best comment so far today. I'm out of mod points unfortunately.
The idea of tv and radio political commentary is not to solve society's ills, but to get people to listen to you while they think you are trying to solve society's ills. They're all professional rabble rousers, that's how they get their paycheck.
So, having a fiscally conservative, socially liberal, and generally libertarian viewpoint on government otherwise (i.e. I don't fit into a neat little political "color"), I felt the need to comment:
1. I agree. 2. I agree, although taxes punish everybody (Except those who don't pay any of course). 3. I'd say that a good number of problems we have in society today came from religion(s) in the first place. That said, I agree that government should not be attempting to legislate morality or good behavior. Their job is to enact and execute laws within the scope of their charter necessary to the function of society, and then provide for justice when such laws are broken. 4. Whose god? any specific one? Zeus? Allah? Odin? Jehova? Vishnu? Paladine? I am of the opinion that "endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights" basically translates in modern speech to "These rights are present from birth, by virtue of being a human being, and not given or privlidged by the government, thus not capible of being controlled by them". Given the religious freedom bent of early colonists, as well as the founding father's belief in a strong seperation of church and state, I have a had time believing that they'd be referencing any specific god when they mention "creator", which is of course probably why they used that exact phrase. 5. Once again, whose god, whose morality, and doesn't this contradict what you just said in point #3? 6. It's funny you quote that specific line, since it was originally "life, liberty, and the pursuit of property". Really it was, look it up. It was changed to "happiness" to be more general. 7. That is true, but as much as it sucks to admit it, the vast majority of them have a pretty good reason for hating us. We're dicks, really we are.. Sure there a few loonies that have been whipped into a fervor by charismatic madmen and by the media, but the real truth is that the US has used it's position of power in the world to basically be giant assholes when we want to be? Example. Did you know that after the Iran-contra affair, the US was convicted of war crimes against Nicaragua, but we used our position as a permanent member of the UN security council to veto every attempt to punish us after that conviction? That's just one example. Really a lot of the people in the world who are pissed off at us have a legitimate gripe. I'm not an apologist, I'm simply saying don't turn a blind eye to the complaints of the rest of the world just because they're not on your team.
as a matter of fact I do pay it off every month, but that's beside the point.
I didn't get a credit card because I knew myself. I knew I would WANT to go out and get the fun toys. I didn't need the temptation.
It wasn't personal pride so much as not putting the cake on the table because I knew I'd just be torturing myself by not eating it but looking at it.
It's hard now that I've got one, but not nearly as hard as it would have been 10 or 15 years ago.
also, I trust credit card companies about as far as I can throw them. They have a history of engaging in accounting practices that would make hollywood cringe. They'll find some way to combine two months and shave another off to explain why your payment is still somehow late and you owe them money. I'm pretty sure that recent legislation in the past few years was enacted specifically to combat that sort of thing. I don't doubt that they'll find another loophole in the future to do the same sort of crap.
Perhaps I do lead a sheltered life, but I contend that what you describe is the exception, not the rule. Some people really do get the shit end of the stick, but most people in my experience wallow in it instead of trying to get up again. This country does NOT keep you down. YOU keep you down. most people aren't REALLY down to begin with. They just don't aim high. They are content (maybe not happy, but content) with their lot in life.
I lived in a trailer park for 3 years while I worked (omg, bad word) my way up and out of it. You know what I saw time and time again? Exactly the things I said previously. I saw people wasting their money, their time, and their lives. Before I was in the trailer park, my wife and I rented a single room in an apartment. I've done time shopping at aldi (bargain grocery store) and I've counted my coupons.
Today I'm two weeks away from closing on a 2600 square foot house in an upper middle class neighborhood (standard morgage with a healthy down payment). I have a job that pays me a healthy amount that I like. Nobody dropped any of that in my lap. I just went through the process of working your way up.
Am I lucky? I don't know. I did all the things you're financially "supposed to do to succeed", and I am succeeding. I don't see how that means "lucky".
I understand perfectly why there is a graduated tax scheme, but that is not what GGP is advocating at all. re-read it. He is for abolishing any concept of rich vs poor.
A graduated tax scheme is not really fair to the rich of course, but the assumption is that the perks of being rich make up for it (which they probably do).
And a big problem, something I really wonder about, is why people would sneer (and don't think some didn't) at the phrase I used above "not really fair to the rich". Why should having a large bank account relative to someone else inherently mean you don't deserve to be treated fairly?
assuming of course you believe that life is fair, which is of course an assumption that is quite suspect.
In the world where $3 to a poor person is an equal proportion of wealth to $300 to a rich person. A person who only makes $3000 a year (number chosen arbitrarily for ease of math) is paying 1/1000th of their annual income in sales tax right there. If you have $300,000 in income, and pay 1/1000th of that, the pain felt is no better and no worse. That seems pretty fair.
Please explain how, in that world, there is any difference between making $3000 a year and $300,000 a year, besides the number of zeros you have to put in every monetary transaction. If everything costs the same as a percentage of total wealth, then everybody makes the same, relatively speaking. There is no such thing as "a raise". There is no such thing as "being a success". There is no success. No matter what you do, you can never get any better. You can never advance. There is nothing better to advance to. How bleak.
Additionally, as I keep pointing out, society has already tried that economic system many times, and it keeps failing as it is contrary to human nature (on the large scale). It's called communism. It hasn't worked, and it never will work until technology has advanced to the point where all material wants and goods, as well as services, can be conjured from thin air at will.
What are you, a miser? Holding on to money without doing anything productive with it does no good for anyone. It's prudent to save some money away in case it's needed, but generally money should either be spent or invested.
How exactly do you think the rich became rich? The money fairy didn't appear out of thin air, tap them on the head, and say "you're now rich" (not counting lottery winners), the vast majority saved their money instead of spending it, and invested it. Since when has spending less than you make been viewed as a BAD thing?! No wonder you're champion of the poor, you're defending the #1 mistake poor people make, spending more than they should!
so you're defining "poor" as "the inability to invest"?
There isn't a "poor" person in the country who couldn't manage to set aside say, 5% of his income to invest? I'd say that multitudes of employer-based 401k plans beg to differ.
The money is there. People choose to spend it on beer, dvds, magazines, clothes, gadgets, what-have-you. it's a well known phenomenon that "your expenses rise to meet your budget". you can see it again and again, as soon as people make more money, they find a way to spend it.
It's a failure of the individual, not the system.
or to put it more succinctly: "YOU RACK DISCIPRINE".
Most people don't understand debt. they don't know what "17% APR" actually means. They don't understand that compound interest works against them if they owe money just as strongly as it works for them if they invest money. It's easier to blame "the man" than learn simple math. Really this stuff is based on like 7th grade math.
I got my first credit card at age 33, solely because I needed to build a credit rating in order to purchase a house. I had a "0" credit score until age 32. Apparently the idea that "I've gotten this far in life without living beyond my means, so when I need to pay for something I've always got the money to do so" is lost on modern lenders. Otherwise, I'd still be credit card free. I use mine to buy gas simply so it has some history on it.
"my old man worked hard. all they ever did was give him more work". - weekend at bernies
"work smarter, not harder" - ducktales
It's amazing how much knowledge was stored in the entertainment of our youth.
Also, I can't understand your point. Either you aren't saying what you mean, or you don't know what you're saying. "Converse" means "opposite" or "reverse of". So yes, the statement "the less money you earn the more you'll keep" IS in fact the opposite of what I was saying.
So, you would suggest that rich people should pay sales tax in relation to their income? So if the poor person buys a pair of shoes and pays $3 sales tax on them, the same pair of shoes should rack up $300 for the rich person? In what world does that seem fair to you? That's massively penalizing success and encouraging failure. how is anybody supposed to succeed if success is penalized?
The whole idea of making more money is that you get to keep more of it, so your expenses are lower relative to what you earn. it sounds to me that you want to arbitrarily raise expenses based on what you earn, which of course defeats the entire purpose of attempting to better one's place in life. Maybe that's the idea comrade?
Good. Sales tax is a regressive tax, meaning poor people pay more than rich people. Even if you want to stick it to Amazon, in a very real way, sale tax is passed on to the consumer. The sooner we can get rid of that awful tax and move to a more equitable tax system, the better..
I assume you're speaking as a relative percentage of entire income, because if you mean that in absolute terms, it's a pretty silly statement. I think it's a pretty safe bet that "rich" people purchase a good bit more than "poor" people do, and thus pay significantly more money in sales tax. In the unlikely event that such a statement isn't true, and that rich people aren't buying more than poor people... well maybe that's why the poor people are poor, maybe they should spend less?
I know, I know, rich man keeping the little man down, blah blah top 10% of the population has 80% of the wealth, etc. whatever. all I know is that I've met many "poor" people in my life who when they get that income tax refund or birthday gift of cash etc, go out and buy a couch or a tv instead of paying their credit card bill.
Nope, you'd think that wouldd work, but there are people with massive credit card bills who owe more than they make (I'm not sure how you manage to rack up $100,000 in debt when you make $30,000 a year, but people seem to have done so), so it's entirely possibly to end up with a negative income if you consider debt as actually existing (which a lot of people seem not to).
define poverty. do you mean "poor" or do you mean "must have at least this much spendable income" or do you mean "must be able to attain this level of food/shelter/goods"? specify.
It's impossible to eliminate "poor" without a method for instantly generating any tangible good one may desire. I.e. star trek replicators. until you reach this point, "poor" is simply a relative value meaning "bottom 10%" or something like that. you will always have a relative spectrum of wealth unless you manage to invent the utopian communist society (hint, nobody seems to be able to do that). Also, as poor is a relative value, compare the US's Poor vs the poor people in other countries. Last time I was out of the country, the slums and people who lived in them outside of city I was in made our (united states) poor look like kings.
Honestly, my solution is to kill every politician within 1500 yards of NASA engineers, write the remaining NASA (After the politician purge) a check that the DOD would envy, and say "get our asses to Mars".
I swear I remember reading that IBM had already simulated an AI "Intelligence" with sophistication on par with a cat's brain, albeit not at full speed.
That's because John Conner has come back from the future and saved us at the last possible moment from significant breakthroughs in AI research no less than 17 times now, you ingrate!
NASA and "save money" are like oil and water. NASA was born under the blank check "just get it done, price be damned" environment of the cold war era. I don't see them as having ever truly moved away from it, not to menion they are now politicized all to hell and have all the penalties of "You'll do it this way because senator asshat from arkansas pulled some favors to have congress vote this way in order to keep jobs in his district".
Aside from that, it works out like this: Launching a rocket costs X dollars. if you are going to launch a rocket because someone else wants you to, not because you want to, one would assume that you're going to charge them X + Y dollars, in order to pay your expenses AND make it worth you while to do favors for them. I think we can assume that if random European country can launch the rocket for X dollars, so could we, so by launching the rocket we designed ourselves, we'd save Y dollars.
The exception to this is, of course, if for some reason it's much cheaper (i.e. more than Y) to launch a rocket in that country than here... at which point you really have to ask yourself "why is it so much cheaper? Is it purely that they're paying a lot less to workers in that country, or are we into areas of 'savings' impacting safety and craftmanship?"
The basic idea of the hardcore libertarians (I know several) is that taking money from individual A (via taxes) to pay for the pet program of individual B is essentially government approved and mandated theft and robbery. I've never been able to get out of them exactly what the dividing line is between "pet project" and "societal necessity", but it seems to me that they generally believe that almost everything we currently spend money on falls towards the former rather than the latter.
On a discussion specifically about spaceflight funding, one particular friend of mine asked what right I (i.e. the government) had to take money from him for a project that does not benefit him and that he would not have chosen to support given the opportunity to choose. I pointed out the ways that the space program had benefited him, but he kept coming back to the same question of "why are you spending my money on something I don't want", and I was never really able to give him a reasonable answer.
Naw, pretty sure that most of that we made some good profit off of first before we sold it off. This we gave up on before it was even done (maybe with good reason, maybe not. I guess we'll have to wait and see).
The point is that if we spent 10 years and billions of dollars developing this technology, then declare it "a dead end" and give up on it, only to turn around and pay other countries to utilize the technology that we ourselves paid to develop... then I am completely disheartened by the leadership of our space program and I begin to see the point of the hardcore libertarians who claim that we have no right to be spending tax dollars on a space program of any kind in the first place.
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My wife has a shirt that says "Social engineering" on the front, and on the back it says "Because there is no patch for human stupidity".
My wife is awesome.
best comment so far today. I'm out of mod points unfortunately.
The idea of tv and radio political commentary is not to solve society's ills, but to get people to listen to you while they think you are trying to solve society's ills. They're all professional rabble rousers, that's how they get their paycheck.
So, having a fiscally conservative, socially liberal, and generally libertarian viewpoint on government otherwise (i.e. I don't fit into a neat little political "color"), I felt the need to comment:
1. I agree.
2. I agree, although taxes punish everybody (Except those who don't pay any of course).
3. I'd say that a good number of problems we have in society today came from religion(s) in the first place. That said, I agree that government should not be attempting to legislate morality or good behavior. Their job is to enact and execute laws within the scope of their charter necessary to the function of society, and then provide for justice when such laws are broken.
4. Whose god? any specific one? Zeus? Allah? Odin? Jehova? Vishnu? Paladine? I am of the opinion that "endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights" basically translates in modern speech to "These rights are present from birth, by virtue of being a human being, and not given or privlidged by the government, thus not capible of being controlled by them". Given the religious freedom bent of early colonists, as well as the founding father's belief in a strong seperation of church and state, I have a had time believing that they'd be referencing any specific god when they mention "creator", which is of course probably why they used that exact phrase.
5. Once again, whose god, whose morality, and doesn't this contradict what you just said in point #3?
6. It's funny you quote that specific line, since it was originally "life, liberty, and the pursuit of property". Really it was, look it up. It was changed to "happiness" to be more general.
7. That is true, but as much as it sucks to admit it, the vast majority of them have a pretty good reason for hating us. We're dicks, really we are.. Sure there a few loonies that have been whipped into a fervor by charismatic madmen and by the media, but the real truth is that the US has used it's position of power in the world to basically be giant assholes when we want to be? Example. Did you know that after the Iran-contra affair, the US was convicted of war crimes against Nicaragua, but we used our position as a permanent member of the UN security council to veto every attempt to punish us after that conviction? That's just one example. Really a lot of the people in the world who are pissed off at us have a legitimate gripe. I'm not an apologist, I'm simply saying don't turn a blind eye to the complaints of the rest of the world just because they're not on your team.
now now, this is most certainly change from the GWB "freedom? lol what freedom? regime.
yep, this is worse.
and wasn't it a really really horrible mess?
as a matter of fact I do pay it off every month, but that's beside the point.
I didn't get a credit card because I knew myself. I knew I would WANT to go out and get the fun toys. I didn't need the temptation.
It wasn't personal pride so much as not putting the cake on the table because I knew I'd just be torturing myself by not eating it but looking at it.
It's hard now that I've got one, but not nearly as hard as it would have been 10 or 15 years ago.
also, I trust credit card companies about as far as I can throw them. They have a history of engaging in accounting practices that would make hollywood cringe. They'll find some way to combine two months and shave another off to explain why your payment is still somehow late and you owe them money. I'm pretty sure that recent legislation in the past few years was enacted specifically to combat that sort of thing. I don't doubt that they'll find another loophole in the future to do the same sort of crap.
Perhaps I do lead a sheltered life, but I contend that what you describe is the exception, not the rule. Some people really do get the shit end of the stick, but most people in my experience wallow in it instead of trying to get up again. This country does NOT keep you down. YOU keep you down. most people aren't REALLY down to begin with. They just don't aim high. They are content (maybe not happy, but content) with their lot in life.
I lived in a trailer park for 3 years while I worked (omg, bad word) my way up and out of it. You know what I saw time and time again? Exactly the things I said previously. I saw people wasting their money, their time, and their lives. Before I was in the trailer park, my wife and I rented a single room in an apartment. I've done time shopping at aldi (bargain grocery store) and I've counted my coupons.
Today I'm two weeks away from closing on a 2600 square foot house in an upper middle class neighborhood (standard morgage with a healthy down payment). I have a job that pays me a healthy amount that I like. Nobody dropped any of that in my lap. I just went through the process of working your way up.
Am I lucky? I don't know. I did all the things you're financially "supposed to do to succeed", and I am succeeding. I don't see how that means "lucky".
I understand perfectly why there is a graduated tax scheme, but that is not what GGP is advocating at all. re-read it. He is for abolishing any concept of rich vs poor.
A graduated tax scheme is not really fair to the rich of course, but the assumption is that the perks of being rich make up for it (which they probably do).
And a big problem, something I really wonder about, is why people would sneer (and don't think some didn't) at the phrase I used above "not really fair to the rich". Why should having a large bank account relative to someone else inherently mean you don't deserve to be treated fairly?
assuming of course you believe that life is fair, which is of course an assumption that is quite suspect.
In the world where $3 to a poor person is an equal proportion of wealth to $300 to a rich person. A person who only makes $3000 a year (number chosen arbitrarily for ease of math) is paying 1/1000th of their annual income in sales tax right there. If you have $300,000 in income, and pay 1/1000th of that, the pain felt is no better and no worse. That seems pretty fair.
Please explain how, in that world, there is any difference between making $3000 a year and $300,000 a year, besides the number of zeros you have to put in every monetary transaction. If everything costs the same as a percentage of total wealth, then everybody makes the same, relatively speaking. There is no such thing as "a raise". There is no such thing as "being a success". There is no success. No matter what you do, you can never get any better. You can never advance. There is nothing better to advance to. How bleak.
Additionally, as I keep pointing out, society has already tried that economic system many times, and it keeps failing as it is contrary to human nature (on the large scale). It's called communism. It hasn't worked, and it never will work until technology has advanced to the point where all material wants and goods, as well as services, can be conjured from thin air at will.
What are you, a miser? Holding on to money without doing anything productive with it does no good for anyone. It's prudent to save some money away in case it's needed, but generally money should either be spent or invested.
How exactly do you think the rich became rich? The money fairy didn't appear out of thin air, tap them on the head, and say "you're now rich" (not counting lottery winners), the vast majority saved their money instead of spending it, and invested it. Since when has spending less than you make been viewed as a BAD thing?! No wonder you're champion of the poor, you're defending the #1 mistake poor people make, spending more than they should!
so you're defining "poor" as "the inability to invest"?
There isn't a "poor" person in the country who couldn't manage to set aside say, 5% of his income to invest? I'd say that multitudes of employer-based 401k plans beg to differ.
The money is there. People choose to spend it on beer, dvds, magazines, clothes, gadgets, what-have-you. it's a well known phenomenon that "your expenses rise to meet your budget". you can see it again and again, as soon as people make more money, they find a way to spend it.
It's a failure of the individual, not the system.
or to put it more succinctly: "YOU RACK DISCIPRINE".
Most people don't understand debt. they don't know what "17% APR" actually means. They don't understand that compound interest works against them if they owe money just as strongly as it works for them if they invest money. It's easier to blame "the man" than learn simple math. Really this stuff is based on like 7th grade math.
I got my first credit card at age 33, solely because I needed to build a credit rating in order to purchase a house. I had a "0" credit score until age 32. Apparently the idea that "I've gotten this far in life without living beyond my means, so when I need to pay for something I've always got the money to do so" is lost on modern lenders. Otherwise, I'd still be credit card free. I use mine to buy gas simply so it has some history on it.
"my old man worked hard. all they ever did was give him more work".
- weekend at bernies
"work smarter, not harder"
- ducktales
It's amazing how much knowledge was stored in the entertainment of our youth.
Also, I can't understand your point. Either you aren't saying what you mean, or you don't know what you're saying. "Converse" means "opposite" or "reverse of". So yes, the statement "the less money you earn the more you'll keep" IS in fact the opposite of what I was saying.
So, what you're saying is, maybe the poor should start investing as well?
So, you would suggest that rich people should pay sales tax in relation to their income? So if the poor person buys a pair of shoes and pays $3 sales tax on them, the same pair of shoes should rack up $300 for the rich person? In what world does that seem fair to you? That's massively penalizing success and encouraging failure. how is anybody supposed to succeed if success is penalized?
The whole idea of making more money is that you get to keep more of it, so your expenses are lower relative to what you earn. it sounds to me that you want to arbitrarily raise expenses based on what you earn, which of course defeats the entire purpose of attempting to better one's place in life. Maybe that's the idea comrade?
Good. Sales tax is a regressive tax, meaning poor people pay more than rich people. Even if you want to stick it to Amazon, in a very real way, sale tax is passed on to the consumer. The sooner we can get rid of that awful tax and move to a more equitable tax system, the better..
I assume you're speaking as a relative percentage of entire income, because if you mean that in absolute terms, it's a pretty silly statement. I think it's a pretty safe bet that "rich" people purchase a good bit more than "poor" people do, and thus pay significantly more money in sales tax. In the unlikely event that such a statement isn't true, and that rich people aren't buying more than poor people... well maybe that's why the poor people are poor, maybe they should spend less?
I know, I know, rich man keeping the little man down, blah blah top 10% of the population has 80% of the wealth, etc. whatever. all I know is that I've met many "poor" people in my life who when they get that income tax refund or birthday gift of cash etc, go out and buy a couch or a tv instead of paying their credit card bill.
Nope, you'd think that wouldd work, but there are people with massive credit card bills who owe more than they make (I'm not sure how you manage to rack up $100,000 in debt when you make $30,000 a year, but people seem to have done so), so it's entirely possibly to end up with a negative income if you consider debt as actually existing (which a lot of people seem not to).
define poverty. do you mean "poor" or do you mean "must have at least this much spendable income" or do you mean "must be able to attain this level of food/shelter/goods"? specify.
It's impossible to eliminate "poor" without a method for instantly generating any tangible good one may desire. I.e. star trek replicators. until you reach this point, "poor" is simply a relative value meaning "bottom 10%" or something like that. you will always have a relative spectrum of wealth unless you manage to invent the utopian communist society (hint, nobody seems to be able to do that). Also, as poor is a relative value, compare the US's Poor vs the poor people in other countries. Last time I was out of the country, the slums and people who lived in them outside of city I was in made our (united states) poor look like kings.
Honestly, my solution is to kill every politician within 1500 yards of NASA engineers, write the remaining NASA (After the politician purge) a check that the DOD would envy, and say "get our asses to Mars".
But then, I'm a romantic.
I swear I remember reading that IBM had already simulated an AI "Intelligence" with sophistication on par with a cat's brain, albeit not at full speed.
Yep, here it is (one of many articles on the subject I picked at random)
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/68678.html
That's because John Conner has come back from the future and saved us at the last possible moment from significant breakthroughs in AI research no less than 17 times now, you ingrate!
NASA and "save money" are like oil and water. NASA was born under the blank check "just get it done, price be damned" environment of the cold war era. I don't see them as having ever truly moved away from it, not to menion they are now politicized all to hell and have all the penalties of "You'll do it this way because senator asshat from arkansas pulled some favors to have congress vote this way in order to keep jobs in his district".
Aside from that, it works out like this:
Launching a rocket costs X dollars.
if you are going to launch a rocket because someone else wants you to, not because you want to, one would assume that you're going to charge them X + Y dollars, in order to pay your expenses AND make it worth you while to do favors for them.
I think we can assume that if random European country can launch the rocket for X dollars, so could we, so by launching the rocket we designed ourselves, we'd save Y dollars.
The exception to this is, of course, if for some reason it's much cheaper (i.e. more than Y) to launch a rocket in that country than here... at which point you really have to ask yourself "why is it so much cheaper? Is it purely that they're paying a lot less to workers in that country, or are we into areas of 'savings' impacting safety and craftmanship?"
I didn't say I agreed (yet).
The basic idea of the hardcore libertarians (I know several) is that taking money from individual A (via taxes) to pay for the pet program of individual B is essentially government approved and mandated theft and robbery. I've never been able to get out of them exactly what the dividing line is between "pet project" and "societal necessity", but it seems to me that they generally believe that almost everything we currently spend money on falls towards the former rather than the latter.
On a discussion specifically about spaceflight funding, one particular friend of mine asked what right I (i.e. the government) had to take money from him for a project that does not benefit him and that he would not have chosen to support given the opportunity to choose. I pointed out the ways that the space program had benefited him, but he kept coming back to the same question of "why are you spending my money on something I don't want", and I was never really able to give him a reasonable answer.
Naw, pretty sure that most of that we made some good profit off of first before we sold it off. This we gave up on before it was even done (maybe with good reason, maybe not. I guess we'll have to wait and see).
The point is that if we spent 10 years and billions of dollars developing this technology, then declare it "a dead end" and give up on it, only to turn around and pay other countries to utilize the technology that we ourselves paid to develop... then I am completely disheartened by the leadership of our space program and I begin to see the point of the hardcore libertarians who claim that we have no right to be spending tax dollars on a space program of any kind in the first place.
from European powers, I'm giving up and joining the fringe-right libertarians.