners, hmm lets see what job would that be, oh yeah President of the United States! What utter crap, the US worker can't compete with workers in countries that don't have the same human rights protections, and environmental protections/laws that we have. Of course you'll make more money with a factory in China than in the US. Paying slave labor wages and spewing pollution into the air/water/land. It's not a level playing field, if a foreign government is subsidizing their steel industry how does the US company compete with that? The rich will get richer and the American worker will slowly be brought down to the level of the foreign worker, who's going to buy the products now? I actually thought about voting for this guy until I read this, what a joke.
The basic problem with Badnirik's immigration position:
Much of the wealth in the United States is in public assets. Naturalization grants people a share in those assets. This means that by having open borders, you essentially are allowing those employers that facilitate immigration the ability to use those immigration rights as corporate welfare--those companies compensate their employees using immigration rights as part of the package.
Not to mention the fact that dang few immigrants vote Libertarian-which means that once they get naturalized, the government that admitted them will get booted out.
Libertarians want to replace all regulatory agencies with the judicial system. We already have an overly litigious society, imagine what happens when every problem is resolved in the courtroom. Maybe trial lawyers should stop supporting Democrats and start pushing the Libertarian party ...
.. the consequences to the rest of us be damned. Given the vagaries of our law system, you can't rely on the fact that the cost of a lawsuit will be equal to the economic damages associated with a corporation's particular action.
Every regulatory agency has major problems, many of them coming because of nasty directives passed from the legislative and executive branches, but by and large they benefit both companies and consumers (yes, it is possible to benefit both). By forcing companies to behave within certain guidelines it no longer means that you compete by cutting any and all costs. Remember, before the FDA, snake oil salesman was a lucrative form of business (I guess one could argue it still is...). It also benefits consumers because who wants to win 5 million dollars at the cost of their youngest daughter's life!
What insight do Libertarian's provide as to how they will balance the poor and middle classes' ability to protect themselves from a corporation's action? If you don't already have money in a libertarian society, you are even more of a second class citizen then you are in our current society.
You can't expect corporations to behave as anything less than profit-maximizing firms. If they know that it will cost them 2 billion dollars in lawyer's fees and settlements to make 10 billion dollars over the cost of production, then they will do so
I'm not in any way trying to demonize corporations. They behave exactly as they should, as profit maximizing entities. It is our job as consumers and voters to make sure that the profit maximization is only a result of meeting our needs.
This is not just an offhand remark you've made, but a specific blind spot of the L Party. Where an easy answer doesn't work, they get stuck. And foreign policy is one place where there's often no easy answer.
Free trade amongst nations makes everyone richer, I'm sure Badnarik would agree. But a global economy requires global security; for example, the US protects the straits between Indonesia and Malaysia from terrorists and/or pirates who would otherwise mess with oil shipments there. I'm sure this is really good for the economy of all the nations that depend on that oil, and it's something the US military can do with its eyes closed. (For training an exercise in real-world non-drills that make the US Navy stronger!) With the first result that a few Asian economies are dependent on the interests of the US.
Maybe those countries would buy the services for security. Maybe they do buy them in other ways I don't know about. I'm not an expert but I do know, there are many places where the US couldn't just walk away without massive and serious repercussions.
The Badnarik deus-ex-machina is that he knows he is unelectable, and can admit so freely, and thus doesn't have to really think hard about such matters. Hey, I don't really have to do any of those things because I didn't really get elected. Well guess what, that's just not good enough. If you're gonna play with the big boys, you better not start by advocating policies that could cause global depression. I know they aren't Americans but some of them do buy stuff from us, and it's actually cheaper to fill those outgoing container shipments with *something*.
How about Keb' Mo'?
Who's being naïve here? [...] a situation where the consequences would be far more deterrence than anything the FDA could ever provide.
Just like deregulating energy in California was supposed to have the consequence of competing companies offering better services at lower prices?
Instead of the real consequences: Higher prices and rolling brownouts.
People should stop having faith in capitalism.
You can't take the sky from me...
> okay, it's not the same thing as having one in the White House, but
> it's a place to start.
More importantly, it is the proper place to start. Like the guy said, just getting elected would indicate the sort of groundswell of revolution that would indicate it was time to make the radical changes he advocates, Which won't happen until we have a People fit to govern themselves as their forefathers once did.
You lead by example. The average person no longer knows what it means to be Free and frankly, the idea scares them. We need Libertarians who have the "people skills" for it to get out and run for local offices, then start making a difference. Those of us who lack the skills to be a successfull pol can provide support. This will show the more mainstream voters that:
1. Libertarians aren't just drug legalizing notcases. This factor should not be underestimated. Those tend to be the loudest voices and the mainstream press makes sure they are the ones the average voter sees.
2. Libertarian policies can actually be implemented in the real world. (Although truthfully, a lot of what passes for "libertarian" thought won't actually work, but weeding that stuff out is a lot less painful in a county government setting than a governor or national office going off into la-la land.)
3. It builds a bench to recruit candidates for higher office from. Where do you thing the Dems and Repubs get most of their candidates? Yup, by watching for new young talent to emerge down in the lower offices.
4. That chaotic Libertarians can actually form a Party. This is important. Regardless of how effective one politician is, it means nothing without a party. See Ross Perot and the Reform Party. Once Ross tired of playing the Reform Party disintegrated because it wasn't a real party, just a cult of personality that couldn't agree on anything, because the only belief they shared was a blind faith in Ross Perot.
Democrat delenda est
And the next CEO will decide NOT to cook the books because he doesn't want to go to jail like his predessesor did.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Yeah, it's a good thing we have government to prevent that sort of thing now. Else we might wind up with another Enron.
Oh, wait....
No system is perfect but the panacea offered by libertarians only looks great because it hasn't fully been adopted yet, no one talks about the issues I have brought up.. Greed has its place, when it comes to public health it has no place whatsoever. From pharmco's influencing the FDA to companies 'self-regulating' themselves, business is best left to other issues. The FDA is not perfect but could stand revision, what libertarians want for public health is on the other hand just plain wrong and unworkable and to the core anarchy, unworkable anarchy.
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I think if the US courts system has proved anything it's that rich people can get away with whatever they want as long as they have enough money for an unbeatable legal team. The rich people know this and that's how we end up with situations like the OJ Simpson trial (assuming he was guilty; I didn't follow the trial at all).
To answer your question: yes. Rich people will continue to get richer, settle out of court, and bribe their way to the top.
True story.
As an example, the libertarian view on pollution (in a nutshell) is that government should not be involved. The marketplace will triumph because people collectively will boycott companies that pollute, and individually sue companies that pollute their specific air or land.
Please read Murry Rothbard: Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution.
Dog-Eat-Dog/Survival-of-the-fittest
What you wind up with here is a very strong centralized government, and a few megacorps who are strong enough to survive the onslaught of red-tape with their bottom line intact. In other words, facism, the very thing that most leftwing advocates purport to be opposed to! Their own actions bring it about.
Only in a libertarian-inclined society will the small business minnows maintain enough numbers to take down an occasional corporate whale. If you don't believe me, ask any small business owner. People wonder why Wal-Mart, McDonalds, and Microsoft are taking over the country... they're the only ones with enough lawyers to beat back the regulators!
"He who throws mud, loses ground." - proverb
"Better, it seems to me, would be for third parties to concentrate entirely on below-the-radar races (city council, etc.) and then move up one step at a time."
Yep. It might take 16 to 32 years, but if they can show how their policies have been BENEFICIAL to the cities / counties / states then they'd move up to the next level of government.
But they have to SHOW that their policies can be enacted at the lower levels WITHOUT destroying civilization as we know it. And if they can't do that, then its obvious that they should NOT be president.
I see big talk about big changes, but are there any smaller changes that they can implement at the city/county levels?
Going to a straight popular vote would, perversely, represent the end of American democracy. Candidates would be inclined to cater to a few urban areas where they can buy the most votes for their buck (or their promise), effectively disenfranchising rural voters. To the extent that the presidency is a representative office, it should represent Peoria and Birmingham as much as it represents New York and Los Angeles.
I disagree with this. Does this mean that my vote is less important than other people because I choose to live in a higher density state? Or that smaller states should have more representation than larger ones?
If the Government is representing Peoria and Birmingham as much as New York and Los Angeles, it is not representing the people. It is not one man, one vote. If the majority of Americans choose to live in cities, why doesn't the election represent that?
More than 50% of the voters in 2000 were disinfranchised.
Maybe I'm generalizing too far, but from your post and the responses of Badnarik I do sense an implicit belief that the legal system is capable of making all the right decisions that the (federal) government is incapable of. Where does this belief come from? Following the 'Trias Politica', on which all western governments are based, without a legislative body (i.e., government), law enforcement is powerless. If there is no law that states that the products of drug companies should not actually kill people, any class action lawsuit would be futile. Or do the libertarians suppose that the judges will start making their own law? Now that is scary!
We do need a distinction between legislation, execution and justice. One of the big problems we're facing now is that legislation and execution are one and the same. Transferring both of these powers to the judicial branch is a horrendous mistake. Who will decide what the boundaries are in which the drug companies need to operate with their products? Legislation, execution, or judicial? Pick one.
I used to have two quibbles, but Badnarik neatly resolved one of them. I used to worry about the Libertarians giving too much power to the mega-corp types, but his answer -- "let's make them compete on a level legal playing field and let the courts, rather than regulation, keep them in line" -- seems like it could work if the government kept a tight watch on it during the transition.
However, I have to question the Libs' attitude toward drug legalization.
I support the decriminalization of marijuana, on the grounds that someone can smoke pot in their home and I'd never know, let alone be impacted negatively. However, harder drugs (thinking mainly of heroin and crack here) can impact me.
How?
Well, I think it is part of the government's duty (or society's duty) to assure a certain minimum standard of living for everyone. We cannot in good conscience allow people to starve in the streets, or die of diseases that could be treated easily.
Fortunately, nearly everyone of sound body and mind can provide for themselves that standard of living. Unfortunately, because society/government has this duty to itself, and because heroin and crack addicts often cannot provide that for themselves, junkies cost the public coffers (or philanthropists, which is the same thing) money to feed their drug-addicted asses.
The libertarian ideal has everyone providing for themselves and no one relying on the government for support. Unfortunately, I fear that hard-drug legalization will give the government a hard choice: let addicts starve in the streets, or raise taxes to pay for them.
Of course, even if the drugs themselves are legal, encouraging others to use them (i.e. "pushing") should remain illegal, just as tobacco/alcohol advertising should be illegal: it consitutes encouraging another to harm himself. People have the right to shoot themselves in the foot all they want, but not to try to convince others that shooting themselves in the foot is good fun.
The FDA has done a reasonably good job at protecting us, they have done a terrible job of OK'ing useless drug spinoffs while doing the pharmco's bidding. Of course we can only speculate what a libertarian society could bring us. Thousands dead is fine in the eyes of a corporation if the $1 billion lawsuit resulted in $3 billion in revenue for example. Money doesn't care about your health. Sounds simplistic but that is ultimately what this boils down to.
2 years and no mod points. Join reddit. Because openness is good.
Makes me think of the Douglas Adma's So Long and Thanks for All the Fish ...
"The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."
"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."
"I did," said Ford, "it is."
"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't the people get rid of the lizards?"
"It honestly doesn't occur to them. They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates the government they want."
"You mean they actually vote for the lizards."
"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."
"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"
"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard, then the wrong lizard might get in."
You sly dog: you got me monologuing! - Syndrome
I know that my economic views are very "right wing": free enterprise with minimal government interference. Their survey had me placed as a leftie, because I was critical of the role of corporations. My views on them are similar to Mr. Badnarik's (I will doubtless be voting for him this November). This tells me that they have a dim view of economic liberty -- that it is merely the liberty to let eeevil corporations run amok with power -- when in fact it is government policy which permits such things to exist, and true economic libertarianism would put things squarely in favor of the individual.
PoliticalCompass tends to be oriented in favor of the European-style socialism which pervades much of the developed world today. I suspect that in Europe equal rights means having something of a Pangloss parity in the freedom department: everyone, regardless of race, gender, or sexual orientation, has the same set of limited rights. As other responders to this post discussed, true free speech is not often seen in Europe; the point of view appears to be that everyone agrees there are some things (like nazism and anti-semitism) that you should not be allowed to say, period.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
... since laws were passed that exempted directors of corporations from full liability limitation. In other words, if the company on which you sit as a director owes back-wages, and you run the company to ruin so you can't even pay your employees, you are jointly and severally liable (along with the corporation itself) for those wages. There are a few such categories of limited-limited-liability.
Of course, shareholders' liability is still limited to their investment.
i - This sig provided by
I'm curious to know how a Libertarian would deal with the fact that some ubiquitous resources are by definition public, i.e. the air and water.
If I own property where the air is being polluted by a nearby factory, isn't the factory owner infringing upon my property rights? How do Libertarians propose to deal with the fact that someone's actions (ostensibly on "their own" property, if the factory is own their own land) affects everyone else's air?
The same argument can be used about water. How do Libertarians propose to stop landowners from polluting or diverting rivers that go through "their own" property?
To address an issue closer to Slashdotters' hearts, what about the airwaves? How would Libertarians divide the electromagnetic spectrum for broadcast?
Some resources are not neatly divided like land. In the case of air and water, one's actions affect other people, even when those actions are taken, "on one's own property." Unless Libertarianism addresses this issue somehow, I see it as an essential contradiction of the ideology.
With a one person one vote system, a politician could direct a marketing blitz on an urban area like mine, get his votes, and not even bother with the entire state of Wyoming. How is that democratic?
It's exactly democratic. The will of the majority of the people wins, and the majority of the people live in big cities.
Yes, it's a crappy way to run a country, but it is democratic.
Then we wised up.
Seriously.
/ Beginnnin gReading/howprwor.htm
Do you really think that a single party can really represent the beliefs and views of 130 million people?
Do you really believe that just two parties can represent the true beliefs of most of the people in America?
Because that is what the existing voting system implies.
A good PR primer:
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/polit/damy
European countries have been using proportionl representation for years and it has resulted in far better policies, better government and much better representation, it's actually worth voting in elections because your vote really counts. Voter turnouts across Europe are far higher than in the US, and the UK for that matter.
Since retirement accounts are typically comprised with 70% of investments in stock, I don't think that this will just hit "greedy evil investors" that many people have in mind.
Badnarik did mention that there someone will most likely offer insurance to project shareholders but at what price? And doesn't he know that shareholders don't run corporations unless he/she also happends to be a board member and/or an officer? I believe his plan will lead to stock market crash as investors pull their money out of the stock market to invest in something less risky.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
1. Lots of people freed up to guard borders, infrastructure, ports, etc, from the existing terrorists of the world. It is called the Department of *Defense*, after all.
That would be just teriffic! A military state in my very own neighborhood!
Truly a marvelous idea! Armed soldiers ready to gun down anybody they consider a threat. Even China would be proud of a plan like that!
Absolutely marvelous!
Because the great Manitou himself knows we don't need any more immigrants in this country.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
He is a conspiracy nut. His views on 9-11, the grassy-knoll, and others put him out in la-la land with the Roswell alien groupies.
That being said he did put forth some nearly perfect anwsers to the questions. Particularly the Electoral college issue and the problem with out sourcing. He nailed both issues squarely.
Great knowledge of what really works, without all the sugar coating (read - buy me votes) but probably too austere of a government especially in a land of people who want everything handed to them, the next big thing being free health care for everyone. (say good bye to quality then)
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I live in NC; I don't expect it to go to Kerry, but I'm still going to do my part. I've seen the margin between the two go below 5%, and I know enough not to trust polls, especially on election day.
I think all bets are off this time around; it'll likely be a close race, and with a surprising amount of people voting, especially given that it's a US election.
As for supporting Badnarik, he sounds more reasonable than some Libertarians out there. I give him credit both for supporting approval voting, and for not giving corporations a blank check. I'm not sure about privatizing education, partially for that reason.
However, I think there are some substantial differences between Bush and Kerry, and I don't think a third party candidate has a reasonable chance in this election. So I'm going to vote the way that my vote can potentially do the most good.
And if NC goes to Kerry, you might have me and people like me to thank--people who didn't give up because someone told them it wasn't supposed to be a "battleground state".
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Badnarik loses all credibility with me when he throws this tired line out there, which is clearly just a lame attempt to defeat the "wasted vote" scenario.
Agreed.
The sad truth is that Bush and Kerry really are too close to choose between based on thier merits. I've voted for third party canidates before, and if the only question was who could best manage the country, I'd vote for one again.
That said, I don't plan to vote for Kerry. I plan to cast the most effective vote I can *against* Bush. That just happens to be the Kerry box on the ballot.
Like I said, It's sad. But it's also reality. This election, like any with an incumbent is a referendum on that incumbent's performance.
A message has to be sent. To the rest of the world, and to the party machine that produced Bush.
What does this button d$#%* NO CARRIER
I was just using that as an example.
The Libertarian goal is to shrink the government, shutting it down (or at least large amounts of it) IS the desired outcome.
Makes it kinda hard to backfire. Also opens up a lot of debate on it being irresponsible.
I think they should work at every level, I think running presidential candidates is a good idea to promote the party as a whole. It is an excellent opportunity for the party to broadcast their platform.
He didn't say "sell at fair market value," he said "get...into the hands of." Seems to me he's saying that he'd make them untouchable...unpurchasable by those large groups that would pay so much more for the land then go on to rape it of its natural resources with not a single reason to care for the destruction of the environment (habitat for animals, plants, ourselves) and the extinction of said living creatures. A seller can put restrictions on the use of any real estate, and the government can take away the land and give it to these groups for a song, contingent upon preservation. It's something that could happen, but then again, I'm not sure what the ramifications of effectively taking someone's corporately "owned" property and giving it to someone else would be.
A libertarian organization is trying to realize their ideals in exactly the manner you suggest.
Everyone writes about the stuff he says and debate it. This is surely OK. But please realize, that he would only implement a fraction of what he states here.
"The presidency is an office of limited power, and I'd actually spend a good deal of time struggling with Congress and the courts to get my solutions implemented..."
Not only a good deal of time, but also a good part of the issues. When a political party/candidate closes in for a majority or even gets elected on a radical platform (if the electorate is really frustrated with how things are going) they will move to the middle/moderate platform eventually. Not only compromise with Congress, but simply common sense would force him to soften up. It is simply not sensible to throw around a whole country in a very short time span. Democracies don't work this way and other (non democratic) goverments had to learn this the hard way. Either they were thrown out of office by a coup or many people died in a famine or civil war errupted or somthing other horrible happened. The only thing that ever worked in this way in some countries was the change of government from authorian to democratic rule in some countries in eastern Europe. As one can see in Russia it doesn't always work this way.
So even if you think he is a little too radical you can still vorte for him if you are 1. fed up with Berry and Kush, 2. think that his ideas make some sense ideoligy wise (taken with a grain of salt) or 3. want some change in the US concerning the two party system.
Apart from that I never get that confusion with the UN that many have. The US is the only remaining superpower on earth and if the US want anything at the UN, like a resolution on Iraq, they get it. The resolution on the non existing WMDs against Iraq went through the security council 15-0 with even Syria voting in favour for heck's sake. So it is not the UN telling anything to the US, but the other way around. If the US uses their diplomatic muscle they can get what they want at the UN any time without any promise of foreign aid to any country or some other shady deal. It is really that simple. But for some reason many people still seem to believe in that fake stereotype of the UN pushing the US around. Please! Get a grip. If anyone is pushing anybody around it would be the other way. But nowdays the Neocons simply want to ignore the UN and have done this. But this doesn't go over well with all the other countries. Diplomacy has some rules. Even though every one knows, that in the end the US will get whatever they want other countries want to be asked first. It is a ritual.
You know You will get cookies from grandma. But You still say "please" and "thank you".
You are reading far too much into it indeed.
I agree that the division between legislative, executive, and judicial branches is a good idea. And if all you're saying is that the libertarian solution here would not be perfect - we're in total agreement. There is, unfortunately, no perfect solution - unless you believe in direct rule by an omniscient being I suppose, but in that case it's long past time she needs to show up and set us straight.
Bad things would happen under the rules libertarians propose. The point is simply that, in the long run, these things would be self-limiting - when the rich have to take responsibility for their actions without hiding behind regulatory agencies and legal fictions, it's suddenly in their best interest to be careful. And, on the consumer side, when people are no longer being taught this nonsense about the FDA and the like taking care of these things so they don't have to worry about it, they may also learn to be a little more careful and critical as well.
A world where pharmaceutical companies enjoy no regulatory shelter and no limited liability protections would be a world where the officers and owners of those companies have solid reasons of self-interest to be careful. A world where both the companies and the consumers are more careful would be a world with fewer (not none, but fewer, particularly in the long run) horrific 'mistakes.'
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
He won't be invited to the presidential debates because the bipartisan commission on debates took organizing the debates over from the league of women voters after the latter invited H. Ross Perot two election cycles in a row. The bipartisan commission instituted a rule where a candidate has to poll at over 15% nationally in order to be invited. There is a tremendous amount of conjecture that this rule was put into place to keep Ralph Nader out of the debates in 2000.
The 8 billion dollars won't matter when that companies top execs are thrown into jail for the rest of their life for killing someone or being purposefully fraudulent to their customers. If you could steal and kill all day long and then just go to court with great lawyers to make a buck right now you might; that's what corporations can do because of their government shielding. If the executives and stockholders are held accountable for the companies actions, not only would all of the executives focus on the bottom line, but they would focus on how to NOT break the laws. Of course there must be laws as such, so that total liberatarianism wouldn't work too well, but definitely a moderate form could work.
Interestingly enough, most of the original superfund sites were on government property! The government has proven they damage the environment more than public companies! Yet we entrust the government to take care of the enironment!
LOL!
While the Libertarian position has its problems, it's better than the current situation. I'd be happy with a middle ground...subject the government to the same environmental standards and hold those who give and follow the orders to pollute criminally liable
Except for that fact that deregulation in California is a misnomer. There were actually more regulations in place regarding utilities buying and selling electricity than before the market was "deregulated". If deregulation causes these things, then why hasn't Pennsylvania, which has been deregulated since 2000, seen these problems?
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
Have to hold up a warning sign about taking anything that Consumer Reports says as gospel... although they are not gov't and are independent, because of their lack of funding from gov't or corporate sources, they often are not able to thouroughly test all of the products they review (notably, automobiles often have old reviews rerun for several years despite companies taking steps to fix known problems). i've found CR gets by on reputation rather than solid numbers.
I know Kerry won't have Cheney for his VP, and will have a different cabinet, justice dept., etc., and therefore I would expect that fully one third of the gov't would end up in saner hands. I think voting against Ashcroft (which the people already did once, mind you) will help prevent harm to your civil liberties.
Also unlike Bush, Kerry might actually use his veto power to prevent bad legislation from going into law. So that should help check the legislative branch. Finally, in the event that one or more Supreme Court justices retires in the next four years, it will be Kerry and not Bush who gets to pick the appointee. So I've covered all three branches!
Personally I think Bush is worse than Kerry, because Bush appears to trust his staff implicitly, and his staff is not to be trusted. Kerry, on the other hand, can make up his own mind about things. He can also change his mind, which is a strength when you'd otherwise be doing the wrong thing.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Libertariasm (a co-opted term in its own right) itself is pretty hypocritcal.
How do libertarians justify a reversion to "property is king" thinking, which would see those that obtained such property under a system that is (in their own mind) unjust, start with an advantage as moral?
Wouldn't a truly just libertarian system be forced to implement a "start from zero" clause, where all of a nation's property would be evenly divided among the citizens, until you say the word go? Would libertarians support this? Why not?
If you don't do that, aren't you just rewarding those that prospered under the old "broken" system? It's naive to think that Bill Gates, with his property value, and myself with mine are on even terms under a libertarian model. Aside from a few more rich folk, and a few more poor folk, what essentially would a libertarian system change?
The advocates of this system aren't concerned with making our world "better off", they're concerned with making *themselves* better off - which makes them no different than those running the show right now.
Why would I take such a risk in basically replacing the status quo led by one group with another?
I may as well support a monarchy... after all, as long as the King isn't insane we'll be ok.
My wife (with a rare health condition) surives on a drug that due to FDA-meddling is illegal to prescribe in the US.
Fortunately, it is available in most of the rest of the planet, and it can be ordered over the Net.
I'm willing to compromise. FDA safety regulations can stay. The tight FDA effectiveness requirements (which always tie into specific diseases and specific pre-determined effects) should be voluntary.
"With a one person one vote system, a politician could direct a marketing blitz on an urban area like mine, get his votes, and not even bother with the entire state of Wyoming. How is that democratic?"
How is that any different than what's happening now with the blitzing of the 10 or 15 close states?
"Stop throwing the Constitution in my face, it's just a goddamned piece of paper!" - George W. Bush Nov. 2005
I'm hoping that proportional representation will make it onto the national radar screen.
The US should switch to proportional representation for electing the house of representatives. We'd gain representation for minority views not represented by either of the two main parties. Plus we would unburden ourselves from the pathetically gerrymandered system of congressional districts.
Leaving the senate as it is would still provide for representation based in geography (at the state level).
Badnarik's ideas have a lot of appeal, but this point about a popular vote meaning the end of democracy is wrong and self serving. There's a lot more libertarian votes in the sparsely populated areas.
We should elect by popular vote. We need to come up with an auditable, verifiable, election process before "in Diebold we trust" becomes our national motto.
-cbare
It isn't and shouldn't be the role of the United States to directly put an end to things like that. Genocides and other human rights atrocities should be dealt with through the United Nations, an international organization set up SPECIFICALLY to handle things like this.
I used to be pretty hard-core in the Libertarian Party, even presenting tens of thousands of signatures to the Commission on Presidential Debates to get the LP candidate in the debates.
While I think the LP is a bit ideologic for general consumption, and has no chance of electing a presidential candidate, I support local candidate efforts.
The LP misses on some key economic issues - 1) A gold standard is more volatile than the modern Fed, plus in some ways an inflation-sensitive Fed policy is equivalent to a diversified commodity basket anyway and 2) There are real "commons" infrastructure issues that are key to developing economies that cannot be ignored (but these don't involve 90% of current government spending.)
Regardless, I find myself unable to swallow voting for the much lamer candidates (Bush, Kerry, Nader) on the ballot...
While I support much of what this candidate says, and seriously consider voting for him (I'm a Republican who is thoroughly disgusted with Bush... in fact I didn't vote for him the first time!) I find it frustrating when a candidate, ANY candidate holds up "ineffective government" as a reason to vote for them.
What most campaigning candidates seem to forget in their quest to tap the frustrated voter is that the US Constitution is designed to create ineffective government. The Constitution is a great document, and if you read it closely you can see that it was designed to LIMIT government power by creating a multi-headed beast. Each head's main goal is to limit the power of the other heads. I think it works well, except in situations (like now) when FUD makes the heads lose their heads and create things like the PATRIOT ACT.
Great interview. maybe the Geek Nation will be the next 70 years.
Many of us have thought that all along, that the only people fit for office are those smart enough to know they don't want the job in the first place. I tend to vote for the people who have real jobs and have to pay the bills. Why would we ever want someone who only does politics running the country? We talk about how screwed up the system is, then turn around and re-elect all the same people for another term. If we want change, we should probably start with those representing us and not their careers...
The question under debate is whether or not it's a good idea to let the government run the education system. The fact that the government deliberately removed educational opportunity from a segment of the population is clearly relevant to that issue, and thus cannot legitimately be adjusted out of the numbers.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
You are exactly right.
It sickens me that because of where I live (Texas) my vote is essentially worthless. It's already been decided. Whether I'm pro-Bush, Kerry, or other, there isn't a damn thing I can personally do to influence the election.
As stated in the article as well as my first post, Badnarik is not defending the Electoral College (nor am I). In fact, he has proposed a rather interesting alternative. But allowing only the most densely populated parts of America do decide the fate of the rest of the country seems to fall short.
"Stop throwing the Constitution in my face, it's just a goddamned piece of paper!" - George W. Bush Nov. 2005
1) he advocates privatizing currentcy? how would taxation occur, given multiple forms of currency? and which one is the non-speculator going to choose? and would it still say "In God We Trust"? =) well i hope it doesn't say "in citibank we trust".
...For instance, a public library helps reduce the public cost of what the market WOULD bear for reading books. We all benefit by conserving trees, conserving human labor to make the books, and reducing the number of hours you or I need to work to read those books. Ask your libertarian what he's got in mind for your public libraries! would he privatize them? or close them and claim that he "created jobs" by forcing us to buy more books while encouraging deforestation and taking away a public resource?
2) his answer regarding privatizing public schools is loose and shabby. (my understanding is that) public education is a constitutional right. i don't see how these guys can present themselves as contitutionalists and then try to mandate that private schools be tasked with safeguarding kid's constitutional right to public education.
3) his ideal that the market should be the final determining factor in all matters seems fundamentally flawed. the market is not always right in the long term. (not even in the short term) sometimes a democratically elected government is exactly the right body to ensure that public needs [and preferences] are met.
for instance, government would be the right institution to bypass the biggest environmental blunder man has ever made (transportation via internal combustion), and to move us forward with something that doesn't make smog, doesn't make noise pollution, doesn't make visual pollution, doen't hurt health, doesn't require roads, road crews or jackhammers, doesn't cost a fortune in insurance and bank debt. doesn't cost your soul. etc.
but the libertarian is going to say what? i tend to guess (perhaps falsely) that he'd say the market bears those cars, so proceed accordingly. in fact what makes money is not what would benefit us overall.
people talk about a multibillion dollar industry as if that's what we're GETTING FROM IT, but that's decepetive. first and foremost, A MULTIBILLION DOLLAR INDUSTRY IS WHAT IT'S COSTING US!!!. so "what the market bears" is not necessarily a good thing. "what the market bears" is how much we could save if we somehow worked around the problem that's costing us multiple billions.
question laissez faire. sometimes it's probably the right answer. but not always.
4) the market seems to bear a landscape of pukey corporate billboards: texaco signs, target signs, safeways, billboards, gaps, chevrons, pottery barns, wells fargos, taco bells, 7-11's etc, etc. personally i think it sucks, and i believe i should have a right to vote that crap down so that i dont have to look at a bunch of advertisements when i go for a drive. (lol) does he think these businesses have a right to turn my whole environment into visual pollution [aka advertising space] just b/c they bought / leased a patch of land large enough for a billboard?
5) he talks about stopping the government from selling the right to pollute. as i understand it, that's one of the ways pollution is mitigated (reduced). pollution isn't free, so companies reduce it as best they can. (in theory) the government fills that role b/c no other institution can fill that role. (lets pray that it's never up to Bechtel or Chevron to sells the right to pollute!) so, as i see it, if he stops govt from SELLING the right to pollute, how's he going to handle pollutors? with regular monthly "fines"? [then what's the difference between that and selling the right to pollute?] they're still gonna be polluting right? or is the laisez faire libertarian ideal going to make them stop? or are all the investors going to be in jail since the corporate veil of investor immunity is lifted, and pollution is a criminal offense? ???!??
6) the guy said ("perversely") that removing t
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
If you have then you can only come to one of two conclusions:
Everyone has bad taste
or
The audience does not have the power to determine what is presented to them.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
He can also change his mind, which is a strength when you'd otherwise be doing the wrong thing.
You mean he's flip-flopping!!!
Waffling!!!!
When you make a decision you should stick with it, not waffle like some spineless wimp.
That's why I think marijuana leads to jazz music and raping white women.
(Apologies to Doug Stanhope for the blatant plagiarism(copyright violation) of his line)
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
Mr Badnarik: your campaign seems to have the momentum of a runaway freight train. Why are you so popular?
There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
Dont be so sure!:0 /normal/19.jpg 0 /normal/07.jpg 0 /normal/13.jpg
http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/kutvonen/promootio200
http://www.yle.fi/linna98/photos/photo46_i.jpg
http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/kutvonen/promootio200
http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/kutvonen/promootio200
If seems like the Libertarian party has a chance of being on the ballot of every U.S. State EXCEPT New Hampshire. Of all the states for the party to be off the ballot in, I would have placed the "Live Free or Die" state right at the bottom of the list.
Is the NH signature requirement just that much harder than all the other states, or is there some other reason?
Capital migrates to where it is most profitably invested. That's just a fact of the market. If I can get a 10% return in Country A and a 25% return in Country B, you know where I'll be investing.
We can deal with that reality, or we can fight it. If we fight it, we'll lose.
I agree with Mr. Badnarik here. Arthur C. Clarke wrote in 1953 (Childhood's End, excellent SciFi that stands the test of time):
True intelligence never resents inevitability.
Once we accept that globalization is a rough but worthwhile phenomenon, we can better adapt our goverments and corporations to exploit it, rather than fear it.
"I think this is the general problem with politics today. We seem to think its the norm to have a career politician. I think the founding fathers would have intended a baker, a butcher, a sailor, and a bank owner to all be equally feasible politicians. These individuals don't like something so they say their ideas and if people like what they say the office selects the person. The way we have it now, the politician(which is a valid "career") looks around for offices that he/she is likely to win and they go for it."
Interestingly enough, the rise of career politicians is practically inevitable. Some people will have a talent for politics and/or a desire to be in politics and they will specialize and simply be better at garnering votes than non-specialists. It's practically the same mechanism that dictates specialization in economics.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
first off:
I AM NOT AN ACADEMIC. I DO NOT CLAIM TO BE.
now, i'm just an average 25 year old geek. i work for the DoD for a living, writing GIST documentation. i am lucky enough to make a very good salary for my age, but i'm not near breaking 6 digits by any means.
from my experience, NOBODY is going to look out for you (as an adult) except yourself. if you're lucky enough to have family/friends/etc that have the extra time/money/caring, feel lucky. a lot of people don't.
to extend that, NOBODY in the government is looking out for you. by NOBODY, i mean just that. every program to support the "poor" is usually a shell, or at best a program to keep the lefties smiling like a 3rd grader with a gold star.
while many people will disagree with my personal finding that only you are looking out for yourself, at least the Libertarian party is quite up front about stating this fact. i think most people would really start taking a better stock of their life if forced to realize this reality. mommy and daddy aren't going to be around forever, which a lot of other gen-x'ers i know seem to think.
rather than trying to go into a 90000k rant and sound like the normal human with limited time to research politics and philosophy i am, just think of it from this perspective. i think a lot of people would start to align themselves better politically if they did.
ps. - Mr. Badnarik, i've never bothered to vote since turning 18. i applaud you, as i'm going out first thing tomorrow after work to register. i doubt you'll live up to 1% of my expectations, but at least now i have something politically i can believe in.
next...?
Your head a splode
My wife (with a rare health condition) surives on a drug that due to FDA-meddling is illegal to prescribe in the US.
I sympathise with you. FDA should never have had the power to ban a drug. Their only *legitimate* function would be to ensure that a drug contains what the label says it contains. In fact, the agency's original name was the "Pure Food and Drug Administration."
FDA kills thousands of people every year, by keeping life-saving drugs off the market.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
About the "90-day withdrawl policy". In short, any withdrawl policy that is "X days" is inherently flawed. The assumption is that security is a state that can be attained. Not so. Security is a process. So the goal of Iraq should be to train and establish police and military forces that can continue the security process on their own. Any policy that says "X days" til withdrawl won't work. It may seem to work because the country will quiet down, but on day X + 1 the country will blow up like nobody's business because all the freaky-freaks know when the troops providing security won't be around anymore.
I heard this somewhere the other day...
Experience is not something that is always desired in a politician...It is similar to looking for an experienced whore.
Keep in mind that it is still constitutionally prohibited for foreign born folk to be elected President. Candlestick makers are relaged to the House and Senate.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Finally, a post that lets me quickly figure out who to put on my friends list, a post that has every Libertarian on slashdot saying something. Well, I was left (for a change) with nothing else to say, but at least I wanted my name attached to this post.
Another satisfied Libertarian voter
How odd. We have troops all over the world, had bush at the helm for most of a year with plenty of warning and we were still attacked. Since then, We have had nearly 3 years in which we had the ability to capture bin ladin and stop al qaeda, yet we all but pulled out of where he was based at to go fight for other reasons. How do you propose that placing troops everywhere, causing more civil wars, invading other countries, and causing the enemies numbers to swell 10 fold is going to increase our security?
Since Democrats, Republicans, and even Putin's appoach does not seem to be working, perhaps Badnarik has it right.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Why are Librarians running for President? Shouldn't they be shelving books!
...he reached this point:
When a particular job or skill _does_ move offshore, all other things being equal, it merely frees Americans -- the most productive workers in the world -- to develop the NEXT job or skill or to come up with a more efficient, profitable way of providing the old one.
Why should I have to give up my chosen livelihood, the four years of education for which I'm still paying off student loans, and my position and tenure within my company so I can go off and "develop the NEXT job or skill"?
I'm a programmer. I don't want to be "merely freed" from the job that I chose and strove for, the job that (despite its frustrations) I love more than any other.
I don't know what "the next job" is for someone like me, although I'd love to hear what Mr. Badnarik thinks it is. And even if I did know, how can I be sure that that job won't be outsourced next?
Whoops. There goes your stupid argument.
point to a president that has had a "regular" job.
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
Freedom includes protection of personal property, such as computers and electronic resources. So spam sent from one's own computers and Internet connection (or those legitimately purchased from others) probably would be legal. And that makes sense: we have and will see that as long is spam is legal somewhere (or the anti-spam laws are not aggressively enforced), the world will keep receiving it.
Even if a US law forced Americans to stop sending spam via Asia, there would be hundreds of folks from other countries to take their place.
Of course, all the blacklists and filtering methods would be legal, too.
And Catholics still ask their priests for marital advise. How more fucked up can you get?
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
After the current "tort reform" ideas are passed into law, they certainly will be.
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
Is it much better that they are spending all of their time in Swing States that represent less than half of the population?
If a candidate decided to spend their time in California instead of Minnesota, that's unfortunate for Minnesota. It's far worse to have a candidate to choose Minnesota over California: California has 6 times as many people!
A speech...
Some people just don't study much history, do they? I think books like "The Jungle" should be a required reading for all citizens. There is a VERY good reason why FDA exists. Just read the book and see what happens when there are no regulations and inspectors. Greenspan (and many free market economists) also thought that free market forces were strong enough to discourage corporate fraud... that is until greedy bastards like Enron's of the world and dirty money managers like Janus milked billions from unsuspecting citizens. And how is suing bankrupt companies like Enron going to help the investors??? Also look at the herbal medicine market right now. There is absolutely no FDA control over it now and you have all these snake oil salesmen selling all kinds of pill that are now worth the plastic bottle it is shipped in (and in case of epehdra, killing people). Do we really want that kind of wild wild west mentality with cancer drugs?
You should be king if you're an American.
Well, I'm not (american that is) and what happens if I don't want to be king? My ego isn't that big.
Libertarians want to make such Americans kings and queens, whereas you believe that some set of authoritarians can right a broken system
First off, don't attempt to tell me what I believe, explain your own beliefs.
Second, Am I to believe that libertarians would they abolish Congress? The Presidency? The Supreme Court? By your definition, they should.
They should also have no problem with my suggestion to have all citizens start on equal footing, regardless of their current net worth... but it seems they do.
So once again, please tell me how it is libertarians can so willfully ignore the fact that the "unfairness" of the current system is being carried over into their own self styled utopia?
Now point to the sorry state of our government. Thanks for reinforcing the man's point.
The Philosophy of Liberty | lewrockwell.com
Oh please the priests and the nuns have been getting it on for centuries. The nuns have illegal abortions and hid the "remains." Priests know plenty about marital relations.
No.
There is a third option. That people are too lazy or stupid to excercise the power to decide what they watch/read/listen to.
Do you remember this article? The whole point of this book was to show how the government and the corporate types had taylored the public school system to produce exactally this kind of 'citizen' (using the term rather loosely) Try reading some of the book. I did.
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
its obvious you did 0 research before posting, of course there are libertarian candidates in all forms of lower office.
cut and pasted from teh libertarian party website:
Currently, more than 590 Libertarians hold public office, more than all other third parties combined. In the 2003 elections, we elected 46 Libertarians, nearly half in higher-level races such as city and county council. During the year 2000, we ran more than 1430 candidates, more than twice as many as all other third parties combined.
We fielded candidates for 255 of the 435 seats in the U.S House as well as 25 of the 33 Senate seats up for election -- the first time in eighty years that any third party has contested a majority of the seats in Congress. Our slate of U.S. House candidates received 1.7 million votes, the first time any third party has received over a million votes for U.S. House.
i can't believe you got modded insightful, there must be a lot of ignorant people out there.
will remain screwed up, whether we are there or not. They were that way before we were there and will be that way once we leave. Oh, sure, some exceptions apply. But they are that, exceptions.
We seem to happily ignore most of them anyway. And maybe, just maybe, we will earn a little more respect in the world.
Exactly. Folks who live in the dark-colored states essentially have no say in the electoral college; "your" electors have already been selected. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans need your vote. So throw your vote to a party that can actually make use of it. The Libertarians, the Greens, the Constitutionists, the Natural Lawyers, the Socialists, etc. all need individual votes to gain credibility. If you have any principles at all, there's gotta be a smaller party that you like better than (at least) one of the Big Two, so give them your vote to add to their resume. Even if you live in Texas and like the idea of smaller government and lower taxes, vote for Badnarik instead of Bush. Or if you live in California and like the idea of a better safety net and more equal rights, vote for Nader instead of Kerry. Or vice versa. Or whatever. Voting instead for one of the Big Two in one of the "already decided" states would actually be throwing your vote away.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
You do know that "W" became president by a similar mandate. He didn't have much intention of becoming a career politician, but the combination of a incompetent incumbent governor in Texas, Bush's likeability by and acceptance in the "good ole boy network" in Texas, his popularity from revitalizing the Texas Rangers baseball team, disillusionment in the corruption of the Democrat party, and approval of his father's policies thrust him into the Governorship and grooming to run for president. In other words, if Ross Perot hadn't run for president in 1992 and cost George Bush Sr. the presidency, and if Bill Clinton hadn't been such an terrible president and Ann Richards such an incompetant governor, George Bush wouldn't have been thrust into the office that most of America regretted relinquishing from his father.
"How can we change the system so people have the choice between multiple candidates and not just two? "
How can we get the idiot interviewer to recognize the fact that THERE ARE MORE THAN TWO CANDIDATES? Jesus Christ! http://www.politics1.com/p2004.htm
Let me spell it out for you!
Bush - Kerry - Gene Amondoson (Prohibition Party) - Michael Peroutka (Constitution Party) - David Cobb (Green Party) - Michael Badnarik (Libertarian Party) - Leonard Peltier (Peace & Freedom Party of California) - Charles Jay (Indiana) - Earl F. Dodge (Prohibition Party of Colorado) - Ralph Nader (Reform Party) - Walt Brown (Socialist Party) - Bill Van Auken (Socialist Equality Party) - Roger Calero (Socialist Workers Party) - John Parker (Workers World Party) - Stanford E. Andress (Independent) - Thomas Harens (Christian Freedom of Minnesota) and the following write ins:
A.J. Albritton (American Republican Party-Mississippi) *
Sterling Allan (Providential Party-Utah) *
Kenneth M. Bonnell (I-Mississippi) *
Harry Braun (I-Arizona) *
Fred Cook (I-Georgia) *
Eric J. Davis (Michigan) *
Robert DiGiulio (Children's Party-Vermont) *
Bob Dorn (Washington) *
Lonnie D. Frank (I-California) *
Ronald "John Galt Jr." Gascon (I-Pensylvania) *
Jack Grimes (United Fascist Union-Pennsylvania) *
Michael Halpin (I-New York) *
Larry D. Hines (I-Texas) *
Georgia Hough (I-Georgia) *
Keith Judd (I-Massachusetts) *
Darren E. Karr (Party X-Oregon) *
Samuel Keegan (I-Rhode Island) *
Joseph Martyniuk Jr. (I-Illinois) *
David Mevis (I-Mississippi) *
Muadin (E-Democratic Party-Massachusetts) *
Jeffrey Peters (We The People Party-New Hampshire)
Andrew M. Rotramel (I-Texas) *
Joseph "Average Joe" Schriner (I-Ohio) *
Dennis P. Slatton (United America Party-North Carolina) *
Dan Snow (I-Texas) *
Brian B. Springfield (I-Virginia) *
Diane Templin (American Party-California) *
Lawrence Rey Topham (I-Utah) *
Lemuel Tucker (I-Michigan) *
Da Vid (Light Party-California) *
Tom Wells (Family Values Party-Florida) *
A.J. Wildman (I-Virginia) *
So please stop asking stupid questions, slashdot! There are more choices than Bush and Kerry, but working for a national talk show host, I can't get anyone except Nader to want to come on our show to debate or talk issues! So stop spreading this crap!
Obviously, there aren't going to be voting reforms to give us a third-party-friendly system so long as the power is held by two main parties opposed to these changes. Overcoming the system to have a non-main-party winner of enough elections to get control on a platform of voting reform is pretty unlikely. It seems to me that the only way to get there from here is to get one or both of the main parties to want a change to the system which, coincidentally or not, permits third parties. Any ideas of what motivation could be given to main parties to support reforms?
My thought is that a system in which a single party could run multiple candidates without those candidates splitting the vote might be beneficial to main parties as well as allowing third parties to get better showings. I bet an acceptance system with Bush, Kerry, and Dean (and others) would be a very interesting race.
Well, of course it depends on what you mean by "regular". But I say it has indeed happened, even in this century. Admittedly some of it was in the tradition of rich kids who are decide to "start at the bottom", but that is still better than complete insularity. For example, the elder George Bush sold tires as a traveling salesman in Texas, among several other mid-level jobs, before going into oil, and then politics. Point is, I'm looking for at least something to help them understand how the world works outside Washington. Not necessary that they should all have been street sweepers, but to be able to successfully take orders and carry out a job, rather than make a life on pontification and schmoozing.
By the same token I am much more interested in a governor running for President than a Senator. Governers actually have to manage something.
There is more to marriage than sex. In fact, once you are married, there is a lot less sex.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
Just one humble opinion. It is currently being fleshed out.
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
Does throwing a wig on an altar boy count? ;^)
Any nasty awful sinner who has premarital sex shouldn't be asking a Catholic Priest for advice anyways. PREMARITAL SEX IS A SIN!! Get some morals evil pinko commie!
I agree. Maybe we should amend the Constitution to require a candidate to be a "regular guy." For example, his net worth must be less than an arbitrary value, say $200,000, cannot have ever served on a board of a public corporation, owned a large business, have a law degree, etc.
If you look at the losers that get elected, they are all rich white men. Rather than spend their time working in factories, firing machine guns, scrubbing floors, etc. they spend their days pondering over which luxury car to drive to the country club.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
being against the patriot act and the war in iraq is not ignoring local terrorists. your conclusions are erroneous. did you see him say he was going to get rid of law enforcement? i don't think so. but eliminating the PATRIOT act would help bring a balance of power back.
third parties do not do well because we are conditioned by the media to believe we only have two options. AND the two parties have made it very difficult to have more parties.
politicans do what benefits politicans. not what benefits the people. which is why we have pork barrel politics and the politicans have no incientive to change it. we may all hate it, but no one lobbies to put an end on lobbying.
like so many in the media today: you're asking the wrong questions!
Note that even that law says "subdivided lots of irregular form"...
That's why if your goal is to preserve something, you buy up a lot of land and not just a few lots from someone else. The Nature Conservancy buys thousands of acres at a time, whole valleys and the like. Even fairly rich individuals could do the same in remote locations.
I do feel the guys in the article you mentioned were railroaded though. I hope they were able to eventually stop the condemation of thier land.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Libertarians are just Republicans who still smoke out.
According to your views, this COUNTRY should not exist, as Washington and the others once given power would have kept it....
It is true that people will not always do the right thing, and that IMO is exactly why we need libertarianism.
Think about this, where exactly does your vote have the most power and influence? On the local level. So then anything that shifts political power away from the federal and closer to the individual enhances your voice and enables you to better affect those issues which are important to you.
Service guarantees Citizenship! Questions Guarantee GITMO.... Amerika Uber Alles!
How the fsck is this a troll? Apperantly, the truth hurts.
Well, that sure explains why you aren't a libertarian. You're stupid!
.... NOT .... THAT .... COMPLETELY ... OBVIOUS?
Why would somebody campaign for votes outside cities, when the cities have all the people? So basically, any and all rural issues would disappear and America would be run by the cities FOR the cities. IS
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Actually anyone that knows me will tell you I've read way too much history. Mr. James best known work I have also read - although it's not exactly history.
Yes, there is. Doesn't mean it was the best imaginable response to the problem, and doesn't mean that it hasn't evolved over time to become a greater threat than the one it was meant to counter.
As to Enron and the rest - you are the one that is obviously in need of some education. Look into that case a little closer, and then come back and tell me how common that would be in a system where there were no regulatory agencies and no limited-liability rules to shield the perpetrators of such fraud.
Would such things still happen? Of course. If you come up with a way to stop them completely, short of a return to the stone age, please let me know. Until then, I'd be quite happy if the perpetrators had to face liability for their actions without layer after layer of federal and state shielding. I'd be happy if those perpetrators lost every penny to partially compensate the victims, and every other corporate officer and shareholder in the company got an object lesson to discourage them from being a part of, or passively allowing, such things to happen with their company in the future.
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I would really like to vote for a libertarian candidate, but right now is not the time. My viewpoint on this is and has been for quite awhile: vote libertarian at the local level. The party HAS to be built first. I am glad to see there is a Libertarian option on almost all the state ballots...it is good exposure....but voting Libertarian in this election will accomplish nothing. What the Libertarian party needs to do is push hard and build up local constituencies...what good will it do this country to have a Libertarian president when he's controlled by a bipartisan congress? The ideology of the Libertarian party must pervade through the house and senate before it can ever be effective in the White House.
The libertarian platform, despite what they may otherwise espouse, is: "legalize pot & deride Christianity." Libertarianism is founded on the principal that atheism equates to intellectually superiority. Other principals have been added and removed from the big tent. Similarly, Planned Parenthood and the ACLU were founded on the principal that white people are smarter than brown people and is the core of the abortion movement, despite other eugenic or "women's rights, animals rights, or socialist ideals that have been added to or removed from the platform
From both a pragmatic and principled perspective, the best foreign policy is one of non-intervention: Refusing to interfere in the internal affairs of, or intervene in the disputes of, other nations.
Sort of how US policy was in World War II... the entire world is dang lucky that Pearl Harbor got bombed, since the policy then seemed to be exactly this.
"Truth is not decided by majority vote" consensus gentium -- Norman Geisler
Yeah! And what about our doctors? They're all rich guys too! Let's pass a law saying you can't be a doctor unless you're a "regular guy" you know, no education beyond a bachelors degree, or maybe even high school, that would be best....
"If you or I want to unseat or kill a thug like Saddam Hussein, we're morally free to do so. He's a tyrant and a murderer. We'd only be acting on behalf of his victims."
Is there some sort of math behind this I can get? Like, if I wanted to unseat the head of Enron because he commited theft (a crime of value X) against Y number of victims, what would (X*Y) have to equal before I'm morally free to bust a cap?
Fuck off, virgin :P
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
Ok, this is going to come from five weeks of education in my Intro. to Business and International Business courses, plus a video I watched on the success of Hong Kong:
There are three types of economic systems: Free market, command economy, and mixed market. The US is a mixed market, not quite command, and not quite free market. What this means is that our businesses aren't dictated to by our government, but there's still government influence in almost everything a government does. Todays businesses are riddled with regulations, laws, and restrictions to the point that our economy is no longer efficient.
To take an example: According to Wikipedia, Hong Kong is the perfect example of a free market economy. "But wait," you might say. "Isn't Hong Kong in communist China?" And I would say to you, "Why, yes, it is." However, when Hong Kong began, about 50 years ago, it was agreed that "China's socialist economic system would not be practiced in Hong Kong and that Hong Kong would enjoy a high degree of autonomy in all matters" (Wikipedia). It's China's "little experiment" with capitalism. And, guess what? It's a thriving economy. People move from the US, Scotland, Japan, Australia, just to start a business in Hong Kong. It's success is due to it's limited government interaction. One paper is all one needs to start a business, and unlike in India where there is no guarantee your business will even be reviewed and approved, in Hong Kong, the paper is copied and stamped. Poof. Business started. There is a fixed tax for everything, only for government. There are no regulations. When did there ever need to be regulations, anyway?
It's a simple theory. If a business produces diseased food, nobody will eat from there any longer. The business will go bankrupt and another business will fill it's place, the peoples needs. It that business begins abusing it's power and begins to charge too much, another will arise and fill the need. If people aren't limited by work hours they can work longer and get more pay for that TV they've wanted. If people just want to deliver a flippin newspaper for $4.00 an hour, they aren't denied the job because the employer can't pay the $6.00 minimum wage. It JUST WORKS.
I didn't know much about the libertarian philosophy before this article, but now I'm thoroughly convinced that I'll vote libertarian in 2008.
Real programmers can write assembly code in any language. -- Larry Wall
If you look at the losers that get elected
Gee, I thought that winners get elected. Did you go to public school?
they are all rich white men.
http://www.nocitycouncil.com/content/ Yes, you must have gone to public school...
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Jimmy Carter was a peanut farmer and naval nuclear engineer, not that I think he wass a good president at all.
Greater threat? Excuse me? I think putting drug manufacturers through trials to prove its efficacy and safety is worthwhile trade for longer development time (isn't that what science is all about?).
No limited liability my ass. Name me the limitied liability law that prevents the Enron investors from suing Ken Lay. What does prevent investors from getting every dime that Ken Lay has is difficulty in proving his wrong doing (all rich people like Ken Lay have an army of lawyers to cover his ass), and rich-folk friendly bankruptsy laws that prevent you from getting certain class of assets from crooks like this. Which has NOTHING to do with regulations - it is all about how much money you have and how much influence you have over politicians. The regulations are there to make the playing fields as even as possible. Without it, the rich and powerful will do whatever they want without fearing for the consequences. If you believe Joe Schmo with 2K in savings can sue someone like Ken Lay and actually win, you are living in the fantasy world.
And if you believe that it is possible to remove ALL layers of protection for the rich in our system, again, you are living in the fantasy world (first thing they would do is to outlaw class action lawsuits - which they are already trying).
Bear in mind that most of the focus of the Libertarian Party is at the FEDERAL level,specifically.
A great deal of Libertarian political philosophy revolves around the U.S. Constitution, and getting back to making sure that document is more rigorously followed. The U.S. Constitution states that (to paraphrase) if a power is not explicitly granted to the federal government, then that power belongs either to the states or to individuals.
Everyone panicking over the thought of, say, never being able to have "socialized medicine", or not having government-guaranteed welfare programs, etc. etc. are missing that point.
It is true that with enough Libertarians in the executive and legislative branches we'd have no chance that the United States would ever have socialized medicine. At the same time, though, California (for example) could have socialized medicine (and would probably be able to run a specifically-Californian socialized medicine program a heck of a lot more effectively than any such program attempted at a federal level where, as I mentioned in a thread in another discussion, they can't even manage a simple "make sure I have enough money to at least rent a comfortable cardboard box after I retire" program without screwing it up and driving it into debt. If I can't trust them to run even a bare-minimum government-mandated small portion of my retirement planning, I certainly wouldn't trust those bozos to decide when I needed, say, and organ transplant...
In any case, that's where Libertarianist ideals meet "conceivably realistic". Sure, selling off every single "public" asset to private entities could be grossly dangerous, but that's not really what would happen, I think, under a Libertarian federal government. What would really happen is that federally-owned government property would be sold to the individual states. The states would then decide what to keep "public" and what to sell to either smaller government entities (e.g. Counties, Municipalities, etc.) or to private entities. The real situation wouldn't be anywhere near as extreme as people paint it.
To be sure, there ARE people who have fairly radical Libertarian ideals and would want to apply the same concepts at the state level, but I think there are more of us than you might think who believe Libertarianism is near-perfect for the Federal government, while State governments can be more "socialist" if their citizens prefer that.
I think of it being a little like the relationship of the EU with its individual member nations...
There are times when I think the US would tend to be more "comfortable" and get along better with the rest of the world if we were actually 3-4 separate, smaller countries with economies, populations, and areas that might be more efficiently and less abusively governed, but out here in the real world, I doubt that's ever going to happen (and I'm not ENTIRELY convinced it would be a net good overall if it did), so I'll leave the naming of these hypothetical countries and the assignment of which states go to which one as a mental experiment for others...
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Bwahhhhahahahahahaha!@%#@!!!&*#!! Thanks, that's the best laugh I've had in a while. W didn't want to be a politician! That's a good one!
The "Ross Perot cost Bush Sr. the election" thing is a good try, but it's not as funny; it's just too easy to do the calculations and see that Clinton would have won even if Bush got all the Perot voters.
And if "most of america" regretted voting Clinton in over Bush Sr. why did more Americans vote for both Clinton over Dole and Gore over jr.?
Sorry, but nobody gets "forced" to run for Governor or President. Unless you're saying there just aren't any other Republicans at all as good as Gore? Even I wouldn't go that far, Gore just wasn't very good.
There is no requirement that ships pass those straits in order for oil to get to almost anywhere in the world. Routing around them simply increases the costs. There are a ton of different solutions to this problem.
Yes, you can have a hegemonist patrol them. That's one solution. It's relatively expensive, both directly and indirectly, but it does, for the most part, achieve the objective you have.
You could also simply route around them. As I said, doable, but at increased costs.
The governments that actually have authority over the waters could patrol them too. Trouble is, they don't see any easy way to make money back out of it to pay their costs, right? Well, not exactly. They *might* see such incentives, if the job wasn't already taken by the hegemon.
But if the hegemon leaves, and they don't? What's to stop the companies that ship oil through there from funding patrols themselves? Remove any legal problems with the idea, and all that's left is that it might be cheaper to re-route them. And frankly, if it is, that's fine with me. No need to pay another 10 cents a litre for petrol to pay for those patrols if 8 cents a litre is all you have to pay to route around it.
This is the beauty of markets, and the reason that people that actually *get* them can sometimes seem a bit obsessed to those who don't. A market here can determine which course of action is most efficient, and if not interfered with will result in several courses of action being taken by different actors, the most efficient one winning out, and also in the actors and potential actors regularly re-assessing the situation and shifting resources to a new optimal course of action when the situations change. A government, immune to the market, simply cannot and will never be able to show that sort of sensitivity. A government will choose a single course of action, maybe the optimal one, maybe not, and will periodically consider changing strategies (if we're very lucky,) but in the end it does all these things based on guesses and opinions and ideology and completely unrelated political considerations... and on all sorts of other basises, but being insulated to the costs of its actions, the one basis it will never and can never use is the one basis that is the most rational and results in the greatest good for the greatest number - cost.
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The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed, and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person.
And this quote :George Mason: "I ask you sir, who are the militia? They consist now of the whole people." (Elliott, Debates, 425-426) (from here
In fact there is tons of evidence that the militia==the people, and precious little for any other interpretation.
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
Whenever I hear this sort of argument, there's part of me that always imagines how I'd feel getting onto a plane and hearing the captain say over the intercom, "Thank you for choosing Third Party Airways! I've never flown anything before, but I have some great new ideas on how to fly planes I think you're going to enjoy! So just sit back..."
It seems to me that America adopted "The Australian Ballot" without adopting the Australian House of Reps/Senate preferential voting system. This at least gives other parties a better chance of representation and, at worst, an opportunity of voting for other than "Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee" without invalidating one's vote. As an aside, Australia doesn't have a Presidential Election (we have a Brit as our permament head-of-state :(. The suggestion made by the Libertarian of numbering as many or as few candidates as you want is a good idea. We have that in the ACT elections but with multi-seat electorates. It is a great way to order the candidates according to the "least annoyance" principle.
Slashdot: Where nerds gather to pool their ignorance
in this post/rant I examined what I believed to be the natural conclusion regarding the 2nd Amendment to Nuclear weapons. His response to it seems to be inline with what I pondered.
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
Many people (myself included) thought Arnold would never be able to perform well as governor of California.
He obviously proven all of us wrong, as he has an amazing approval rating amongst the population.
If Ahnold can do it, why can't Badnarik?
Governments usually struggle with corruption quite a bit, don't they?
DNA just wants to be free...
Let's get one thing straight. You can't guarantee bad things won't happen. No one can - you can't, I can't, no one can.
What you're doing here is trying to sneak in an impossible yardstick to judge opposing oppositions, while never subjecting your own, never explicated solution, to such a yardstick.
Bad things happen every day. Bad things have happened since long before recorded history began. Bad things, sadly, are likely to continue happening for the forseeable future.
So don't tell me that getting rid of the FDA is an idea that should be rejected because bad things might occur. Bad things are occuring right now, with the FDA larger and better funded and more powerful than ever before. The question is, how can we minimise bad things in the future. Not how we can end them. The answer to the latter is, we can't.
The chances of this sort of thing happening go down very quickly with economic progress past the level we were at when he wrote. Today, food processors charge large premiums for food products produced to strict standards, attest those standards with special seals of certification they have to pay more to be certified for, and consumers eat it up. A plant like Sinclair wrote about would be on the tv news and in the papers very shortly, today, and every restaurant and grocery in the developed world would be scrambling to swear that they didn't deal with them in short order. If they ever existed in the first place - I'm sure those places, at that time, were quite horrific, but Sinclair was also a rather obvious propogandist and it's not hard to believe he exaggerated a bit here and there to make his points. Either way, such a state of affairs could only have existed because it was a time when simply having something to eat was more important to most people than any thought of potential problems in its preparation. That is no longer the case, in any developed country at least. It is economic development that eliminates such practices, not regulatory agencies who sometimes manage to appear at the right time with the right pose to take credit.
People whose loved ones have died while waiting for the FDA to be satisfied may disagree. People whose loved ones died, are dying, will die... or who live with chronic pain or difficulties, because of the market distortions caused by FDA regulations, by patent law, and other monopolistic practices, may disagree.
Do you have any idea how much it costs to get a treatment approved by the FDA? I can tell you it's more than enough to make sure that no one has any financial interest in qualifying any therapy they can't get a patent on. There are an enourmous wealth of natural and/or obvious treatments out there, that could save lives, that could relieve suffering, that will never ever be approved because no one can patent them, no one can get a legal monopoly on them to ensure they make up the costs of testing.
What exactly is so wrong with allowing those of us that wish to take our chances on things the FDA has not and will not approved from doing so?
I don't believe there is one, although his lawyers certainly get a lot of mileage out of 'compliance with SEC regulations' if you pay attention. But that wasn't the point at all.
In a regime where shareholders were liable for corporate actions, how much more incentive would there have been for large shareholders, or groups of small ones, to have external auditors take a look at those books now and then? How much incent
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what's Slashdot's favorite definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result? And so, again, you refuse to "throw away your vote"... When do you execpt an actual change to occur? This time? Next time? The time after? Forty years? Eighty? Whoops, you're dead by then. No more chances to make a difference. Thanks for playing!
I don't think that a transition from government schooling to market schooling would be particularly disruptive in that respect. "Public" education has been such an unmitigated disaster that most children would almost immediately be well ahead of where they had been when the transition took place.
Uh, ok. Could you please explain to me how closing all public schools will increase literacy. Explain to me how it would even save the government money. Sure, there would be less spent on education, but even the Libertarians agree to have prisons to hold criminals (even if they might want to force slave labor out of them for room and board). So, when you have millions of children in families that can't afford schools (and aren't capable of probiding an enriching home envoronment), what do you think these millions will do when they hit their 20s? We'll turn into a 3rd world country. Wages will plummet for unskilled jobs, as there will be so many unskilled people that are willing to take anything to be able to eat, and those that aren't willing to clean up other's feces will turn to crime.
He talks about an internal revolution every 70 years or so in the US, he'd get it in about 20 with his plans for education.
Learn to love Alaska
"My expectation is that if we eliminate the Fed's monopoly on currency provision, the Fed will continue exist -- it will just have to compete with other currency options on a truly level playing field without the government demanding that its currency be accepted instead of others. People can decide whether they want to hold their wealth in green pieces of paper backed only by seven trillion dollars in debt, or in currency coined of, or backed by, some scarce commodity."
Gripe: A currency backed on a valuable commodity (say, gold) is then cast to the winds on that commodity's market. If the price of gold goes down (say, a large chunk of it falls out of the sky), the value of your currency goes down. At least with a floating currency you have a little more control over what happens to it than simply relying on geology.
Also don't forget that currency backed by a precious metal effectively sets the price for that precious metal. I remember seeing someone gripe about a Nevada proposal to mint $20 silver coins with only ~$5 worth of silver content because of the apparent disparity between what's in the coin and what's written on it. Doing that isn't "cheating" so much as increasing the value of silver within the State of Nevada by 400% So much for free market ideology.
And then there's what goes along with pinning your currency to precious metals: restrictions on what you can do with said precious metals. The US stopped minting circulating coins that contained gold in the 1930's, silver was removed from circulating coints in the 1960's, and yet laws restricting the amount of precious metals any person can own or transfer at one time were only repealed in the Ford administration.
And let's not forget the purpose of those laws: keeping people from wreaking havoc with the larger economy by messing with the precious metal markets. Today, somebody who has a gold meteorite land in his backyard can do mean and nasty things to the gold market. But what if the US dollar is pegged to the value of gold again? Even without precious metal standards we have foreign governments trying to tweak the value of the US dollar in their favor; in order to consistently undercut the cost of labor in the North American Free Trade Area, the PRC has pegged their yuan to the dollar; in order to prop up the yen (and hence their exports), the Japanese banking system is buying US dollars at a premium, trying to reverse the dollar's current inflation. Things like this won't be quite so easy for our government to catch and diplomatically complain about when they're done to whatever the dollar is based on and not the dollar directly.
(Heck, the fact that China has pegged their currency to something makes me question the wisdom of the US doing something similar.)
Comment: The new federalist in me would like to point out that states still have the right to mint their own gold and silver coin (see previous allusion to Nevada). Why should the national government get involved in something the states can do on their own?
If he's so insistent on fuck^H^H^H^H having a direct influence on monetary policy, why doesn't he start relatively small and just print up some United States Notes (as opposed to Federal Reserve Notes) like the Kennedy administration did?
"If you or I want to unseat or kill a thug like Saddam Hussein, we're morally free to do so. He's a tyrant and a murderer. We'd only be acting on behalf of his victims."
"Morally free," yes. "Legally free?" No. Private citizens only get to do stuff like that against nations the US had declared war on. Congress is the only thing authorized to make war on another government, and is constitutionally authorized to have mean and nasty things done to you if you try to exercise Congress' authority on your own like that.
After all, some Americans may see a "moral freedom" to, say, actively support Quebecois independence like that. In fact, there's a long history of US citizens trying to get involve
Bush's experience as a lowly worker didn't help him understand everyday people when he was president. Remember the hilarious photo opportunity where he didn't know what the scary laser was doing to his food in the checkout line of the grocery store? Yeah. Really connected with the rest of us.
Do you honestly think that it is a bad thing if robots/computers can do the work of 25% to 75% people? Would you be happy working a job that you knew didn't have to be done by you?
Sure, it looks bad on the surface. People wouldn't be getting paychecks because of this new technology. But what if it meant that food became so cheap that feeding those people became almost free. What if it meant that their houses and clothing and anything else they needed could be created cheaply by robots?
You would hold back this kind of progress? If a robot wants to do my job for me, im fine with it. I'll be out by the pool if it needs me.
Suggestion: Electoral College Reform
Some say removing the Electoral College will mean the heavily populated areas will be focused on during the campaigning. So I'm not really for removing it completely. Why not a modification on how our vote is done, with no one choosing for us.
Take the number of registered voters and divide by 200. If there's 156 million registered voters that would be 780,000. Set variable X equal to 780,000. Set variable Y to the number of registered voters in a given county.
Let the weighted vote of a given county be equal to Y divided by X then rounded up. Whether a county has 1 registered voter, or 780,000 registered voters, that county vote would be weighted one. If that county has 780,001 to 1,560,000 registered voters, that county vote would be weighted two.
The plurality (or majority if Instant Runoff Voting were instated) winner would be given that vote in the county.
Hypothetically speaking, let's say Albany County, New York has 200,000 registered voters. They would get a county vote weighted at one. If the plurality (or majority if IRV is implemented) of votes goes for Nader for example, then Nader would get one of these special votes. The candidate with the most special votes at the national level wins. This protects small counties from being ignored.
If you look at history, only one country has ever used atomic or nuclear weapons in war. That country is the United States.
That's funny, when I said that the other day, I was marked -1, Troll.
Seriously though, I disagree with his politics on a fundamental level in some cases, but if I were a USA citizen, I would vote for him, as he's well-informed and he is advocating changes to the democratic process, which, at the moment, are fundamentally broken. I see him not as an advocate for a good style of government, but a way to get a good style of government.
And it's not good. People _do_ pay for services which restrict their freedoms because a) they don't read contracts, b) contracts are opaque, c) they don't think it will affect them even though it is crappy.
So basically we know the answer. People will tolerate pretty severe abuses (think of your DSL or cable modem contract, or your mobile phone contract) as long as they are not shoved in their faces. It takes really over-the-top abuse and publicity around it to make people care enough to avoid signing contracts.
... we'd have more funds to dedicate explicitly to charities.
Beyond that, remember, that STATES would still have their own levels of welfare. That power rightfully belongs to the states, not to the federal government.
Not that you are still convincing me over...
In a regime where shareholders were liable for corporate actions, how much more incentive would there have been for large shareholders, or groups of small ones, to have external auditors take a look at those books now and then?
In Enron's case? NONE!!! The people who were ripped off WERE the shareholders (AND employees). If the people who already have vested interest and HUGE incentives NOT to get cheated couldn't get the board to take things more seriously, then how would your suggestions change ANYTHING???
People whose loved ones have died while waiting for the FDA to be satisfied may disagree. People whose loved ones died, are dying, will die...
This argument is such a red herring that I can't believe someone reasonable as you are arguing for it. How could flooding the market with drugs that don't work, and even worse, kill you faster be of ANY help to these people? As it is, there are countless shady operators who bilk every penny from desparate people seeking non-existent cures. How could you argue that spending last few months of your life looking for cures that don't exist (most of these edge-of-science NEVER prove their efficacy) is better than spending quality time with your loved ones? Dying people are looking for ANY kind of life raft, it is WRONG to take advantage of that kind of situation.
Sure, the cost of going through the trials is expensive, but so is the benefit if the drug proves to be successful.
And after this little fiasco with Iraq, do you really believe that media has the people's best interest (cheerleaders for the industry is more like it)? How about their reporting about P2P and copyright? Have you seen any major media reporting FOR public domain? I haven't see it. Almost every article and report is about how bad piracy is.
Sure your local news exposes a bad Mexican restaurant every now and then, but how often is that? And how wide is the coverage? You'll be lucky if your local media checks 1% of the local restaurants in 5 years. How is that going to discourage shady operators from cutting corners?
Look, you can't promise that bad things won't happen, but you surely can limit it to small percentages. It is like sports. You can either play games with no rules where anything goes and be not enjoyable at all, or have some basic rules that all players can agree upon that is fair - which makes sports MUCH more enjoyable.
Not all rules are bad.
You are using pollution as an example of an "externality." Many detractors of libertarianism bring this up. The short answer is that it is well within the scope of a libertarian government to address externalities, by, say, imposing costs on the source. Whether the idea is practical is another matter. Also, while libertarianism philisophically can accomodate this solution (and may even require it), the platform of the Libertarian Party may exclude it. However, I'd still vote for the LP to throw my weight into shifting policies and discussion in that general direction.
Do you honestly think that it is a bad thing if robots/computers can do the work of 25% to 75% people?
No, but it will require a basic redesign of our economic system.
Would you be happy working a job that you knew didn't have to be done by you?
Only if it was required for my survival.
Sure, it looks bad on the surface. People wouldn't be getting paychecks because of this new technology. But what if it meant that food became so cheap that feeding those people became almost free. What if it meant that their houses and clothing and anything else they needed could be created cheaply by robots?
Then the price of land would quickly rise to over $1 million/acre, unless something was done, and massive numbers of people would die of exposure and starvation for not being allowed to earn anything at all.
You would hold back this kind of progress?
No, I'm just saying it needs to be handled *carefully* and that neither of our current political parties is up to the task.
If a robot wants to do my job for me, im fine with it. I'll be out by the pool if it needs me.
Sounds good to me- and the idea is that if these things can be created this cheaply, then there is *no* reason not to use taxes to create them, and make food, clothing, shelter, clean water, and medical care (the basic 5 needs of humanity) free. All else is luxury- and occasional working can provide that.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
As opposed to now, when the FDA acually tries to shield drug companies from lawsuits associated with people dying from lethal drugs which are on the market with FDA approval.
Here's some food for thought.
He's got my vote!
(Or would have, if only we had approval voting. But we don't so I'm still voting for Kerry.)
For those who don't know, IRV is promoted by a lot of people but is full of flaws. It is not monotonic (does not always produce a non-contrary response to a shift in a voter's rankings) and, even worse, has the property of sometimes punishing people for turning out to vote. That is, it is possible for IRV to produce a result that is less desirable to some group of voters than the result that would have been produced if those voters had stayed away from the polls.
Approval voting has none of these flaws.
That being said, he's already explained what the problem is with a direct popular vote:I personally liked the comparison to the world series -- it's not how many total runs you get -- it's a series of smaller games. Likewise, the election is a series of smaller 'races' -- you have to win a lot of smaller competitions, so that you can get enough points to win the final victory.
</response>
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Indeed. It's rarer than in the old days, but it still happens.
Well my girlfriend is a hopelessly deluded socialist, and if I can't convince her I shan't hope to convince you, but if at least I can get both of you to open your eyes to the fact that a decent person can be in favour of this, without being mentally defective or ill-informed, I figure planting that seed is job 1.
Did I say 'audits specifically looking for the officers trying to defraud the shareholders and employees?' Umm. No. Just audits, period. Doesn't matter what they're looking for, what matters is simply that they pay attention. The Enron deal was a massive case of no one paying the slightest attention, of everyone assuming that everything was fine. And, again, I certainly can't guarantee that sort of thing won't happen, again and again and again. It's been happening for a very long time. But I do think that without limited liability laws and the rest, you'd see a lot more people paying a lot more attention.
I watched the two people I loved most in this world die slowly. I live with chronic pain every day of my life. I don't consider it a red-herring, at all.
Where did I advocate that?
I didn't.
I advocate letting me, and anyone else that needs help, to look for that help as we see fit, rather than forbidding, under force of law, people from offering us any help that the FDA hasn't approved.
Would I have a dozen sharks peddling snake oil to me the next day? Probably. Would that be legal? Doubtful. Snake-oil salesmen usually make promises that amount to *fraud* which is quite illegal, FDA or not.
Fraud is notoriously difficult to prosecute, of course. And it should be - it revolves around facts that are difficult to demonstrate, and the burden of proof lays on the accuser. Hence 'caveat emptor.' And also hence 'thou shalt not suffer a poisoner to live'... but that's really neither here nor there.
You want folks to check these things out so you don't have to? You don't need the FDA for that. Look at consumer reports. You don't think a similar group, or three, would come about very quickly with the FDA monopoly out of the way?
The difference would be, the private versions would have no *power* - only influence over those that choose to trust them. This would give them incentives to compete. And it would leave me free to evaluate as many choices as possible, and to try the ones I want. Instead of being limited to only the ones that the monopoly FDA says are ok. I could read reports myself, weigh the possible downsides against my needs, and make my own decision.
If you prefer not to put so much thought into your choices on the matter, that's fine ('rational ignorance' is rational, after all, and even if it weren't it would be your choice) but don't you dare tell me I can't take a chance because YOU or some beaureacrat that has no knowledge of me or my condition or my needs has determined already that it's no good. Or worse yet, because it's unpatentable and therefore no one has any incentive to cough up millions and millions of dollars to do the tests the FDA requires on it. If I want to test it, that's my choice.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
I voted for Bush in the last election. And he won, as we know.
But the point that the hopeful brought up clarified a stance that I hadn't thought about previously- which is odd for me(really). Where the metal meets the meat, you have to vote for the right no matter how small a chance for a favorable outcome. Outcomes are made in baby steps and are cumulative.
Vote the right way and vote that way consistently. I screwed up last time. I admit that- I just didn't want that self-absorbed BS'er Gore in office. But never again.
You have my vote in this election. Good luck.
Just a comment about Underwriters Laboratories...
As an employee of the company, I can say with reasonable confidence that It's not a consortium of anything; nor is it a government-backed initiative.
It's a privately held, not-for-profit corporation that performs 3rd-party safety testing. Very much like Consumer Reports, with the exception that we do not do performance testing (unless a customer wants it.)
Later...
Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe that back in the day, politicians actually did hold down real jobs. They didn't make enough being a politician to support themselves or their family. Being in congress only ment that when it was time to vote you would travel to washington and cast your vote on behalf of the people you represent. The rest of the time you would work a job like everyone else.
Imagine money we would save if we stopped paying senetor's $15,000 pention after serving for only 1 term.
The people who represent us in Washington should be the ones who desire the position the least.
I really, really, really, do not desire the position of offical government breast inspector.
A strong government "which acts in the interest of the people" absolves those people of the responsibility of working out the problem on their own. Look at what happened when homosexuals couples tried (and are still trying) to get the same rights as heterosexuals couples. Within weeks of the issue coming to the forefront of the American hype machine there were calls for a constitutional amendment to prevent it. What article of the Constitution gives the federal government the right to restrict who can and cannot enter into a legal union? What "interest of the people" would the government be protecting?
Do you think that policies can unilaterally be applied to someone in NYC that thinks chicken comes in shrink wrap and someone in the Nebraska panhandle that thinks any building taller than the grain elevator is huge represent both of them? With a weak federal government, the local governments would have to step in to fill the void. The advantage of that would be greater access to those that wield the power. Right now the "balance" of power is like an inverted cone. Local governments are at the bottom (city, township, etc.) with very little power as to what happens to those people that elected them to their position. Higher up the cone is the state government with more control over your day to day life but not the one that collects the bills. At the top of course is the federal government. We give them most of our tax dollars, most of the power to decide which of our local projects get funded and now what we can listen to, watch and/or do on the Internet. That doesn't seem very balanced to me.
What if the cone was flipped over? Out local governments would collect taxes to pay for the things that matter most to the people that elected them to that position and pay the state to take care of things like the freeways. Then the states would pay the weak federal government to regulate interstate trade (like the Constitution explicitly gives them power to do) and take care of the nation's defense. Without giving the federal government the big blank check, it is automatically limited in its powers.
Sorry, got a little side tracked there. Back to your statement about corporations needing a strong federal government to regulate them. You are forgetting your most important right of a free market society. The all powerful dollar. If you don't like that company's policies, don't buy their products. At the risk of starting a flame war, I bought a Mac because I thought Microsoft produced a crappy interface, bullied its way over its competitors and used its power to sway the market in its favor. Yes, I know I pay a premium. Yes, I know I don't get every game. YES, I KNOW I ONLY HAVE ONE MOUSE BUTTON! The point is I spent my money (i.e. my vote) with the company (i.e. the party) that best represented what was important to me. Make the corporations earn you dollar the way politicians should earn your vote and that will balance the power they can have on the market.
Did you find Michael Badnarik's answers refreshingly unique? Did you feel his support of small government, all of our rights, and the Bill of Rights truly significant? Would you like to help Michael Badnarik get into the presidential debates? Then please help join us in an effort to get Michael Badnarik into the debates. Please visit the following URL for the "Debate Badnarik" activism page blog: http://debatebadnarik.blogspot.com And also please visit the following URL to sign up for the "Debate Badnarik" activism email list: http://home.comcast.net/wsb-cgi-bin/ssi.cgi?PWPToo l=ALEntry&State=True&wsbID=633698&GroupID=626840&O wner=gfeez
If we all work together we can get Michael Badnarik into the debates and shatter the two party system so that a fresh voice and an alternative choice will be included!
The Debate Badnarik Blog http://debatebadnarik.blogspot.com/ Sign up for the Debate Badnarik email List! http://home.comcast.net/wsb-cgi-bin/ssi.cgi?PWPToo l=ALEntry&State=True&wsbID=633698&GroupID=626840&O wner=gfeez/
Look, we've got all this power at our finger tips without having to break a sweat... we have thousands of people with CGI/Video/Audio/Web Design/Web Coding/etc. talent who are currently unemployed or have some time to spare. Most of us hanging out at slashdot, or on irc, or wherever are introverted freedom loving people who would find more harmony with Badnarik... Half of the voters hate Bush, but most of them don't necessarily love Kerry...
SO HERE IS OUR CHANCE.
We really don't have much time... but seeing as we are all procrastinators, even if we would've planned this better we still would've waited until now. But this might be our last chance to get someone else in there and take back the system. Do you understand that it is quite possible that within a fairly short period of time our liberties on the Internet could be jeapordized even more so than they are now?
I'm serious here... we can change tings. Everyone knows Badnarik won't win, but why? Why can't he? This is our country and it is our choice. Isn't it about time we got off our asses and used our intelligence to blow these other idiots out of the water?
Let's plan this. We are the people who control most of the media's marketing. We are the web designers for the top brand names. We are the animators who make the products dance and sing on TV. We are the artists, the engineers, and we can put together a swift effort that will utilize our powers for something WE DESIRE rather than what other people tell us to do. We can hype up this Badnarik dork with so much high-techonoligical marketing power that he becomes a super hero in the eyes of the people. Hell, we can really make him fly, and produce ads that make the other presidents look like jokes. Arnold won for crying out loud!! PEOPLE PAY ATTENTION TO MARKETING TACTICS USED FOR CELEBS AND PRODUCTS. It's true, whether we like it or not, so let's exploit it!
We don't need to do anything else. Bush is a puppet and can't debate, or be seperated from his cronies or he won't know what to say. But if we hype up this Badnarik guy, and he has to step away from the curtain and stand on his own... he is intelligent! He can stand and speak without a teleprompter.
We can do this! Please reply to this thread, and let's begin a formal movement that will tap the power of us tech geniuses and change things forever.
http://home.comcast.net/wsb-cgi-bin/ssi.cgi?PWPToo l=ALEntry&State=True&wsbID=633698&GroupID=626840&O wner=gfeez
http://home.comcast.net/wsb-cgi-bin/ssi.cgi?PWPToo l=ALEntry&State=True&wsbID=633698&GroupID=626840&O wner=gfeez
This is working
- They can deploy the military. (they can't declare war, however)
- They nominate people in a few key positions (attorney general, CIA director, secretary of defense, etc)
- They act as the public face to visiting dignitaries
- They can veto new laws
We've seen the impact of the first one from the current president -- he can send the troops in, and effectively pressure the legislative branch to declare war. The second one can have an effect, as we've seen w/ Ashcroft's pressure for the PATRIOT act. The third one is one of the bigger ones -- do you have someone who's going to provoke other countries, or try to get along? [and don't get me started on those who said Gore would've been a better president -- did you watch the debates?]So we come to the veto -- the ability to veto means that it's signficantly more difficult to pass a law that the president doesn't want -- instead of the normal simple majority (just over 50%), they need a 2/3 majority.
As to the overall direction of the country, however, you're right -- just a change in president won't directly turn the country around. The judicial branch acts as a stabilitizing group, preventing things from changing too fast, as they're appointed for life (one of those folks the president can impact), and the legislative branch should act as a more representative distribution of the population, to help balance things out.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
The constitution reserves the execution of foreign policy to the executive branch. It is not in the interest of Americans to have other Americans go implement their own foreign policies based on their own conceptions. The result would be a target on the back of all Americans, as a result of the actions of those interventionists.
Further, it does not require a vivid imagination to figure that violent partisan interventionists could really screw up negotiations. Imagine some delicate negotiation is going on, is nearing agreement, and then some butthead commits an assassination or sabotage in the country we are negotiating with.
An example of this is in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. The Palestinian Authority does not have a monopoly on force (Hamas, Hezbollah, etc attacks), and Israel has not reined in illegal settlements. Troublemakers on both sides are holding the entire process hostage.
That there is hatred for Americans already does not mean that things cannot get worse.
"Things are used -- they're traded on the market -- and the desire to profit from doing so is the best guarantor of all that property owners will encourage free speech. It's just good business." What a stupid idea. 1. People are not governed by profit motive alone. Quite often, they are willing to lose some profit in order to promote their agenda. So if you depend on the "good business" argument for free speech protection, you may end up with rich people successfully silencing what they don't want to hear (and don't want others to hear) _even_ if this makes them suffer financially. 2. Even without 1, the speech which needs protection the most is often the least financially sustainable. Most people are not happy to listen to troubling news and analysis which shows how rotten their world is, not to mention paying for that. And those who do have such news and analysis to offer often do not have resources to buy airtime. So what you get at the end is a world totally controlled by those with deep pockets and pretty similar political agendas. It's basically the same as now, to be sure, but now at least you have some chance to affect that through democratic mechanisms, government channels (yes!) and public property. What this guy is selling is is just a legalization of the worst aspects of the current system and the removal the last checks that limit it today.
one that tried to push a dangerous drug would be doomed, because everyone would be afraid to touch their stuff forever after.
Forever after? Is that like how Coca-cola got its name because it used cocaine as an ingredient for years? Or how strychnine has been used as medicine throughout history?
People who are dying tend to either be unconscious or not be rational about the choices they make. Completely abolishing the safeguards that prevent companies from preying on these irrational people does not help anyone.
Reform the FDA, but don't destroy it.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Okay, this really isn't a beef with Badnarik, but with the question which itself presupposes that Americans at large are denied a choice. While one could argue such, the evidence rarely bears this out. In most cases, its simply because what every political scientist knows, that American is fairly well homogenized in terms of the sociopolitical spectrum, and there's only really room for two major candidates. We've had a decade of third party candidates now, and all they really do is siphon the votes of disaffected independants who would otherwise support a major candidate.
For that reason, I want to actually give kudo's to Badnariks support of Approval voting (although I oppose IRV, and if anyone mentions Condorcet I'll shoot 'em in the ass). Approval voting would allow people to express a mandate for a third party candidate or platform while letting them make a strategic vote for the candidate that both most represents them and has a real chance of winning. We may find that people are happier with their choices under approval voting, and I suspect that more people will participate, though thats only my opinion.
Kerry changed his mind this afternoon. For the third or fourth time in as many months. To say that it's "difficult to tell them apart" is a matter of opinion. For the average joe working his or her 9 to 5 job, yes. But that average joe isn't concerned about the issues that people who are attracted to minor parties is. Of course, I'm of the opinion that it is the responsibility of the electorate to research and make up their own mind on candidates and issues, but most people are inclined to let the mainstream media feed them the issues and then make snap decisions. Regardless, I think it's disingenuous for any minor party candidate to disparage any other party, even the big two, because it takes away from the quality of political debate in this country. That tactic is just pandering to the same sentiment that have disgruntled the votors into exploring minor parties to begin with.
Lastly, I don't think the "wasted vote" is an argument, it's a sentiment. People who are faced with supporting a minor party candidate, but still want their vote to count do in fact feel that their vote is wasted if they don't go for the electable candidate who best fits their sentiment. But that's academic.
What you describe as "libertarianism" is more properly American libertarianism (which, elsewhere, is oxymoronically called "anarcho-capitalism")
It is a political philosophy that asserts that the fundamental human right is the right to property. Everything else in American libertarian philosophy (and economic thinking) flows from this absurd premise.
Historically, "libertarianism" has meant anarchism, which is a political philosophy that rejects the heirarchical organization of society. The rejection of heirarchy means many things:
It surely is the antithesis of so-called Libertarianism, but it's none of the things you ascribe to Noam Chomsky.
Life after capitalism? The participatory economics project
Why should I trust the same government that has conducted secret syphilis and radiation studies to watch over the food I eat?
Who else could garantee you that your food is both syphilis AND radiation free?
You can't take the sky from me...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I found Mr Badnarik's position on nuclear proliferation very troubling. His position seems to presume that the leaders of nations who get nukes will behave in a rational manner. That there will never be a nuclear exchange as a result of erroneous brinkmanship. Neither assumption holds validity.
In the case of assuming rational behavior, there are too many counter-examples to mention, but I'll list one that is dirtectly pertinent. The Atlantic Monthly featured a story about Pakistan -- I believe it was 9/2000 by Robert D. Kaplan, but I'm not certain (Atlantic archives are no longer viewable without a subscription). In the article, a high-ranking former member of the Pakistani military said that he felt it would be a good idea to nuke India. The writer incredulously asked whether he was aware of the consequences of a nuclear exchange between the two nations. He assured that even considering the fallout (literal and figurative), he thought it was a good idea. Mind you, this is not some illiterate on the street. This is a guy who knows exactly what would happen.
As to infallibility, although there was never an inadvertent launch as in "Fail Safe" nor a misconception leading to an exchange, we came perilously close. The Cuban Missile Crisis could have resulted in an exchange merely as a result of miscommunication. McNamara said there were other incidents where an unlucky series of events could have resulted in a nuclear exchange -- in other words, we got lucky.
Leaders of countries like Iran and North Korea know exactly what they are doing and why. But I don't credit those leaders with enough rationality to believe that they would not use nukes against enemies in a first strike, under some irrational calculation, such as the hatred Iran's leaders have for Israel.
Unfortunately, I don't think the US has the international standing to make any serious case against them as a result of (a) the failure to find WMDs in Iraq, and (b) our own programs to build new nukes. And no one else seems likely to take up the issue.
My sense is that nuclear weapons counter-proliferation is the most important national security issue we face. Even bio-weapons are probably less important, given that they are difficult to actually deploy. If an American city is nuked, our response to 9-11 will look like patty-cakes.
peanut farmer and naval nuclear engineer
those two jobs are not as dissimilar as one would think...
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
Yeah! And what about our doctors? They're all rich guys too!
Possession of an M.D. does not make one rich, neither does it entitle one to represent the public in government.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
Gee, I thought that winners get elected. Did you go to public school?
Candidates that win the election get elected, but that does not make them winners. If you take a step back and stop taking me literally you might understand. I went to public school for one year, private for three years. I make no claim as to whether or not that makes me smarter or better. I don't care: it is not important to me, even if it is to you.
http://www.nocitycouncil.com/content/ Yes, you must have gone to public school...
I fail to see what that link has to do with electing the President of the United States, which is what this entire discussion is all about.
I am sorry you are offended that I want a regular working guy as my president. I feel that I am not adequately represented in my government. While I do my part at the voting booth, I also feel that I cannot effect change well enough because of a severe lack of viable choices.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
Reminds me of what Tom Clancy has been saying in all of his Jack Ryan books since Debt of Honor. Politicians who come from the general worker population who serve their terms and then go back home.
...now why would that be? (-:
I know! (snaps fingers) It's because neither Cobb nor Badnarik have dodgy military service records to attack!
More seriously, I'm guessing it's because they don't rate either of the above as serious Presidential contenders, therefore there is no profit and great risk in trying to undermine their positions by personal attendance.
I personally find Badnarik a bit... I don't know... idealistic isn't quite the word. His ideas are mostly good, his background research seems to be good, his disclaimers are encouraging but I'm left with the nagging suspicion that he seriously underestimates the power of bureaucratic inertia and much other self-interested short-term thinking which keeps the USA in this current unhappy homeostasis. OTOH, possibly that's entirely appropriate for a candidate who doesn't genuinely expect to win this time around.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Who is going to buy their food if we're all dead or dying?
Don't be stupid.
Speckpot?
So, why is it? Why must you have pure capitalism in order to avoid pure communism? Why is there only the complete liberal vs the absolute fascist? Is moderation supposed to come only from the 3 branches' checks & balances? Why isn't there a middle-of-the-road candidate that just cleans up? I don't understand it.
"Do not drill any holes in your cat - it will not like it."
-- Nick Davies
Who is going to buy their food if we're all dead or dying?
Who's going to make the link to their product when you get sick months or years later?
You can't take the sky from me...
An excerpt:
Also:
The founders of this country gave the world a stellar republican system which has lasted for 225 years or so. The electoral college is not broke, it's one of our greatest assets. The electoral college wasn't put into place to create an elite group of states, it was put into place to get smaller states to join up to the union, states that would be completely dominated by larger states otherwise.
The electoral college actually works for the disenfranchised, rather than against it. The sparse, rural states tend to have lower per capita incomes than those states which are "under-represented".
Large urban coastal states still dominate the American system, as they would in any republic, they simply dominate less because of the electoral college.
Yes, it is obvious. Right now, there is an undemocratic tyranny of rural issues over the vastly more important urban issues in America.
Cities are the backbone of American economy. Cities are the hotbed of American liberty. Cities are the birthing grounds of American art. Cities are the homelands of American science. Rural crap needs to FOAD.
If increased democracy would de-emphasize 19th Century rural bullshit, then so much the better.
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
They presume that a new industry of "liability insurance" or something like that would spring up.
And then watch the shareholder liability insurance companies become corrupt and become tools for the well-connected to pull the strings at publicly held corporations.
I myself thought that one of the most damning indictments of Dubya was that he comes from a family of career politicians.
and the inefficient US shoe maker (the person, not the corp.) gets to find some other kind of work.
Resource immobility. It costs money to retrain a shoemaker.
This work will not (on average, all other things being equal blah.) pay as much as his former job did, but it will pay more than the other work that the chinese worker would have done.
Not necessarily if you factor in the cost of paying back the student loan for the new job.
Thanks for that clarification. UL was started by a group of insurers, was it not?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
"Wage slavery" is marxist crap. For something relating to this, see this set of notes.
A strong respect for property rights is the only thing that makes living standards rise. That is what allows people to save up capital, causing cime-preferences to be lowered, and eventually time-preference schedules -- this leads to the process of civilization. But when you start engaging in systematic thievery (taxes, inflation, wealth-redistribution), this systematically lowers time-preferences, causing de-civilization.
You understanding of the USSR is also flawed. It is not just that the USSR wasn't socialism -- it is that socialism, as defined and understood by Marx, Engels, and the other socialists of the time, is impossible. The USSR's worst disasters, however, occured when they tried to implement socialism as fully as possible (by eliminating money). The socialist system is impossible because of the calculation and information problem. (Hence, to say it is "impractical" because of the "incentive problem", also a problem, is not correct). For another analysis of the problems of socialism (in this case, "anarchist" socialism), see The Anarcho-Statists of Spain.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
please explain how universal education directly affects Companies, Lords, Kings, and Warlords. Since the latter three generally do not exist in the USA
I can tell you own your home. Lords and tenants do exist in the United States. Make that two.
Anyway, with respect to companies, a company has much more power to speak than an individual and thus much more power to propagandize and false advertise than an individual, as many people just do what the TV tells them to do and buy what the TV tells them to buy. Is this the fault of the Department of Education and local authorities who answer thereto?
are the party of free-market rhetoric and Statist action. Most people who vote for Republicans follow their rhetoric but not their actions, and hence think they're voting for the "free market" candidate.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
As Douglas Adams put it, "Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."
I do not care that he has not protected our borders and prevented illegal immigrantion, but done the oppostie and embraced it. I have no problem with someone entering the country properly, but someone who illegally enters is an invader and should be treated accordingly.
Once a government has embraced "illegal" immigration, then are the immigrants really all that "illegal" anymore? It looks more like streamlining "entering the country properly".
I don't drink Busch Light, and I'm not going to vote for Bush Light either.
Yeah... Back in the late 1800's, early 1900's the company was in cahoots with the fire insurance companies and the fire department (can you say monopoly?
Those days are long gone... now it's just another US company shrinking over here and growing overseas.
Later...
Our constitution enforces a two party system, which is probably a bad thing. The basic problem is that a candidate must get more than 50% of the electoral college seats in order to be elected president. In this absense, the House of Representitives decides.
In the event where you have three strong candidates, it is unlikely that any one will earn more than 50% which means that the president will be elected by the House not the College. This has actually happened in at least one case in our history, and probably enforces the two party system more than anything else.
One of the real problems that Badnarik correctly points out is the homogeneity of politicians in this country. Nowhere is this more evident than the Presidential race. In general, our politicians in general come from similar educational and economic backgrounds, and hence have a certain level of similar thinking patterns which is very different than some other parts of the world. I think it would be nice if we had a wider diversity in our legislative bodies and other governmental institutions.
Indeed, the homogeneity hurts us badly. I am voting for Kerry in this election because I think that Bush is simply too dangerous to allow to be re-elected under any circumstances, but I also think that we could have more impact by simply getting a few third-party individuals elected to congressional offices. More than ever, we need such diversity of background and political opinion in the House and in the Senate. Perhaps I will vote Libertarian for many other candidates.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
If you pick up an uncut version you find yourself in a dense thicket of philosophy, history, culture, manners, politics, geography, analysis of human motives and actions, all conveyed in data-rich periodic sentences so formidable only a determined and well-educated reader can handle it nowadays. Yet in 1818 we were a small-farm nation without colleges or universities to speak of. Could those simple folk have had more complex minds than our own?
10 million copies you say? Of conplex convoluted language and philosophy. Gosh, yes, we're really not up to that standard.
How about some figures:
In 1998, eighty-one million copies of Ulysses were sold--not worldwide, but in the United States alone.
Okay, so that's maybe 8 times as many copies, sure, but as we all know Ulysses by Joyce makes for very easy reading. No, wait, its almost fucking unreadable by well, most people. It has sentences that run for an entire page just about.
Try again please.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
His insurance company is supposed to pay that up to policy limits.
Your example of an insurer works for the case of the person injured in a motor vehicle collision, but it fails in the case of the person born with a hereditary health condition. Unfortunately, the health insurance industry has dismissed many of these people as uninsurable.
From what I've read about New Hampshire, its election laws throw out all petition signatures of people whose election district changes between when the person signs the petition and when the petition is due. It could be a difference in law, or it could be that NH is re-gerrymandered more often than other states.
Vote for Badnarik!
He's so not a lizard.
Yours truly,
Mr. X
...let Badnarik debate...
A strong representative government?
Now who's dealing in fairy tales?
Where is this strong representative government? Or are you speaking of government that representing the companies you're so worried about? We pay taxes--and then those taxes are used to provide additional support to the companies you don't trust!
You're even more guilty of dealing with fiction--because the current state of affairs completely invalidates your logic. If you're going to talk about human nature, you need to also discuss the nature of power. Discuss the history of power--and take a look around. Take a look at the kind of government we've actually got.
Insurance is not a replacement for limited liability. In fact, they do opposite things. Limited liability prevents lawsuits and other buesiness costs from hurting investors more than the value of the stock; insurance manages medium size losses (above the deductible but below the cap). However, insurance does not handle truly large losses. Further, insurance doesn't protect from judgements; it merely pays them (up to the cap). If the insurance company goes out of business after you pay the premium and before you try to collect, you are still liable for the cost of the judgement--even if you purchased sufficient insurance.
But those retraining costs provide income to someone else in the same nation.
Are you sure this isn't a broken window fallacy?
If the other nation simply is poorer, and people are willing to work for less, then I doubt that the retraining costs are enough to change the net gain conclusion.
I focus on retraining costs because I graduated from college only to find that my field had been outsourced to contractors in India. Can I, or anybody else in this position, afford a second student loan on top of the first one that I have trouble repaying?
This was certainly not an edited version and I can say with great certainty that although it was amusing and surprisingly entertaining, it was not a complex book to read.
Literacy, and yes I do have an MA in Composition by the way, is a completely subjective term. Wittgenstein's later writings were filled with examples of where the attempt to define literacy falls apart because there is simply no way to know for certain what another person is thinking. Simply declaring a figure is nothing more than making up facts to suit your argument from whole cloth.
What really bugs me about this incredible distortion of history is this idea that people who needed to read could and this should be the measure of literacy. Well who the hell decides who needs to read? That is so subjective as to be meaningless.
I know there is next to no likelyhood that this question will get answered or even seen, but I will ask it anyway because I think it is important:
Mr. Badnarik, in your response to geoff313's question "Intellectual Property", you said:
I do not understand how a system of government granted monopolies can be decided in the marketplace, unless you are referring to our current government where such legislation is bought by a few wealthy lobbying groups (the *AAs come to mind). Being that you are a Libertarian, and Libertarians are generally anti-monopoly, how do you reconcile your ideas with government granted monopolies such as copyright and patent? Do you consider yourself to be more of a Constitutionalist (e.g. the Founding Father's version of freedom is the best possible implementation) or more of a Libertarian (e.g. freedom is more important than any particular implementation). Where do you stand on government monopolies that are allowed by the Constitution (especially monopolies on information which may directly impact the First Amendment)?All data is speech. All speech is Free.
Exceptions are good for pointing out potential flaws, especially for grand, sweeping statements. But just because Ulysses is harder to read than Last of the Mohicans doesn't mean that it isn't hard to read. Nor does it account for all the other points the grandparent made. Nor does it account for the propensity of people to buy books in order to appear intelligent, rather than for the purpose of reading, when their income is sufficiently high, which is more likely the case now that it was about two centuries ago.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
While I agree with the sentiment of your message, I feel the need to play the devil's advocate. Yes, I'd love to have someone in office representing my viewpoint, but I also want someone who has experience enough not to run the country into the ground. If your candidate has both qualities, than more power to you, but either way, don't be so quick to discount career politicians just because they like politics.
Possession of an M.D. does not make one rich
In the United States, yes it does. Richer than 99% of ordinary Americans, that is.
I don't like the current system either. :) I thinks pharmaceuticals should be a public industry.
And I don't believe the weak would die. They would receive private assistance instead of government assistance--and I'd wager it would be twice as effective and half as expensive.
Yeah sure, private sector doesn't care about such people. They don't consume much etc.
This is precisely why the Founders of the American Republic rejected pure democracy -- they knew enough history (Roman history, in particular) to recognize the results of allowing the urban mob to have unchecked control of national politics.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
If you read the article, you'd see that Badnarik favors *increased* legal immigration.
We have bases in Germany, South Korea, etc. Are those places "military states"? No. And neither is any American town with a military base. You need to distinguish between what happens when you put troops in a foreign and hostile country to what happens when you put them in a familiar, welcoming country. El Paso would not suddenly turn into Baghdad.
Personally, I'd like to see a vast reduction in our standing military, moving toward a Switzerland-like citizen militia system. But in the mean time, bringing troops home is the correct solution.
"The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern." - Lord Acton
I like what Frank Herbert wrote about power (paraphrasing): "It is not that power corrupts, but power attracts the corruptible."
I agree with you that bringing troops home is a good idea, but we can't just pick up and leave, while the countries we liberated are in a power vacuum.
We need to establish roots of a "sustainable, just" society and then pick up and leave.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
Meta-modded unfair. This is the politics section.
If you don't like political banter, don't come here!
What is this "Australian ballot" shit. There was no Australia in the 1890s when it was adopted. Australia became a nation in 1901.
Secondly, Austrians vote on a preference system to the whole point of the argument in flawed.
But Iraq didn't pose a clear and present danger to the United States. It didn't pose a danger to the United States at all. And the US has not, in fact, "liberated" the people of Iraq. They still have a dictator. For awhile, his name was Bremer. Now it's Allawi. And the US has the innocent blood of thousands of Iraqis and more than 1,000 of its own young men and women on its hands.
What? Congress declared war very soon after 9/11. How the heck does this guy think that "Iraq didn't pose a clear and present danger to the United States."
Iraq was the source of the terrorism. If they didn't decare war, what should they have done?
Meet the new Boss, same as the old Boss.
I suppose the only thing about privately run organizations is that it is intrinsically harder for them to imprison or kill you (since the government sort of likes to have a monopoly in that area).
(I don't think e.g. prison subcontractors count, though they certainly marry the worst of both worlds)
DNA just wants to be free...
Nothing wrong with a regular guy getting elected. On the other hand, arbitrarily denying the right to serve to anyone who's actually successful seems pretty foolish as well. I mean, you don't deny college admission to the people who get 800's on the SAT even if they make the rest of the class look bad.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
I mean, you don't deny college admission to the people who get 800's on the SAT even if they make the rest of the class look bad.
No, but most colleges I have been to do deny admission for test scores that low.
Of course, an SAT score of 400 or 1600 does not qualify one to represent others in government. That is the issue. Score what you want, but if you are a rich white guy you do not represent me nor do you represent 95+% of the electorate. You represent CEOs, politicians, corporate lawyers and accountants, etc.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
I would like to draw your attention to the following footnote in your link: "This quote and this source--like all the quotes and sources in this essay--are, of course, fictitious. One may argue that this to some extent negates the arguments that the essay makes, but since actual sources supporting those arguments don't exist, all I can say is that it seemed necessary."
Hoo boy. 80 million copies of Ulysses? Your BS-meter should explode.
The PLURAL of "800's" meant "800 on all parts of the test".
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
No, that's the big Libertarian answer. The brilliant market sorts everything out.
Like Marxism, it sounds better before someone tries it.
Mind the Gap
If there were the slightest chance of that happening, do you really think that anyone would be interested in doing modern business in the United States? Holders of shares in U.S. based corporations would have about three choices:
A big company could presumably buy liability insurance for its shareholders as a cost of doing business and otherwise carry on as before, but I'll call that a special case of #3 above.
Mind the Gap
I will ignore your first two points as there is no way we can politely debate them.
On Communism... I think you missed the other poster's point. His said that the USSR sucked and that it's what you get when you try to implement Communism. He didn't say it was possible to implement Communism; in fact he implied the opposite. His point to saying that is that Communism doesn't seem so horrible in the theoretical. Much the same with Libertarianism.
Do you think it would be possible to make everything, even the military and education for the poor, private and yet still have a society where we had rights? I don't and I don't want to see what happens when you try.
I've paid thousands in property taxes to pay for the education of total strangers. It's not robbery, any more than a pedestrian whose taxes go tward public roads. The benefits of education are more than a handout to parents.
Storm
Deadly force is legal for self-defense where other methods are not possible, and would also be legal in a libertarian version.
However I've heard some libertaians talk about privatized assasinations and such so it may be that they want to get rid of the monopoly instead of actually banning deadly force.
So your point was that number of workers != number of citizens. You could have stated that earlier and save a lot of grief. Ok, so where are your numbers based on actual workers (including illegal aliens and migrant workers) for the US which shows that our workers are the most productive in the world?
Hold crap you had me until I followed your link. Come on, who you are fooling? DDT is fine? It doesn't build up in nature? It doesn't kill birds species? Have you actually researched any of John Stossel's stories? They are usually overly-hyped one-sided CRAP. The whole site looks like junk science to me.
Does it have stories about how smoking is actually good for you, that you should make pillows out of asbestos, and that we didn't land on the Moon?
In 1998, eighty-one million copies of Ulysses were sold--not worldwide, but in the United States alone.
Umm. Sure...
Looks like you didn't even comprehend the link that you posted. I'm guessing you were educated in government schools...
You are the kind of person that perpetuates these problems. Get in step & conform if you feel that way, but have you even thought about these ideas at all? I believe you have (you're reading a political discussion of sorts), but you haven't offered any argument as to why you're skeptical other than, well, pure skepticism. I'm satisfied with not taking things at face value, but your minor dissension provides no counter argument other than more FUD (well, just the Fear maybe), with a dose of absurdity thrown in.
http://www.badnarik.org/whybadnarik/why_environmen talists.php
Also, Mr. Badnarik may want to invest in proper <title> tags for his site.
Please ignore this message. Someone at my office is concerned that slashdot is banning them from posting. If I can post this, then I'm hoping that the ban issue is gone.
Your'e missing a key link.
If these corporations and agencies are getting wealthy off of exploiting or poisoning their customers, then what the hell kind of position are they going to be in when they have no more customers left?
Want to talk about not killing, but just infecting? Private studies are done all the time testing different products at the expense of private investors -- including every day citizens. If there's a common denominator between people getting a certain disease and the places they shop, someone will find it.
Speckpot?
If these corporations and agencies are getting wealthy off of exploiting or poisoning their customers, then what the hell kind of position are they going to be in when they have no more customers left?
Look at the tobacco industry. If it takes long enough to kill you, by the time you do, your kids are their clients.
As long as the damage is long-term, you can profit just fine.
You can't take the sky from me...
Have you ever read any of those unbiased investigations into tobacco smoking causing cancer? The results show that there has never been any conclusive evidence showing that tobacco causes cancer. Most people who smoke tobacco, even for 50 years or more, never even show signs of cancer before they do. Many people who do not smoke, and are not around smokers more than a few minutes per day, get cancer.
p df
http://www.forces.org/evidence/download/fennel.
You might find it in HTML format on google if you search for "Public Comments solicited in response to the National Toxicology Program" or something similar.
All of those little anti-tobacco industry commercials talking about how tobacco kills people are very effective, but they don't deal with actual scientific facts.
Tobacco companies, being almost exclusively corporations, and therefore intentional government costructs to maximize profit, are being blamed by various clueless environmentalists and the very same people who created them [socialists] who either want to be a part of some cause however erroneous it might be [environmentalists], or a little bit more control [socialists, other authoritarians].
Until you can prove that smoking cigarettes causes cancer, that argument holds no weight.
Even if tobacco does cause cancer [never been proven], if people still do it on their own, voluntarily, you can't complain. That's like banning guns, knives, rope, or swimming pools because they were used by a few people in suicides or in 'accidental' deaths.
Speckpot?
if people still do it on their own, voluntarily, you can't complain
1- Addictive.
2- Second hand smoke.
You can't take the sky from me...
Even popular science reported [at least on one occasion] that second hand smoke isn't bad for you.
Again, people who want to quit smoking, can achieve breaking the addiction.
We're getting further from the original topic. End of discussion?
Speckpot?
I put about 3 hours into writing this, and put alot of insight into it. I doubt the person who modded it down to zero=troll even read it. But he demoted it to a lower rating than most people would even consider reading.
...For instance, a public library helps reduce the public cost of what the market WOULD bear for reading books. We all benefit by conserving trees, conserving human labor to make the books, and reducing the number of hours you or I need to work to read those books. Ask your libertarian what he's got in mind for your public libraries! would he privatize them? or close them and claim that he "created jobs" by forcing us to buy more books while encouraging deforestation and taking away a public resource?
Given that the rating is wrong I'm reposting the comment, so I at least get the "1" that I deserve for writing something that nobody but a troll read.
Some flaws with the Libertarian View:
1) he advocates privatizing currentcy? how would taxation occur, given multiple forms of currency? and which one is the non-speculator going to choose? and would it still say "In God We Trust"? =) well i hope it doesn't say "in citibank we trust".
2) his answer regarding privatizing public schools is loose and shabby. (my understanding is that) public education is a constitutional right. i don't see how these guys can present themselves as contitutionalists and then try to mandate that private schools be tasked with safeguarding kid's constitutional right to public education.
3) his ideal that the market should be the final determining factor in all matters seems fundamentally flawed. the market is not always right in the long term. (not even in the short term) sometimes a democratically elected government is exactly the right body to ensure that public needs [and preferences] are met.
for instance, government would be the right institution to bypass the biggest environmental blunder man has ever made (transportation via internal combustion), and to move us forward with something that doesn't make smog, doesn't make noise pollution, doesn't make visual pollution, doen't hurt health, doesn't require roads, road crews or jackhammers, doesn't cost a fortune in insurance and bank debt. doesn't cost your soul. etc.
but the libertarian is going to say what? i tend to guess (perhaps falsely) that he'd say the market bears those cars, so proceed accordingly. in fact what makes money is not what would benefit us overall.
people talk about a multibillion dollar industry as if that's what we're GETTING FROM IT, but that's decepetive. first and foremost, A MULTIBILLION DOLLAR INDUSTRY IS WHAT IT'S COSTING US!!!. so "what the market bears" is not necessarily a good thing. "what the market bears" is how much we could save if we somehow worked around the problem that's costing us multiple billions.
question laissez faire. sometimes it's probably the right answer. but not always.
4) the market seems to bear a landscape of pukey corporate billboards: texaco signs, target signs, safeways, billboards, gaps, chevrons, pottery barns, wells fargos, taco bells, 7-11's etc, etc. personally i think it sucks, and i believe i should have a right to vote that crap down so that i dont have to look at a bunch of advertisements when i go for a drive. (lol) does he think these businesses have a right to turn my whole environment into visual pollution [aka advertising space] just b/c they bought / leased a patch of land large enough for a billboard?
5) he talks about stopping the government from selling the right to pollute. as i understand it, that's one of the ways pollution is mitigated (reduced). pollution isn't free, so companies reduce it as best they can. (in theory) the government fills that role b/c no other institution can fill that role. (lets pray that it's never up to Bechtel or Chevron to sells the right to pollute!) so, as i see it, if he stops govt from SELLING the right to pollute, how's he going to handle pollutors? with regular mo
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
Your fear of lawyers is disturbing. It's like saying you only use software written by people with no professional history of programming. Politics is law, we are a country that believes in the rule of law, created from a civilization whose greatest single contribution to the world is our body of secular law. How do you propose that we uphold equality under the law when no one understands the logical basis for it? Have you stumbled upon some other method of defining human activity that will create a more just existence for individuals? It seem to me that you would throw the baby out with the bath water.
Repeating hyperbole is not insightful, it's noise.
Arrogance is Confidence which lacks integrity. -- me
I like the LP because it fractures the right wing and thus weakens it.
Other than that, it serves no useful purpose.
Everytime I discuss any issue with a libertarian, the discussion degrades into a impassable nexus of absurdist, inflexible, and literally "fundamentalist" beliefs that libertarian takes as absolute truth.
They see the constitution as some holy assembly language program that government must follow without deviation. Any federal activity that is not explicit in the constitution is regarded as "illegal".
Anyways, more power to them. They will never get anywhere, and will help the us (liberals) by diluting the other side.
That fucking sucks. Instead of being 35 years old and natural born citizen, it should be sole citizen for 35 years. Same loyalty. Arnie in 2008!!!!
No, I don't fear lawyers any more than I fear politicians. It's a job that can be done honorably or dishonorably. My point: someone who has *only* done law is akin to someone who has only done politics; they might not be in the best position to understand some aspects of life. I am just saying that in a leader of a country, I want someone who has at least spent a little bit of time doing work that actually *produces* something. Farming, sales, business, construction, whatever... Otherwise, IMHO, there is a tendency to be blissfully unaware of certain economic realities (as in: money doesn't grow on trees, and we can't all just talk our way into prosperity).
And what lawyer doesn't have to make money? What politician doesn't have to run a campaign with limited funds?
Lawyers produce justice and Politicians produce laws, and both live in a capitalist society. Your misunderstanding is still there. Without justice and laws, we would not have near the economic opportunity that your want your leaders to take part in. Since those were created by politicians and lawyers, I would say that they had a pretty good understanding of economics and the structure required to produce all the other things you give merit to.
How about if I preferred that only voters who understood lawyers and politicians were allowed to vote, since they are blissfully unaware of certain legal realities? It's just as farcical an opinion as yours. The economy isn't the sole business of the US government.
Arrogance is Confidence which lacks integrity. -- me
>>How about if I preferred that only voters who understood lawyers and politicians were allowed to vote, since they are blissfully unaware of certain legal realities? It's just as farcical an opinion as yours.
Now it is you who are being just a little disingenuous. I never ever said that legal or political experience is a *negative* thing, just that I would like for politicians to have other outside experience. I certainly still think legal or political experience is a positive thing to look for in a political leader.
Think of it this way: I know a few architects. Some of those architects also spent a certain amount of time laboring on constructions sites and running their own small construction projects. They have an inside experiential edge on those architects who have only spent their time on design and theory, or if you will "book knowledge". They often have no idea how some small change in the plans can cause a major problem in production, because they haven't *done* any production. It's a simple thing; I'm not making absolutes, just saying there are practical benefits to a broader experience.
Your example still shows that you misunderstand lawyers and politicians. The goals of the professions are to have the working knowledge in order to construct the legal system necessary to fairly and universally take into account all of the working knowledge you desire. It's just like a customer asking me to build a piece of software that automates a business process, I can't begin to work until I understand the process. The law doesn't always reach a perfect state at 1.0, that's why we have the courts, they are sort of a debugger.
Electing good politicians or finding a good lawyer is very similar to finding a good software engineer to automate your business, if they just know tech and can't understand your goals, then you'll wind up with crap. The reason that lawyers have Bars with ethics committees and licensing is to insure that an unsuspecting public is not preyed upon by incompetents.
Most legislatures have ethics committees that are supposed to provide the same oversight to politicians, as are campaign laws. The US Congress suspended (bipartisan truce) the House ethics committee in the late 90's, which was one of the greatest injustices against the people of the US ever committed.
I would say that it is more dangerous to put people in power who don't understand the law or how it works than the other way around. The system is set up to deal with bad politicians and lawyers, but it is not as easy to deal with sheer incompetence and ignorance.
Arrogance is Confidence which lacks integrity. -- me
OK, you spent some thought or alot of thought on this, so I'll help congeal what you've attempted to here:
"While one could argue such, the evidence rarely bears this out. In most cases, its simply because what every political scientist knows, that American is fairly well homogenized in terms of the sociopolitical spectrum, and there's only really room for two major candidates."
Wrong. If you have ever met a Republican or Democrat you will know immediately that they are not the mainstream of this country. If it were up to them we would all be dead in equal parts. The people of this country that keep it afloat are the ones that value their liberty and take responsibility for themselves. Traits that you will not find in either "mainstream" party. You aren't looking at what a person is, in and of themselves. You are looking at a label.
"People who are faced with supporting a minor party candidate, but still want their vote to count do in fact feel that their vote is wasted if they don't go for the electable candidate who best fits their sentiment. But that's academic."
Yes, it is academic- but not logical. As I've posted earlier, I made that mistake. But there is no point to it. If we aren't given the option of Approval voting, then we must vote for the one right candidate. Voting for a turd will always yield a turd. You stand a chance if you vote for who's right for the job.
" That doesn't mean that I have to like Saddam Hussein. It just means that the legitimate interests of the United states are not served, nor are the legitimate rights of Americans and Iraqis respected, by invading and occupying Iraq."
He didn't avoid any evidence in his reply. I don't think you are grasping the undercurrent of the libertarian concept. If Saddam were to touch us, his country would be destroyed in total. If Afghanistan were to touch us, they would be destroyed in total. Not taken over, vaporized.
I don't think you understand what he's saying. If you touch us, you will die. That is the primary focus of government in this label called Libertarianism. We would not kill Iraq because they did not attack us. They attacked Kuwait. Kuwait is not the US. We don't care. Simple. Leave the rest at the door with the gay ass liberals.
"I'd like to know what you'd do to provide a defense from asymetric nuclear threats."
Defense is primary. We would already have had defensive laser tracking systems to vaporize incoming missles if a Libertarian were elected 8 years ago.
"This may be one of the few areas where taxation must augment the free market in leveraging tarriffs on polluting processes, and it must be applied to imported products. As we recognized with Kyoto, an unbalanced environmental policy will only encourage companies to move to third world countries and pollute there, which affects the global ecosystem while sending US jobs away."
Wrong. You cannot pay people to not rob you. You must either have the death penalty in place, and/or market incentives(NOT Taxes) to make the land we all live in healthy. Turning it to shit kills everyone, and should be set to paid by the polluter. Kyoto proves one thing. Without the bill of rights and the constitution, market forces will take precedence. This falls under the right to Life. As does abortion. As does murder. As does genocide. No government on Earth provides this protection in total except our Constitution- and we don't even adhere to it. How shitty is that.
The short answer is that the penalty is not stiff enough in this country or any other. When we are the only one's left with clean land/water and mostly clean air, then others will emulate us. And that's the short of it. For the most part, you were close but slightly myopic about the topics. You can't see the forest from the trees, in some cases. But, it's a place to start. Take care.
Thor
not because somebody in Korea can do the job cheaper, but because robots can do the job even cheaper yet
domo arigato....