Command-and-control hierarchical organizations are doomed like the dinosaur. Most current "corporations" are hierarchical command-and-control organized. This does not have to be.
Dee Hock, the founder and CEO emeritus of what is probably the world's largest commercial enterprise (1.25 Trillion/yr) organized Visa around a completely different paradigm, the chaord. You can read about his efforts here.
Chaordic organizations like the Linux effort illustrate how correct Hock was (and is).
Just because they're called "campaign contributions" instead of bribes doesn't mean that they aren't just that: bribes.
Actually the real problem with campaign finance isn't that politicians receive money, it's that they are able to give money and favors out in response to the "campaign contributions" (read:bribes) that they get.
Were These United States to return to the Constitutional limitations on governmental powers (General Welfare means NO specific welfare, not to individuals or corporations), there would be less opportunity for politicians to redistribute Other People's Money, and thus less need to bribe them so that money comes to the briber.
Ah... I had a half-hour conversation with Doris Gordon once. She nearly conceded that perhaps government legislation was not the very best way to prevent abortions. But not completely. She's a bit less than a good Libertarian because she believes that government edicts can prevent abortions.
I don't happen to believe that. Governments are notoriously bad at preventing so-called "evils." Look at the War on Drugs if you have any doubts about this.
If legislators were to start a "War on Abortion" (as it appears many in the Religious Right Wing of the Demoblican party do) we would soon see even men getting abortions.:-)
If you define abortion as murder (and precious few cultures and religions do), then perhaps legislation is warranted. Since there isn't universal acknowledgement of abortion as murder, any such legislation is an imposition of a minority's moral position on the majority. Now that can be accomplished easily in a Democracy (it's done all the time). But we live in a Republic, and in a Republic the government is limited to protecting the life, liberty and property of breathing human beings. (Horses, for example, don't have such rights.) Since many people consider an unborn baby the property of its mother, protecting the right of the mother to do what she wishes with that property is the best that government can do.
People with a moral or religious position on abortion should be allowed (and are, under the first amendment) to use all the persuasion they can bring to bear to prevent abortions from taking place. But using the force and violence (guns and prisons are the result) of legislation to enforce a moral position produces not more good, but more evil.
Well, Libertarians truly believe in the phrase: "Give me your tired, your poor, your teeming masses yearning to be free." They thus believe in Open Immigration. Repeal the INS. Repeal passports, visas, green cards, etc. etc. What we have now is little better than the Soviet Union with its internal passports (if we don't watch out, the SS card or the Driver's License will become one of these), its closed emigration (just closed immigration turned on its head) and its wonderful economic system! (Whee! Government decides and provides EVERYTHING!)
These United States used to welcome every possible immigrant. People like Andrew Grove(Hungary). People like Albert Einstein (Germany, Switzerland). They can't become President, but they can start Intel or think up the Theory of Relativity.
I read The Sparrow too, and you've completely decontexted the quote. If Libertarianism was wrong, These United States wouldn't have risen from a backwater colony of Britain to the pre-eminent world power it now is. Libertarianism may not be a very good way to organize a people, but it's better than all the others.
Libertarians support individual freedoms... for those that can afford them.
Who would you prefer to "afford" them? If I have CP or AIDS or lung cancer (to name a few) is it right for me to force all the other taxpayers to pay for my disease, or would it be better for me to rely on the kind graces of my family or (in the rare case of no family available) those religionists and altruists and simply goodhearted people who will recognize that I'm in trouble and help out because it makes them feel good or gets them points with the Big Guy.
I don't know about you, but it seems to me that using the force and violence of government (try not paying your taxes if you don't believe it's force and violence) to do "charity" work defeats the entire purpose of "charity," which, according to all the religious definitions (and some nonreligious ones) includes voluntarily giving something to someone in need not because some IRS agent stuck a gun in your back but because you desire to do so to make the world a better place.
Forced charity is like the Holy Roman Empire (neither holy, nor roman, nor an empire): it isn't charity if it's forced.
And if that doesn't convince you, just use the utilitarian argument: people who are constantly given things by government lose the ability to get those things for themselves, thus destroying their humanity and their self-worth.
Let's think about what we want.
Well, yes. Let's think about what we want. Do we want the "visible hand" of Adolph Hitler, Pol Pot, Josef Stalin or Mao Zedong, or do we want the constantly improving conditions we see in countries like the USA where market forces (individual choices) raise all boats? Remember, Adolph was elected by a perfectly normal democratic vote.
you don't have freedom unless some random private individual gives it to you
Ah. The "Government doles out freedom" argument. No, the government doesn't dole out freedom. Freedoms pre-exist government. The Constitution of These United States specifically limits the powers of government to those explicitly stated in the Constitution. Nowhere in the Constitution is there a "Right to the money of others." You might recall that those who insist on a "right to the property of others" are generally called thieves.
Before 1912, American charity was the "business" of the Congregation, the Church, the Elks, the Moose, the Odd Fellows or the Masons. It was no "random private individual" who took care of the poor, the halt, the lame and the blind. It was specific voluntary organizations (including, most importantly, the families of the unfortunate) that charitably took the unfortunate under their wings and healed them, allowing them to become self-sufficient once again and preventing them from being a burden on anyone for very long. Sure there were the "uncurables," but even they were taken care of by families, religious organizations, and voluntary charities.
even the test on the libertarian web site doesn't say that most people are libertarians
Hmmm... Does that prove anything? I'd say it proves that the test quite accurately sorts people's political leanings. Most of the folks who take the quiz aren't aware of their libertarianism, and those who aren't libertarians clearly show up in quadrants appropriate to their politics. What results would prove to you that the quiz was unbiassed? That all the takers scored in the Libertarian quadrant? I would think not.:-)
Demoblicans of the right (GOP) or left (Sociocrats) are only interested in two things: 1.) getting reelected, and 2.) growing government power.
No. Make that three things: 1. getting reelected, 2.) growing government power, and 3.) getting reelected.
NOBODY EXPECTS THE SPANISH INQUISITION!
But that's what we've got. Current campaign finance (read: incumbent reelection guarantee) laws are all written to exclude third parties and anyone who might have the dough or the guts to challenge the current reigning royal hierarchy.
If you must vote, vote Libertarian. Only Libertarians will bring back the freedom from government oppression that Americans enjoyed until 1912. And don't give me that BS about how everything at that time was run by John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, etc. That's historical BS shoved down your throat by Government Monopoly Youth Indoctrination Camp teachers who were trained in the Education Diploma Mills to be good little collective citizens who trumpet the "Government Solves All" line.
To me, the big issue is simply campaign finance reform.
Not being from the U.S. I can understand why you look at American campaigns the way you do. But I'm an American citizen who has had the "privilege" of running for a federal office (US Congress, CO, district 2, 1996) and I can tell you that you have the problem exactly backwards and the solution exactly inside out.
It is the current campaign finance legal morass that allows corporations and other large organizations to buy favors from the federales through campaign contributions. Only Demoblicans can get those "corporate" contributions because they have set up the laws to favor incumbents. Current "campaign finance reform" is strictly and completely "incumbent re-election insurance."
Having watched this all from the "inside" I favor complete repeal of all "campaign finance" laws with the only remaining requirement that all candidates (at all levels of office in all government posts however small, including dogcatcher) post the amounts and source of their campaign contributions on the web. No limits. Foreign contributions (like the Chinese to Clinton) would still be prohibited, but that's all.
Such a situation would allow someone like Gene McCarthy (who got an $800,000.00 contribution from a single anonymous donor in 1968) to knock off the nomination of the incumbent president (Lyndon B. "Warmonger" Johnson) in 1968 in the New Hampshire primary. Such upsets cannot occur under the current incumbent guarantee laws.
"The rights of unborn babies" are best protected by mothers who have moral scruples. Government can't protect those rights and if the government tried to do so, pretty soon we'd have men getting abortions.
Legislation is force and violence. When you use force and violence to enforce your moral scruples, you have just departed from any "religion" that I'm aware of.
If Jim's computer is made of paper, copper, silicon, bits of spring steel and biodegradable plastic, then throwing it out won't be any worse than having a meal at McDonalds or Burger King.
If so-called "environmentalists" would merely impress on "the great unwashed" the importance of using trash cans instead of the side of the road, our "environment" would be lots more livable.
All life is creation and eventual destruction. Throwing out something that will eventually be broken up and returned to its original components is sane and sensible.
I hope Jim's paper computer is "the next big thing" since I want computing to become so ubiquitous that nobody can claim they are "computing disadvantaged."
Why not? I'll tell you why not. The NEA will have none of it.
Few of us realize the lockjaw hold the NEA has on the education business in this country. Without an NEA-approved certificate of teacher "competence" from an approved Education Diploma Mill, you can't teach squat in any Elementary or Secondary school in this country.
Thus, no program to take people from industry on sabbatical and put them in the classroom for 4-8 months can currently succeed.
But get the Government out of education and allow a free market in pedagogic competence without any certifcation requirement and you'd see plenty of this kind of cross pollination.
But too many parents are still suckling at the the great $350 BILLION Middle Class Welfare Education teat, and are reluctant to take personal responsiblity for their children's education. Thus the current system will continue unless enough/.ers get together and get the Government out of the education business.
What do you think would happen to the programming profession if, before you could practice as a programmer, you were required to take government mandated courses in programming, then pass a years-out-of-date test to "prove" your programming "competence?"
We live in a Republic (remember "...and to the Republic for which it stands...") and that is supposed to mean that the government is limited to powers delegated to it in the Constitution. Nowhere do those delegated powers include funding of education.
We all know what happens when Government subsidizes, regulates or bureaucratizes some function of our social contract: it degenerates into ineffective money-shuffling.
Before the 1850's, when some Boston Protestants got worried that the entire country would soon be Catholicized, and thus set up the "Public" (read: Government Monopoly) school system, more Americans were literate than in virtually any other country on the face of the earth (90%, as I recall). We can't even boast that rate now, after a century and a half of enduring the Government Monopoly Youth Indoctrination Centers.
We often forget the lesson of the Soviet Union: when Government provides a good, that good is in scarce supply and is of rotten quality.
Open Source the schools. Sell off the government monopoly. Stop giving out Middle Class Welfare to people who choose to have children. Allow instead a free market in education so that parents will have a choice to send their children to a school that teaches Evolution, Creation, or Alien Abduction:-).
Watch, then, as the literacy rate rises, science teaching takes the forefront, and America gains the kind of preeminence in education that it now has in computer hardware and software.
I'd say it's time for the federal government to step in when some states think it's OK for people to be owned by other people, don't you?
Not me. The whole tradition of slavery was on the way out when Mr. Lincoln enslaved the rest of us with what amounts to martial law. He was the first one to impose an (unconstitutional, it was later decided) income tax. He was the first one to force the sacrifice of the lives of the best and the brightest in a draft (because fighting the South was an unpopular cause and people had to be forced to do it).
Juries in the North were refusing to convict people who gave safe harbour to former slaves, and that humane tradition was beginning to filter down South.
Instead of the massive, horrible, and tremendous death and destruction of the Civil War, we might have abolished slavery in the same period of time by merely publicizing that every citizen on a jury has not only the right but the duty to judge both the law and the facts in any case brought before him/her.
That right and that duty remain today. Were every/.er to judge the IRS, the BATF, the DEA and every other unconstitutional branch of the Federal Government in their juries, many of the so-called powers of the Federal Government would just evaporate.
It's awfully funny when Anonymous Cowards bitch about/.ers who supposedly know too little and whine too much.
There's no doubt that we have way too much Federal Government. Ever since about 1914 when the Feds forced an Income Tax on us, the FG has grown exponentially, sucking the juices from our freedoms and our economy. The NSA is just the tip of the iceberg of the kind of meddling dumped on us by people who have too much of our money and too little respect for us as individuals.
/.ers who participate in the least government-regulated part of our economy: computers and software, should thank their lucky stars that the worst thing that can happen to them is to have Bill Gates investigated for monopolism. If we don't do something about that and all the other niggling little interferences in our lives perpetrated out of the District of Criminals, things will get worse. Much worse.
Not once did they ever, *ever* claim that the laws that they were being charged with breaking (and have now been proven to have broken) were unconstitutional. They could have. It might have worked. But they didn't, probably because they think that antitrust regulation is perfectly fine when not applied to them.
Only too true. But I've seen BillG hanging around with the Cato Institute folks recently, and maybe, just maybe, they'll impart to him some of the good old Constitutional religion. We can only hope.
as it is an issue to you and you alone
Well that'll be news to lots of my Libertarian (and libertarian) friends.
I think that the courts disagree with you.
Disagreement doesn't make them right. Were the King's soldiers right to punish those pesky Revolutionaries in 1776?
It's a good thing for two parts of the government to generally be at odds with each other and refusing to budge. This prevents it from turning on the populace.
Too bad this hardly ever works any more. I sure wish this had been the case at Waco. No legislator that I'm aware of stood up and tried to pass legislation to get the FBI and the ATF out of those Texans' church. No court got a restraining order against that agressive bunch of jackbooted thugs who perpetrated a holocaust on 80 children, women and men.
You need to be willing to run the risk that the Supreme Court will not agree with your legal analysis.
Well yes, you do need to run that risk. The Supremes have been kowtowing to the Executive ever since that FDR fascist (takes one to fight one!) threatened to pack the court with his own cronies. Only one or two of the current crop have begun to depart from the Executive/Legislative line and apply the Constitution to legislation that has spun way out from under the chains of the Constitution.
Bill and MSFT flaunted the anti-trust laws
Hmmmm... Did they ever force anyone to buy Microsoft products? No. Did they harm consumers by forcing them to buy Microsoft? No. Consumers have always had alternatives like Unix, MacOS, WordPerfect, NetWare, etc. etc. By their own fairly clear definition, Microsoft is not, and has never been, a violator of the unConstitutional anti-trust laws.
Red-baiting aside
Must've found one here.:-)
anti-trust laws were passed, by popular demand, by the democratically-elected Legislature, and have been upheld by the Executive-appointed Judiciary. All three branches of our "checks and balances" involved.
Yes. They've all been involved in ignoring the clear Constitutional limits that were intended to keep the Federales out of the economy and keep legislators' meddling fingers from politicizing business. The business of business is to provide competitive products in an open market where price matters (but may not always be decisive). The business of government is to make sure that nobody forces me to buy or to give up or to do anything I do not wish to buy or give up or do of my own free will. If I buy Windows 98R2, it's because I want to easily share my IP address with my family and get rid of some pesky bugs. Nobody forces me to buy it, since Linux is an alternative for both these issues.
But "most successful entrepeneur"? Give me a break.
Well, if success can be measured in numeric terms (a big if), then BillyG and the Microsofties are arguably the most successful entrepreneurs around. If you measure success only by how much risk was taken, then perhaps Bill never risked much, but he sure got a good payback from the risks he did take. Who am I (or you) to judge how much more praise-or-blameworthy Bill's entrepreneurship is vs. Mom & Pop? Are you a mindreader too?
Unlike you, I have no ability to peer into the soul of Janet Reno and discern her true motivation for having her department do its job.
Then let's use Occam's razor and see if there are any other motivations she might have. Hmmmm... Perhaps a wish to defend the "little guy" consumer against the "greedy big rich guy" BillG. Well, I never saw any consumers picketing Redomond about bugs in Windows 95. I seem to recall some McNealy guy and some Andreeason guy (sp??) using political pressure and contributions to certain political hacks to get their big business agenda pushed through.
Perhaps Janet & Co. wanted to stop BillG from "forcing" Windoze users to use Internet Explorer. So far as I know, nobody has ever been forced to use IE to browse a single website. Perhaps IE was forced on Windoze users to browse their filesystems, but free alternatives to IE have always been available for Web browsing.
Perhaps the Reno Justice Corporation wanted to make sure Microsoft didn't buy up every competing software company in the world. Well, last time I checked, it was still possible to refuse a buyout offer.
Envy, greed, and will-to-power explain things far more clearly and consistently than any other explanation for what Janet has done to Bill. Sorry if you don't like that analysis, but it's my opinion, so get over it.:-)
"World's greatest wealth creator"? Bah humbug. BillG is the world's greatest (private) wealth concentrator.
What's so bad about enriching all of Microsoft's stockholders? What's so bad about making many Microsoft employees instant millionaires? What's so bad about making products that are at least usable enough so that plenty of people buy them and increase their personal and corporate productivity? What's so terrible about having Bill concentrate his wealth? He certainly can't use it all up to buy palatial houses and Ferraris, so some of that "obscene" (how is that possible?) wealth must be invested in companies outside Microsoft, thus creating more jobs, more millionaires, more economic activity and more wealth for more "ordinary Americans."
Surely you're not envious of Bill's "concentration of wealth," are you?
And speaking of "private" vs. "public" concentrations of wealth, how about having at least one person in this country whose own wits, sacrifice and hard work have made him worth as much as 1/1000th of the yearly budget of the Federal Government of These United States, not to mention 1/10000th of the National Debt.
Extortion, perhaps, but not creation.
I still have no evidence that BillG ever put a gun to anybody's back forcing them to buy Microsoft rather than Apple or AIX or Linux or WordPerfect or Novell. BillG used the persuasive force of his legally gotten gains to persuade some folks that it wasn't in their best interests to buy from Bill's competitors. If you see that as an illegal act, then I suspect you need to talk to those McNealy and Andreeson guys I mentioned, since that's exactly what they did, although they leveraged their investment with political force.
Regardless, we must come back to the basic point: Microsoft broke the law.
What law? Some unConstitutional law created by anti-capatalist socialists in the middle of this most bloody of all centuries (soon to end, thankfully!).
Monopolies cannot continue in the real world without government support. If the GSA decided today that Microsoft products were not on the GSA schedule, Microsoft would go down like a lead balloon. Far better had the GSA taken that route than the Justice Department brought this greedy and envious suit against America's most successful entrepreneur.
I have never had much use for Microsoft's bloated products and actively avoid them when possible (my main machine is a Macintosh and at work I SysAdmin AIX boxen). But it is clearly greed, envy, and will-to-power that drives Janet Reno and her murderous (remember Waco?) minons to browbeat the world's greatest wealth creator.
Government always mucks things up. This "region code" thing is really a way the DVD producers shoot themselves in the foot by not allowing their goods to be marketed equally around the globe, thus reducing potential sales, and thus profits. The amount lost to "piracy" is miniscule compared to the great gains possible by having one world standard (which DVD has: note there's no "NTSC" or "PAL" DVD's: the translation to NTSC or PAL is done on the player from a standard disc).
Having government enforce a private agreement does make it censorship. Those weird alien folks who call themselves "politicians" back there in the District of Criminals need to get a life.:-)
If we privatize Social Security (surely a smart thing to do, but you know how intelligent the U.S. Congress is) then retirement will still be guaranteed, but not by the government. The anti-population effect will remain, but the burden will not be on "other people's children."
Privatizing schools would reduce everybody's taxes and since parents would then be paying their own hard-earned money for education, rather than freeloading on the taxpayers, they'd pay lots more attention to the schools they sent their kids to.
Reducing everybody's taxes might even allow a parent or two to stay home and educate their children themselves rather than sending them off to a government monopoly youth education camp.:-)
In countries where a large percentage of the men are unemployed because their government has stolen most of the capital for business creation, these men have little capital of their own for recreation. What's the cheapest recreation you can think of if you can find a willing woman? What's the result of that unprotected recreation?
Of course the long term result is that there are more mouths to feed, but in agrarian cultures, those mouths can also work at the earliest possible age, thus providing more food for everybody.
Economists may be dull, but they have generally found out that if a country has a government that allows a free market in goods and people, the economy grows so quickly that virtually everyone who wants a job can have one. People with jobs come home too tired for procreative recreation, so the population busts.
Don't believe me? Check out any of the works of the late Julian Simon, who forsees a future in which the most precious resource, human beings, will be the the most scarce.
Chris, since religion in Europe has mostly been secularized by the government (people have their religious donations taken out by the government and given to the "state" religion in Germany, for example), religion has been killed. That's what governments do: coopt fine ideas and noble principles so that governments can be seen as noble and people as mere clients of the government.
Fortunately, here in These United States, the Constitution prohibits government from either supporting or denigrating religion. Thus, the people are free to give their shekels to whatever religion they perceive as benefitting them the most. Currently, religions in America that have rousing music and exciting oratory are on the rise.
America is mostly a nomadic culture, so if you don't like where you're living, you can decamp to a different city or state or climate with ease, and having a religious "family" to turn to during these wanderings is a very comforting thing.
So, since European government has coopted religion and Europeans rarely move about like Americans, thus needing far less "family" support, religion in Europe has been castrated and American religions thrive.
Slashdot Mirror
Dee Hock, the founder and CEO emeritus of what is probably the world's largest commercial enterprise (1.25 Trillion/yr) organized Visa around a completely different paradigm, the chaord. You can read about his efforts here.
Chaordic organizations like the Linux effort illustrate how correct Hock was (and is).
Highly recommended.
Actually the real problem with campaign finance isn't that politicians receive money, it's that they are able to give money and favors out in response to the "campaign contributions" (read:bribes) that they get.
Were These United States to return to the Constitutional limitations on governmental powers (General Welfare means NO specific welfare, not to individuals or corporations), there would be less opportunity for politicians to redistribute Other People's Money, and thus less need to bribe them so that money comes to the briber.
I don't happen to believe that. Governments are notoriously bad at preventing so-called "evils." Look at the War on Drugs if you have any doubts about this.
If legislators were to start a "War on Abortion" (as it appears many in the Religious Right Wing of the Demoblican party do) we would soon see even men getting abortions. :-)
If you define abortion as murder (and precious few cultures and religions do), then perhaps legislation is warranted. Since there isn't universal acknowledgement of abortion as murder, any such legislation is an imposition of a minority's moral position on the majority. Now that can be accomplished easily in a Democracy (it's done all the time). But we live in a Republic, and in a Republic the government is limited to protecting the life, liberty and property of breathing human beings. (Horses, for example, don't have such rights.) Since many people consider an unborn baby the property of its mother, protecting the right of the mother to do what she wishes with that property is the best that government can do.
People with a moral or religious position on abortion should be allowed (and are, under the first amendment) to use all the persuasion they can bring to bear to prevent abortions from taking place. But using the force and violence (guns and prisons are the result) of legislation to enforce a moral position produces not more good, but more evil.
These United States used to welcome every possible immigrant. People like Andrew Grove(Hungary). People like Albert Einstein (Germany, Switzerland). They can't become President, but they can start Intel or think up the Theory of Relativity.
I read The Sparrow too, and you've completely decontexted the quote. If Libertarianism was wrong, These United States wouldn't have risen from a backwater colony of Britain to the pre-eminent world power it now is. Libertarianism may not be a very good way to organize a people, but it's better than all the others.
Who would you prefer to "afford" them? If I have CP or AIDS or lung cancer (to name a few) is it right for me to force all the other taxpayers to pay for my disease, or would it be better for me to rely on the kind graces of my family or (in the rare case of no family available) those religionists and altruists and simply goodhearted people who will recognize that I'm in trouble and help out because it makes them feel good or gets them points with the Big Guy.I don't know about you, but it seems to me that using the force and violence of government (try not paying your taxes if you don't believe it's force and violence) to do "charity" work defeats the entire purpose of "charity," which, according to all the religious definitions (and some nonreligious ones) includes voluntarily giving something to someone in need not because some IRS agent stuck a gun in your back but because you desire to do so to make the world a better place.
Forced charity is like the Holy Roman Empire (neither holy, nor roman, nor an empire): it isn't charity if it's forced.
And if that doesn't convince you, just use the utilitarian argument: people who are constantly given things by government lose the ability to get those things for themselves, thus destroying their humanity and their self-worth.
Well, yes. Let's think about what we want. Do we want the "visible hand" of Adolph Hitler, Pol Pot, Josef Stalin or Mao Zedong, or do we want the constantly improving conditions we see in countries like the USA where market forces (individual choices) raise all boats? Remember, Adolph was elected by a perfectly normal democratic vote. Ah. The "Government doles out freedom" argument. No, the government doesn't dole out freedom. Freedoms pre-exist government. The Constitution of These United States specifically limits the powers of government to those explicitly stated in the Constitution. Nowhere in the Constitution is there a "Right to the money of others." You might recall that those who insist on a "right to the property of others" are generally called thieves.Before 1912, American charity was the "business" of the Congregation, the Church, the Elks, the Moose, the Odd Fellows or the Masons. It was no "random private individual" who took care of the poor, the halt, the lame and the blind. It was specific voluntary organizations (including, most importantly, the families of the unfortunate) that charitably took the unfortunate under their wings and healed them, allowing them to become self-sufficient once again and preventing them from being a burden on anyone for very long. Sure there were the "uncurables," but even they were taken care of by families, religious organizations, and voluntary charities.
Hmmm... Does that prove anything? I'd say it proves that the test quite accurately sorts people's political leanings. Most of the folks who take the quiz aren't aware of their libertarianism, and those who aren't libertarians clearly show up in quadrants appropriate to their politics. What results would prove to you that the quiz was unbiassed? That all the takers scored in the Libertarian quadrant? I would think not.No. Make that three things: 1. getting reelected, 2.) growing government power, and 3.) getting reelected.
NOBODY EXPECTS THE SPANISH INQUISITION!
But that's what we've got. Current campaign finance (read: incumbent reelection guarantee) laws are all written to exclude third parties and anyone who might have the dough or the guts to challenge the current reigning royal hierarchy.
If you must vote, vote Libertarian. Only Libertarians will bring back the freedom from government oppression that Americans enjoyed until 1912. And don't give me that BS about how everything at that time was run by John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, etc. That's historical BS shoved down your throat by Government Monopoly Youth Indoctrination Camp teachers who were trained in the Education Diploma Mills to be good little collective citizens who trumpet the "Government Solves All" line.
It is the current campaign finance legal morass that allows corporations and other large organizations to buy favors from the federales through campaign contributions. Only Demoblicans can get those "corporate" contributions because they have set up the laws to favor incumbents. Current "campaign finance reform" is strictly and completely "incumbent re-election insurance."
Having watched this all from the "inside" I favor complete repeal of all "campaign finance" laws with the only remaining requirement that all candidates (at all levels of office in all government posts however small, including dogcatcher) post the amounts and source of their campaign contributions on the web. No limits. Foreign contributions (like the Chinese to Clinton) would still be prohibited, but that's all.
Such a situation would allow someone like Gene McCarthy (who got an $800,000.00 contribution from a single anonymous donor in 1968) to knock off the nomination of the incumbent president (Lyndon B. "Warmonger" Johnson) in 1968 in the New Hampshire primary. Such upsets cannot occur under the current incumbent guarantee laws.
Legislation is force and violence. When you use force and violence to enforce your moral scruples, you have just departed from any "religion" that I'm aware of.
If Jim's computer is made of paper, copper, silicon, bits of spring steel and biodegradable plastic, then throwing it out won't be any worse than having a meal at McDonalds or Burger King.
If so-called "environmentalists" would merely impress on "the great unwashed" the importance of using trash cans instead of the side of the road, our "environment" would be lots more livable.
All life is creation and eventual destruction. Throwing out something that will eventually be broken up and returned to its original components is sane and sensible.
I hope Jim's paper computer is "the next big thing" since I want computing to become so ubiquitous that nobody can claim they are "computing disadvantaged."
Few of us realize the lockjaw hold the NEA has on the education business in this country. Without an NEA-approved certificate of teacher "competence" from an approved Education Diploma Mill, you can't teach squat in any Elementary or Secondary school in this country.
Thus, no program to take people from industry on sabbatical and put them in the classroom for 4-8 months can currently succeed.
But get the Government out of education and allow a free market in pedagogic competence without any certifcation requirement and you'd see plenty of this kind of cross pollination.
But too many parents are still suckling at the the great $350 BILLION Middle Class Welfare Education teat, and are reluctant to take personal responsiblity for their children's education. Thus the current system will continue unless enough /.ers get together and get the Government out of the education business.
What do you think would happen to the programming profession if, before you could practice as a programmer, you were required to take government mandated courses in programming, then pass a years-out-of-date test to "prove" your programming "competence?"
We live in a Republic (remember "...and to the Republic for which it stands...") and that is supposed to mean that the government is limited to powers delegated to it in the Constitution. Nowhere do those delegated powers include funding of education.
We all know what happens when Government subsidizes, regulates or bureaucratizes some function of our social contract: it degenerates into ineffective money-shuffling.
Before the 1850's, when some Boston Protestants got worried that the entire country would soon be Catholicized, and thus set up the "Public" (read: Government Monopoly) school system, more Americans were literate than in virtually any other country on the face of the earth (90%, as I recall). We can't even boast that rate now, after a century and a half of enduring the Government Monopoly Youth Indoctrination Centers.
We often forget the lesson of the Soviet Union: when Government provides a good, that good is in scarce supply and is of rotten quality.
Open Source the schools. Sell off the government monopoly. Stop giving out Middle Class Welfare to people who choose to have children. Allow instead a free market in education so that parents will have a choice to send their children to a school that teaches Evolution, Creation, or Alien Abduction :-).
Watch, then, as the literacy rate rises, science teaching takes the forefront, and America gains the kind of preeminence in education that it now has in computer hardware and software.
Juries in the North were refusing to convict people who gave safe harbour to former slaves, and that humane tradition was beginning to filter down South.
Instead of the massive, horrible, and tremendous death and destruction of the Civil War, we might have abolished slavery in the same period of time by merely publicizing that every citizen on a jury has not only the right but the duty to judge both the law and the facts in any case brought before him/her.
That right and that duty remain today. Were every /.er to judge the IRS, the BATF, the DEA and every other unconstitutional branch of the Federal Government in their juries, many of the so-called powers of the Federal Government would just evaporate.
There's no doubt that we have way too much Federal Government. Ever since about 1914 when the Feds forced an Income Tax on us, the FG has grown exponentially, sucking the juices from our freedoms and our economy. The NSA is just the tip of the iceberg of the kind of meddling dumped on us by people who have too much of our money and too little respect for us as individuals.
Only too true. But I've seen BillG hanging around with the Cato Institute folks recently, and maybe, just maybe, they'll impart to him some of the good old Constitutional religion. We can only hope.
Well that'll be news to lots of my Libertarian (and libertarian) friends.
Disagreement doesn't make them right. Were the King's soldiers right to punish those pesky Revolutionaries in 1776?
Too bad this hardly ever works any more. I sure wish this had been the case at Waco. No legislator that I'm aware of stood up and tried to pass legislation to get the FBI and the ATF out of those Texans' church. No court got a restraining order against that agressive bunch of jackbooted thugs who perpetrated a holocaust on 80 children, women and men.
Well yes, you do need to run that risk. The Supremes have been kowtowing to the Executive ever since that FDR fascist (takes one to fight one!) threatened to pack the court with his own cronies. Only one or two of the current crop have begun to depart from the Executive/Legislative line and apply the Constitution to legislation that has spun way out from under the chains of the Constitution.
Hmmmm... Did they ever force anyone to buy Microsoft products? No. Did they harm consumers by forcing them to buy Microsoft? No. Consumers have always had alternatives like Unix, MacOS, WordPerfect, NetWare, etc. etc. By their own fairly clear definition, Microsoft is not, and has never been, a violator of the unConstitutional anti-trust laws.
Must've found one here. :-)
Yes. They've all been involved in ignoring the clear Constitutional limits that were intended to keep the Federales out of the economy and keep legislators' meddling fingers from politicizing business. The business of business is to provide competitive products in an open market where price matters (but may not always be decisive). The business of government is to make sure that nobody forces me to buy or to give up or to do anything I do not wish to buy or give up or do of my own free will. If I buy Windows 98R2, it's because I want to easily share my IP address with my family and get rid of some pesky bugs. Nobody forces me to buy it, since Linux is an alternative for both these issues.
Well, if success can be measured in numeric terms (a big if), then BillyG and the Microsofties are arguably the most successful entrepreneurs around. If you measure success only by how much risk was taken, then perhaps Bill never risked much, but he sure got a good payback from the risks he did take. Who am I (or you) to judge how much more praise-or-blameworthy Bill's entrepreneurship is vs. Mom & Pop? Are you a mindreader too?
Then let's use Occam's razor and see if there are any other motivations she might have. Hmmmm... Perhaps a wish to defend the "little guy" consumer against the "greedy big rich guy" BillG. Well, I never saw any consumers picketing Redomond about bugs in Windows 95. I seem to recall some McNealy guy and some Andreeason guy (sp??) using political pressure and contributions to certain political hacks to get their big business agenda pushed through.
Perhaps Janet & Co. wanted to stop BillG from "forcing" Windoze users to use Internet Explorer. So far as I know, nobody has ever been forced to use IE to browse a single website. Perhaps IE was forced on Windoze users to browse their filesystems, but free alternatives to IE have always been available for Web browsing.
Perhaps the Reno Justice Corporation wanted to make sure Microsoft didn't buy up every competing software company in the world. Well, last time I checked, it was still possible to refuse a buyout offer.
Envy, greed, and will-to-power explain things far more clearly and consistently than any other explanation for what Janet has done to Bill. Sorry if you don't like that analysis, but it's my opinion, so get over it. :-)
What's so bad about enriching all of Microsoft's stockholders? What's so bad about making many Microsoft employees instant millionaires? What's so bad about making products that are at least usable enough so that plenty of people buy them and increase their personal and corporate productivity? What's so terrible about having Bill concentrate his wealth? He certainly can't use it all up to buy palatial houses and Ferraris, so some of that "obscene" (how is that possible?) wealth must be invested in companies outside Microsoft, thus creating more jobs, more millionaires, more economic activity and more wealth for more "ordinary Americans."
Surely you're not envious of Bill's "concentration of wealth," are you?
And speaking of "private" vs. "public" concentrations of wealth, how about having at least one person in this country whose own wits, sacrifice and hard work have made him worth as much as 1/1000th of the yearly budget of the Federal Government of These United States, not to mention 1/10000th of the National Debt.
I still have no evidence that BillG ever put a gun to anybody's back forcing them to buy Microsoft rather than Apple or AIX or Linux or WordPerfect or Novell. BillG used the persuasive force of his legally gotten gains to persuade some folks that it wasn't in their best interests to buy from Bill's competitors. If you see that as an illegal act, then I suspect you need to talk to those McNealy and Andreeson guys I mentioned, since that's exactly what they did, although they leveraged their investment with political force.
What law? Some unConstitutional law created by anti-capatalist socialists in the middle of this most bloody of all centuries (soon to end, thankfully!).
Monopolies cannot continue in the real world without government support. If the GSA decided today that Microsoft products were not on the GSA schedule, Microsoft would go down like a lead balloon. Far better had the GSA taken that route than the Justice Department brought this greedy and envious suit against America's most successful entrepreneur.
I have never had much use for Microsoft's bloated products and actively avoid them when possible (my main machine is a Macintosh and at work I SysAdmin AIX boxen). But it is clearly greed, envy, and will-to-power that drives Janet Reno and her murderous (remember Waco?) minons to browbeat the world's greatest wealth creator.
Having government enforce a private agreement does make it censorship. Those weird alien folks who call themselves "politicians" back there in the District of Criminals need to get a life. :-)
Privatizing schools would reduce everybody's taxes and since parents would then be paying their own hard-earned money for education, rather than freeloading on the taxpayers, they'd pay lots more attention to the schools they sent their kids to.
Reducing everybody's taxes might even allow a parent or two to stay home and educate their children themselves rather than sending them off to a government monopoly youth education camp. :-)
Of course the long term result is that there are more mouths to feed, but in agrarian cultures, those mouths can also work at the earliest possible age, thus providing more food for everybody.
Economists may be dull, but they have generally found out that if a country has a government that allows a free market in goods and people, the economy grows so quickly that virtually everyone who wants a job can have one. People with jobs come home too tired for procreative recreation, so the population busts.
Don't believe me? Check out any of the works of the late Julian Simon, who forsees a future in which the most precious resource, human beings, will be the the most scarce.
Fortunately, here in These United States, the Constitution prohibits government from either supporting or denigrating religion. Thus, the people are free to give their shekels to whatever religion they perceive as benefitting them the most. Currently, religions in America that have rousing music and exciting oratory are on the rise.
America is mostly a nomadic culture, so if you don't like where you're living, you can decamp to a different city or state or climate with ease, and having a religious "family" to turn to during these wanderings is a very comforting thing.
So, since European government has coopted religion and Europeans rarely move about like Americans, thus needing far less "family" support, religion in Europe has been castrated and American religions thrive.