I'm willing to bet that if McCain had been hanging out with someone who was an unrepentant abortion bomber, the story would have been handled much differently in the press.
Well, considering abortion bombers tend to kill poeple, which Ayers didn't, let's pick another crime.
How about burglary? Wiretapping? Breaking and entering? Urging people to shoot BAFT agents?
also worth a mention that McCain got a big pass on the Keating 5 scandal on the 80s and his sudden move towards anti-abortion right when he started running for president.
No shit. Seriously, the Repubs bring up Rezko where Obama...didn't appear to do do anything wrong, and no Keating Five.
This is because Obama, for once, didn't try to win by attacking his opponent, but simply linked him to failed policies. As those were actually McCain's policies, it worked.
That is because Ted Stevens was recently found guilty of many charges.
Whereas William Jefferson has not been. In fact, the last news about his case was over a year ago.
And the different between 'Obama rezko' and 'Palin trooper-gate' is that Palin appears to have actually committed crimes and abuse of power, whereas Obama appears to have purchased a house with the help of someone who was later convicted of unrelated crimes.
I know the right likes to pretend all scandals are equally important, but they really aren't.
Palin said the VP's job was to be in charge of the Senate. It's not.
She also said they can 'really get in there with the Senators', which technically speaking is true...anyone can hang out with the Senate if the Senate doesn't mind.
But she continued with 'and make a lot of good policy changes....' which is not true...the VP cannot actually propose legislation, or speak on the floor without an invitation. Which the Senate could obviously extend to anyone.(1)
Or vote, unless, obviously, it's a tie.
1) In fact, technically, speaking, the President has more right to speak to the Senate...he's required to do it once a year, and it's possible that the Senate (and House) are required by the constitution to issue him an invitation for that. Whereas the VP has no right at all to speak there. He, or she, simply can show up during ties and press a button to vote.
And when I say 'flip Iowa', I am, of course, ignoring the evidence that Obama would have, in fact, had more votes there except for voter disenfranchisement. Oh, and the same thing in Colorado, which actually had a lawsuit over that recently.
If the race had been much closer, we'd be hearing a lot about that, and it's entirely possible Obama should have gotten more than a 10% margin in both those states.
Which means he could have tied even if literally 1 out of ten Obama voters had vanished off the face of the earth right before they voted.
In the last three elections, the press reported days after the race relevant information that would have harmed the Republican candidate.
In 2008, it was goofy information about Palin. As the GOP was going to lose anyway, it wasn't that important.
In 2004, it was the warrantless wiretapping story that the press had been sitting on for months.
In 2000, it was, of course, Bush's National Guard or lack thereof.
Liberal bias my ass. They might talk like liberals on the air, sometimes, but in reality the people paying their paychecks tell them to sit on stories and they do.
Most voters are vaguely center-right, with a significant center-left contingent.
Most voters are actually center-left WRT their actual held positions, but believe they are center-right.
Something like 75% want the government to cover the health care costs for people who cannot afford care, for example. (And something like 52% of Republicans want that.)
Likewise, many Americans would like there to be less abortions, but do not want to make it illegal, yet paradoxically believe they are 'pro-life'.
No. Any business that can pay someone over $250,000 a year is, by definition, not a small business. There are 10,000 employee companies where the CEO doesn't make that much.
I don't know why the media and Obama blithely put up with the lie that the line was '$250,000', implying that if the business made that much, it would be taxed more. $250,000 was for personal income tax.
That's amazingly high income. That's income of a quarter million dollars a year.
And, of course, people with that much income often do many deductions to keep it under that.
Or the truth about accepting public campaign finances??
You mean the fact that Obama, at no point, said he was going to accept public financing? Only that he was willing to work out an agreement with McCain where they both accepted it?
If they took a few steps to the right, stayed there for a couple of years, and then stepped back to the left then wouldn't that be a "shift to the left" relative to their last official (i.e. voted on) position on the issue?
Well, yes. But that position wasn't 'socialist' the last time around, and it isn't 'socialist' this time around.
I wasn't trying to make the point the parties hadn't moved rightward, and the Dems back left, as it would be extremely stupid to attempt to make that point by talking about how the parties had moved.
I was, if you recalled, objecting to: If what you say is true then some moderate Democrats must surely have registered as Independents in response to the shift of the Democrats to the left, but that hasn't happened has it (and don't say that Obama does not and would not represent a shift to the left, because his policies are decidedly socialist and redistributive in nature).
The reason that didn't happen is that, as I said, the party didn't so much 'move' as 'move back'. Also voter registration doesn't work like that. People don't change their registration to independent unless they're pissed at their party.
For what you suggest to have happened, people must have honestly believed the Democrats were some sort of middle-of-the-road party on purpose, and gotten pissed when they stopped being so. When in reality most people thought the party was a good deal more left than it was voting. (Thanks, ironically, to Republicans.)
And, of course, what you are suggesting is entirely possibly going to happen once Obama gets into office and actually demonstrates the left shift. There's really not a lot of reason it should have already happened, as the current Democratic Congress hasn't been extremely left either.
I think that people probably stayed in the same place. People might refine their positions over time and change their party affiliations as the parties shift around them (I used to be a Republican when I was younger), but in my experience a complete "u-turn" is pretty rare and is usually caused by a noteworthy personal event (i.e. a religious conversion, a brush with death, etc...). Most people don't just casually change their whole world view one day (although they might drift far enough to be on the other side over the course of their lifetimes if they consistently head in one direction) or at least that is probably pretty rare.
People don't change in a day...but we're talking 40 years since an actual progressive left president, and 16 years since the party itself shifted to the right.
16 years is long enough that some voters don't even remember Clinton promoting progressive ideas, like you pointed out, during his election, only to see their hopes 'triangulated' out of existence afterwards, as they were just toddlers.
But the whole point of this was not to show that people 'shifted' to the left, it was to demonstrate that people were already at this 'socialist and redistributive' point when Clinton took office, and there's hardly any evidence they shifted towards the right since.
More to the point, what's the obsession with taxes at all?
On an individual level, health care and housing prices and energy prices are just as important as taxes, and those have risen horribly because of things that either can traced to Bush, or at least nothing done anything about them by Bush.
And, on a national level, talking about the total amount of taxes is stupid. Taxes must match spending. There is no amount of 'taxes' independent of spending, despite what several Republican presidents have decided.
Really? I'd take that bet if I trusted you in the least.
I predict that Obama's first year budget will slightly increase the debt. (And by first year I, of course, mean 2010, as the 2009 budget is already done.)
I don't know about his second, but I bet his third and fourth will decrease it.
I've deliberately done what I can to force the Republican Party to fracture and squeeze out either the godnuts or the socially liberal. Then maybe I can vote for economic conservatism without lumping it in with votes for totemic spirits. I'll deal with four or eight years of bad financial decisions because even if the far right wingnuts are correct, I'd STILL rather starve than torture and kill for Jesus.
I wish more Libertarians thought like you.
Look, I'm a Progressive. I oppose you guys on quite a lot of issues, and think you're mostly dupes of business interests.
OTOH, at least you aren't fucking torturing people. Or detaining them indefinitely. Or attempting 'regime change', which sounds like a really good way to convince other countries that invading places is acceptable.
If the election had, instead, been between the Republicans and Libertarians, with the Democratic party as the third party without a chance of winning, I hope I would have behaved like you and voted Libertarian.
No, that was the shift to the right under Clinton I was talking about. In fact, the biggest issue he shifted to the right on. (That and health care reform.)
For NAFTA, Clinton essentially had to bribe some Democrats at the last minute with future promises, and even so only got about a 1/4th of them to go along. Not everything that made it though the Senate in 1993 is representative of Democratic position, especially ones that just managed to get barely enough Democratic votes to pass. The fact he 'bucked the party' is pretty obvious...when you only get a 1/4th of your own party to vote with you, and 100% of the other party, guess what that means?
Remember NAFTA was proposed, in essence, by Reagan, and didn't get any traction until Clinton. And notice that Reagan, while promoting free trade, actually set up tariffs to protect American industry. Yes, something that the right could not actually do in 1986 the left strong-armed itself into doing by 1993.
That's why I specified 15-20 years, although perhaps it would be easier to say 'pre-Clinton'. Clinton 'triangulated' progressive issues into nothingness the entire time he was office. Because apparently he couldn't figure out that what the right was asserting about Americans was total nonsense, and if he'd just stand up and push back he could have crushed them.
It wasn't really until the Republican Revolution that Democratic elected officials essentially decided Clinton and the Republicans were right, and themselves took several steps right-ward. The ones that were still in power.
And I think it's an interesting assertion that more elected Democratic officials oppose NAFTA now than then. I don't know how that conclusion was reached, and I'd like some evidence of it.
The Democratic voters, of course, hate it, but that's somewhat my entire point: The Democratic party, along with the Republican party and 'the center', over the last 15 years since Clinton was elected, moved to the right, while the people stayed in the same place, or even moved slightly to the left.
Now, you can debate the last part of the sentence, I'd understand if people on the right argued they moved because of public pressure in that direction, while people on the left argued they moved despite public pressure in the other direction, but the fact they did move seems rather obvious to me.
Pffft, if they hadn't bought the subprime mortgages they did, the banks would have just packaged those up too and dumped them in the big shitpile.:)
But, yes, the GSEs did not behave 100% responsibly, and we need to make sure they do in the future...but, like I said...we already cleaned up their mess when we guaranteed their securities in July.
Absolutely nothing that happened after their bailout can possibly be pinned on their behavior. We corrected all investments in them, we explicitly guaranteed the securities we had implicitly guaranteed before, all was made right with them and their investors.
Eventually there needs to be an accounting for their behavior, and we possibly need to rethink the whole idea, but they are, for now, 'fixed', and so are any possible problems they caused.
And then banks kept toppling, and we had to bail everyone out with almost a trillion dollars.
And people still ranting about them are, frankly, GOP lunatics who desperately want this mess to be someone else's fault and are hoping people haven't noticed they can't possibly have caused any problems since July, and any problems they did cause were fixed in July.
Well, okay. If you want to assert that low interest rates helped cause it, I won't argue. That seems sorta like arguing that gasoline causes speeding, but whatever.
But my point was it didn't have anything to do with the Fed 'fixing prices', nor did it have anything to do with the 'problems' Ron Paul constantly points out.
Me:...who want the government to only do things that benefit them and no one else.
You: Doesn't EVERYONE want the government to do for them that which they're not doing for themselves?
See the difference?:)
Some people would like the government to help all people, including themselves. Often this includes helping others more. Some people would just like to see it help themselves, and doesn't care about anyone else.
But like I said...the Libertarians are out of step with the 'beltway', the 'political knowledge' that runs the country and often is amazingly wrong about what people actually want.
On some topics, this is a huge advantage, in that they are more in tune with the population that either of the parties. For example, drugs. The beltway wisdom says that touching drug legalization results in 'lax on crime' attack ads that mean you lose the election, but libertarians do not know that. Incidentally, I think that little bit of wisdom might be right...legalizing drugs might sound like a winning issue, but I can imagine it going horribly wrong during an actual election.
However, by the same token, they are completely and utterly in crazyland when it comes to other topics. Like social security, which is immensely popular. Conventional beltway wisdom there is the same as with drugs...you can't touch it...and we've actually had ample proof in the past that they are correct about that one.
That is precisely the problem though. In the United States (and also in Britain where the Progressive movement really began) the term "Liberal" has become inextricably linked in the public mind with elements of Progressivism (albeit not their full platform either) and even Socialism. So really Liberalism, in the classical sense, and Liberal are separate entities (at least here in the United States). That is why, originally, the Libertarians selected a separate term for themselves, to draw this distinction between Liberalism, as it was understood in the classical sense, and the baggage that it had acquired (at least here in the United States) over they years both unconsciously and as part of conscious efforts by certain groups, mostly on the left, to hijack the term and suggest that Liberalism had always included those progressive and socialist items. At least the Libertarians were honest and selected a new term to avoid muddying the waters any further.
Oh, that's what you think happened. Well, no. It's the right that goes around calling progressive things 'liberal'. I refer you to the term 'tax and spend liberal'. The right made 'liberal' a 'redistribute the wealth' smear, not the left.
It has, in fact, called a great deal of confusion all around. I have consistently argued that mingling progressive and liberal thought has been bad for the Democrats, giving us stupid shit like affirmative action, which is pretending to be liberal, is based in progressive ideas, and ends up being neither. You can help minorities through liberal actions, and you can help the poor through progressive, but you can't do both with the same thing or you will ignore the poor white people and the discriminated-against-but-not-poor minorities.
And I don't have problem with you guys inventing a new term...heck 'progressive' been reinvented three times in the past 150 years. Shows up, hangs around for 20 years, goes away for 50. Inventing new terms is actually much less confusing. ('Progressives? Hey, aren't you the guys who caused Prohibition?' 'Um, yeah, but we're not going to do that again.')
I just have a problem with you guys claiming that the famous liberal philosophers wouldn't agree with the left. We mostly don't know, although there are a few places you guys really are just wrong and we're right, like Adam Smith, who had no problem with government regulation of businesses and yet is held up as some example of the ultimate market anarchist. And David Hume, hilarious, proposed that we'd all turn to communism, and that this would be a fine thing, with unlimited resources, a century before Marx.
Let me ask you this, do you believe that you will get any real value back from Social Security by the time you are old enough to begin taking payments (I am not talking about dollars inflated to 1/1000 of their present value)?
Yes, I do.
Why do so many young people consider Social Security to be a black hole for their savings?
Because they are a) cynical, and b) constantly lied to be you people.
If that is true, then why did the "spread the wealth around" comment strike such a nerve during the campaign?
It didn't. McCain tried to make it, but it did not.
Just because libertarians and conservatives pretend people get upset about that shit doesn't make it true.
If they were fine with those concepts then why are they discussing them?
Because they need health care? Oh, you mean in the negative sense. Well, that's because they, um, aren't.
Perhaps because they are worried that Obama will take away their SUVs, dilute their savings, and make them all live like Europeans?
Ah, yes, and that's why he's going to win by 150+ EV today.
If what you say is true then some moderate Democrats must surely have registered as Independents in response to the shift of the Democrats to the left, but that hasn't happened has it (and don't say that Obama does not and would
Except, of course, that banks are insured so normal people cannot, in fact, lose any of their money. (And criminals are unable to steal houses that a bank owes, so I am not sure how that is relevant.)
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Not all businesses are separately incorporated.
Yes, and some people report their casino winnings and not their casino losings.
I have no idea why we should worry about such stupid people in the tax code.
I'm willing to bet that if McCain had been hanging out with someone who was an unrepentant abortion bomber, the story would have been handled much differently in the press.
Well, considering abortion bombers tend to kill poeple, which Ayers didn't, let's pick another crime.
How about burglary? Wiretapping? Breaking and entering? Urging people to shoot BAFT agents?
How about, in fact, G. Gordon Liddy?
also worth a mention that McCain got a big pass on the Keating 5 scandal on the 80s and his sudden move towards anti-abortion right when he started running for president.
No shit. Seriously, the Repubs bring up Rezko where Obama...didn't appear to do do anything wrong, and no Keating Five.
This is because Obama, for once, didn't try to win by attacking his opponent, but simply linked him to failed policies. As those were actually McCain's policies, it worked.
That is because Ted Stevens was recently found guilty of many charges.
Whereas William Jefferson has not been. In fact, the last news about his case was over a year ago.
And the different between 'Obama rezko' and 'Palin trooper-gate' is that Palin appears to have actually committed crimes and abuse of power, whereas Obama appears to have purchased a house with the help of someone who was later convicted of unrelated crimes.
I know the right likes to pretend all scandals are equally important, but they really aren't.
Obama didn't promise that.
He said he was willing to work out an agreement with McCain to only use public financing. McCain did not attempt to work out such an agreement.
Um, dude, that's not what Palin said.
Palin said the VP's job was to be in charge of the Senate. It's not.
She also said they can 'really get in there with the Senators', which technically speaking is true...anyone can hang out with the Senate if the Senate doesn't mind.
But she continued with 'and make a lot of good policy changes....' which is not true...the VP cannot actually propose legislation, or speak on the floor without an invitation. Which the Senate could obviously extend to anyone.(1)
Or vote, unless, obviously, it's a tie.
1) In fact, technically, speaking, the President has more right to speak to the Senate...he's required to do it once a year, and it's possible that the Senate (and House) are required by the constitution to issue him an invitation for that. Whereas the VP has no right at all to speak there. He, or she, simply can show up during ties and press a button to vote.
And when I say 'flip Iowa', I am, of course, ignoring the evidence that Obama would have, in fact, had more votes there except for voter disenfranchisement. Oh, and the same thing in Colorado, which actually had a lawsuit over that recently.
If the race had been much closer, we'd be hearing a lot about that, and it's entirely possible Obama should have gotten more than a 10% margin in both those states.
Which means he could have tied even if literally 1 out of ten Obama voters had vanished off the face of the earth right before they voted.
Personally, I feel that the election was close enough that it could have gone the other way had the media been fair.
And, personally, you're a moron. Obama won by an absurd amount. Almost every state except ones in Appalachia swung majorly left since 2004.
If people had liked Obama 5% less in every single state, if Obama had gotten 5% less votes everywhere and McCain had gotten 5% more...
Flip Iowa (9% Obama) and Colorado (7% Obama) back to Obama, and he wins.
It was all fawning softball coverage.
In the last three elections, the press reported days after the race relevant information that would have harmed the Republican candidate.
In 2008, it was goofy information about Palin. As the GOP was going to lose anyway, it wasn't that important.
In 2004, it was the warrantless wiretapping story that the press had been sitting on for months.
In 2000, it was, of course, Bush's National Guard or lack thereof.
Liberal bias my ass. They might talk like liberals on the air, sometimes, but in reality the people paying their paychecks tell them to sit on stories and they do.
Most voters are vaguely center-right, with a significant center-left contingent.
Most voters are actually center-left WRT their actual held positions, but believe they are center-right.
Something like 75% want the government to cover the health care costs for people who cannot afford care, for example. (And something like 52% of Republicans want that.)
Likewise, many Americans would like there to be less abortions, but do not want to make it illegal, yet paradoxically believe they are 'pro-life'.
No. Any business that can pay someone over $250,000 a year is, by definition, not a small business. There are 10,000 employee companies where the CEO doesn't make that much.
I don't know why the media and Obama blithely put up with the lie that the line was '$250,000', implying that if the business made that much, it would be taxed more. $250,000 was for personal income tax.
That's amazingly high income. That's income of a quarter million dollars a year.
And, of course, people with that much income often do many deductions to keep it under that.
Or the truth about accepting public campaign finances??
You mean the fact that Obama, at no point, said he was going to accept public financing? Only that he was willing to work out an agreement with McCain where they both accepted it?
And, of course, McCain didn't do that?
If they took a few steps to the right, stayed there for a couple of years, and then stepped back to the left then wouldn't that be a "shift to the left" relative to their last official (i.e. voted on) position on the issue?
Well, yes. But that position wasn't 'socialist' the last time around, and it isn't 'socialist' this time around.
I wasn't trying to make the point the parties hadn't moved rightward, and the Dems back left, as it would be extremely stupid to attempt to make that point by talking about how the parties had moved.
I was, if you recalled, objecting to: If what you say is true then some moderate Democrats must surely have registered as Independents in response to the shift of the Democrats to the left, but that hasn't happened has it (and don't say that Obama does not and would not represent a shift to the left, because his policies are decidedly socialist and redistributive in nature).
The reason that didn't happen is that, as I said, the party didn't so much 'move' as 'move back'. Also voter registration doesn't work like that. People don't change their registration to independent unless they're pissed at their party.
For what you suggest to have happened, people must have honestly believed the Democrats were some sort of middle-of-the-road party on purpose, and gotten pissed when they stopped being so. When in reality most people thought the party was a good deal more left than it was voting. (Thanks, ironically, to Republicans.)
And, of course, what you are suggesting is entirely possibly going to happen once Obama gets into office and actually demonstrates the left shift. There's really not a lot of reason it should have already happened, as the current Democratic Congress hasn't been extremely left either.
I think that people probably stayed in the same place. People might refine their positions over time and change their party affiliations as the parties shift around them (I used to be a Republican when I was younger), but in my experience a complete "u-turn" is pretty rare and is usually caused by a noteworthy personal event (i.e. a religious conversion, a brush with death, etc...). Most people don't just casually change their whole world view one day (although they might drift far enough to be on the other side over the course of their lifetimes if they consistently head in one direction) or at least that is probably pretty rare.
People don't change in a day...but we're talking 40 years since an actual progressive left president, and 16 years since the party itself shifted to the right.
16 years is long enough that some voters don't even remember Clinton promoting progressive ideas, like you pointed out, during his election, only to see their hopes 'triangulated' out of existence afterwards, as they were just toddlers.
But the whole point of this was not to show that people 'shifted' to the left, it was to demonstrate that people were already at this 'socialist and redistributive' point when Clinton took office, and there's hardly any evidence they shifted towards the right since.
More to the point, what's the obsession with taxes at all?
On an individual level, health care and housing prices and energy prices are just as important as taxes, and those have risen horribly because of things that either can traced to Bush, or at least nothing done anything about them by Bush.
And, on a national level, talking about the total amount of taxes is stupid. Taxes must match spending. There is no amount of 'taxes' independent of spending, despite what several Republican presidents have decided.
Really? I'd take that bet if I trusted you in the least.
I predict that Obama's first year budget will slightly increase the debt. (And by first year I, of course, mean 2010, as the 2009 budget is already done.)
I don't know about his second, but I bet his third and fourth will decrease it.
Screw income tax. I want to see fucking asset tax. You have over 200 million, you lose 1% of it a year.
Just kidding, but, seriously, at some point we have to look at the money the rich have already collected.
I've deliberately done what I can to force the Republican Party to fracture and squeeze out either the godnuts or the socially liberal. Then maybe I can vote for economic conservatism without lumping it in with votes for totemic spirits. I'll deal with four or eight years of bad financial decisions because even if the far right wingnuts are correct, I'd STILL rather starve than torture and kill for Jesus.
I wish more Libertarians thought like you.
Look, I'm a Progressive. I oppose you guys on quite a lot of issues, and think you're mostly dupes of business interests.
OTOH, at least you aren't fucking torturing people. Or detaining them indefinitely. Or attempting 'regime change', which sounds like a really good way to convince other countries that invading places is acceptable.
If the election had, instead, been between the Republicans and Libertarians, with the Democratic party as the third party without a chance of winning, I hope I would have behaved like you and voted Libertarian.
The 'Patriot Act' was actually pretty tame compared to Bush's repeated wiretapping felonies.
He has plenty of plans. They're on his damn web site.
The fact that McCain made this election about imaginary issues is not his fault.
No, that was the shift to the right under Clinton I was talking about. In fact, the biggest issue he shifted to the right on. (That and health care reform.)
For NAFTA, Clinton essentially had to bribe some Democrats at the last minute with future promises, and even so only got about a 1/4th of them to go along. Not everything that made it though the Senate in 1993 is representative of Democratic position, especially ones that just managed to get barely enough Democratic votes to pass. The fact he 'bucked the party' is pretty obvious...when you only get a 1/4th of your own party to vote with you, and 100% of the other party, guess what that means?
Remember NAFTA was proposed, in essence, by Reagan, and didn't get any traction until Clinton. And notice that Reagan, while promoting free trade, actually set up tariffs to protect American industry. Yes, something that the right could not actually do in 1986 the left strong-armed itself into doing by 1993.
That's why I specified 15-20 years, although perhaps it would be easier to say 'pre-Clinton'. Clinton 'triangulated' progressive issues into nothingness the entire time he was office. Because apparently he couldn't figure out that what the right was asserting about Americans was total nonsense, and if he'd just stand up and push back he could have crushed them.
It wasn't really until the Republican Revolution that Democratic elected officials essentially decided Clinton and the Republicans were right, and themselves took several steps right-ward. The ones that were still in power.
And I think it's an interesting assertion that more elected Democratic officials oppose NAFTA now than then. I don't know how that conclusion was reached, and I'd like some evidence of it.
The Democratic voters, of course, hate it, but that's somewhat my entire point: The Democratic party, along with the Republican party and 'the center', over the last 15 years since Clinton was elected, moved to the right, while the people stayed in the same place, or even moved slightly to the left.
Now, you can debate the last part of the sentence, I'd understand if people on the right argued they moved because of public pressure in that direction, while people on the left argued they moved despite public pressure in the other direction, but the fact they did move seems rather obvious to me.
Pffft, if they hadn't bought the subprime mortgages they did, the banks would have just packaged those up too and dumped them in the big shitpile. :)
But, yes, the GSEs did not behave 100% responsibly, and we need to make sure they do in the future...but, like I said...we already cleaned up their mess when we guaranteed their securities in July.
Absolutely nothing that happened after their bailout can possibly be pinned on their behavior. We corrected all investments in them, we explicitly guaranteed the securities we had implicitly guaranteed before, all was made right with them and their investors.
Eventually there needs to be an accounting for their behavior, and we possibly need to rethink the whole idea, but they are, for now, 'fixed', and so are any possible problems they caused.
And then banks kept toppling, and we had to bail everyone out with almost a trillion dollars.
And people still ranting about them are, frankly, GOP lunatics who desperately want this mess to be someone else's fault and are hoping people haven't noticed they can't possibly have caused any problems since July, and any problems they did cause were fixed in July.
Well, okay. If you want to assert that low interest rates helped cause it, I won't argue. That seems sorta like arguing that gasoline causes speeding, but whatever.
But my point was it didn't have anything to do with the Fed 'fixing prices', nor did it have anything to do with the 'problems' Ron Paul constantly points out.
Me: ...who want the government to only do things that benefit them and no one else.
You: Doesn't EVERYONE want the government to do for them that which they're not doing for themselves?
See the difference? :)
Some people would like the government to help all people, including themselves. Often this includes helping others more. Some people would just like to see it help themselves, and doesn't care about anyone else.
But like I said...the Libertarians are out of step with the 'beltway', the 'political knowledge' that runs the country and often is amazingly wrong about what people actually want.
On some topics, this is a huge advantage, in that they are more in tune with the population that either of the parties. For example, drugs. The beltway wisdom says that touching drug legalization results in 'lax on crime' attack ads that mean you lose the election, but libertarians do not know that. Incidentally, I think that little bit of wisdom might be right...legalizing drugs might sound like a winning issue, but I can imagine it going horribly wrong during an actual election.
However, by the same token, they are completely and utterly in crazyland when it comes to other topics. Like social security, which is immensely popular. Conventional beltway wisdom there is the same as with drugs...you can't touch it...and we've actually had ample proof in the past that they are correct about that one.
That is precisely the problem though. In the United States (and also in Britain where the Progressive movement really began) the term "Liberal" has become inextricably linked in the public mind with elements of Progressivism (albeit not their full platform either) and even Socialism. So really Liberalism, in the classical sense, and Liberal are separate entities (at least here in the United States). That is why, originally, the Libertarians selected a separate term for themselves, to draw this distinction between Liberalism, as it was understood in the classical sense, and the baggage that it had acquired (at least here in the United States) over they years both unconsciously and as part of conscious efforts by certain groups, mostly on the left, to hijack the term and suggest that Liberalism had always included those progressive and socialist items. At least the Libertarians were honest and selected a new term to avoid muddying the waters any further.
Oh, that's what you think happened. Well, no. It's the right that goes around calling progressive things 'liberal'. I refer you to the term 'tax and spend liberal'. The right made 'liberal' a 'redistribute the wealth' smear, not the left.
It has, in fact, called a great deal of confusion all around. I have consistently argued that mingling progressive and liberal thought has been bad for the Democrats, giving us stupid shit like affirmative action, which is pretending to be liberal, is based in progressive ideas, and ends up being neither. You can help minorities through liberal actions, and you can help the poor through progressive, but you can't do both with the same thing or you will ignore the poor white people and the discriminated-against-but-not-poor minorities.
And I don't have problem with you guys inventing a new term...heck 'progressive' been reinvented three times in the past 150 years. Shows up, hangs around for 20 years, goes away for 50. Inventing new terms is actually much less confusing. ('Progressives? Hey, aren't you the guys who caused Prohibition?' 'Um, yeah, but we're not going to do that again.')
I just have a problem with you guys claiming that the famous liberal philosophers wouldn't agree with the left. We mostly don't know, although there are a few places you guys really are just wrong and we're right, like Adam Smith, who had no problem with government regulation of businesses and yet is held up as some example of the ultimate market anarchist. And David Hume, hilarious, proposed that we'd all turn to communism, and that this would be a fine thing, with unlimited resources, a century before Marx.
Let me ask you this, do you believe that you will get any real value back from Social Security by the time you are old enough to begin taking payments (I am not talking about dollars inflated to 1/1000 of their present value)?
Yes, I do.
Why do so many young people consider Social Security to be a black hole for their savings?
Because they are a) cynical, and b) constantly lied to be you people.
If that is true, then why did the "spread the wealth around" comment strike such a nerve during the campaign?
It didn't. McCain tried to make it, but it did not.
Just because libertarians and conservatives pretend people get upset about that shit doesn't make it true.
If they were fine with those concepts then why are they discussing them?
Because they need health care? Oh, you mean in the negative sense. Well, that's because they, um, aren't.
Perhaps because they are worried that Obama will take away their SUVs, dilute their savings, and make them all live like Europeans?
Ah, yes, and that's why he's going to win by 150+ EV today.
If what you say is true then some moderate Democrats must surely have registered as Independents in response to the shift of the Democrats to the left, but that hasn't happened has it (and don't say that Obama does not and would
Except, of course, that banks are insured so normal people cannot, in fact, lose any of their money. (And criminals are unable to steal houses that a bank owes, so I am not sure how that is relevant.)