Yes, it is - what is it you think pays for the operation of the aircraft and the fees they pay the airport such that the airport can operate? The cost of airline tickets (and incidentals like luggage fees) pays for the operation of the airline.
"Liberty" does not equate to the right to have the government provide a course of study in any subject you desire. Of course, it does mean that you can pay to study whatever you want, provided there's someone willing to sell instruction in it.
"...we should...provide a basic income to everyone who wants one..." What you are saying here is that I should go to work such that part of my work day should go towards someone who does not go to work, because unless you have people who go to work and then forcibly take some of the money those people earn from them, there will be no money to give away for free. In case you aren't aware (and it seems you aren't), there is no such thing as "government money", except by way of expropriating money from people who work. In short, the solution to "provide a basic income" is to get a fucking job.
"...hold challenges to stimulate innovation..." These challenges are already held: you win a prize if you come up with useful innovation, and the value of the prize is determined by how useful people find your innovation. Contests are held all day, every day, and you can participate at your will or whim. These contests are lumped together under the banner of the "free market", and you can find examples of past winners in the iStuff you have and the flat screen TV you own and the refrigerator you use and many more things in your world.
A tenth of a trillion dollars to build this?!? A round trip flight from LA to SF costs about $100, which means you could provide just under one billion round trip flights between LA and SF for the same price (and reduce travel time to 1.5 hours).
Let's say for the sake of argument (and because I don't know the real figure) there are 10,000 people who travel between LA and SF each day. For that same tenth of a trillion, you could fly each of these people return, every day of the year, for almost 274 years.
Like all things managed by government, the economics come from bizarro land. It's like reading articles that a government is "investing" $300,000,000 in order to fulfil "short term housing needs" by providing 1,500 "permanent beds" for homeless people - make you wonder why they don't just give these 1,500 people $200,000 each (except that $290,000,000 ends up spent on the bureaucracy to "support" the exercise).
This guy has identified exactly the issue, which seems to elude almost every software company, and music and video publishers too (and an astonishing amount of executives in other fields too): it is all about putting the customer first. When companies put DRM on their product, and other impediments to product satisfaction, they are putting their customer last. The problem is fundamentally one of mistaken priorities at an executive level: sometimes that manifests itself as DRM, sometimes it manifests itself as not putting a superior product out for fear of "cannibalizing" an existing product, sometimes it shows itself in hidden fees and misleading terms. These are all symptoms of the same mistaken priorities.
Been a long day and perhaps my brain just ain't so sharp at the moment, but I don't get your point about "...keep the units straight": on average, in any arbitrary set of 100,000 Americans, about 1 will be killed by a drunk driver, 4 will be murdered and 11 will commit suicide (and somewhere around 146 will die as a result of tobacco smoking). In only one of those scenarios do police attempt to pre-emptively prevent the outcome by arbitrarily stopping people at police check points absent any probable cause. I'm also regularly shocked by the lack of relative attention suicide gets.
You're right: meth is very insidious - I too have a friend who is a "husk" - he went completely nuts on it, coke and ecstacy and ended up in the mental ward of the hospital and he never came back to normal. I visited him every day for the first 30 days he was in there and your description of "husk" is spot on: the guy I knew just didn't live there anymore.
However, there are lots and lots of things which are not particularly good for humans. My point is pragmatic, not Darwinian: prohibition has worse consequences and outcomes than non-prohibition. Are there still horrible outcomes? Yup. But fewer. And adults ought to be free to do what they want, including things which are demonstrably sub-optimal.
"...there's only 40 years of oil left" is a ridiculous statement, because it presupposes numerous things:
- that the price of oil will not increase as it becomes more scarce (if oil prices were increased to $1000/barrel today, would you still say there are 40 years left?), which in turn would impact consumption, increase the economic viability of alternatives and spur investment in innovation to develop so far unknown alternatives; and
- that the quantity of all the oil in existence in known (hint: it's not - exploration and finds continue)
Drunk driving is one of the most over-hyped causes, just behind "terrorism" (which you rightly point out doesn't kill many people either). In the US, the percentage of the population which died from drunk driving in 2009 is around 0.0036%. Of those, 67% were the drunk drivers themselves. So your odds of being killed by a drunk driver are somewhere around 1 in 100,000. You have 4 times greater chance of being murdered and about 11 times greater chance of committing suicide.
Of course, it serves as a serviceable excuse for arbitrary police check points and routine 4th amendment violations, so at least there's something coming out of it...
Way off topic, but this is precisely why countries like Pakistan will never seriously make efforts to kill the people the US wants them to kill: as long as they get billions of dollars to "fight terrorism", there is very little incentive to stop "terrorism" and every incentive to make it appear they are occasionally helpful but never actually particularly effective. It's like anything whereby payment is made based on intentions or actions, rather than results.
The reason your meth head friend commits crime to support his habit is because the drugs are expensive. The reason they are expensive is because they are prohibited. The reason people kill to stake out territory in the drug trade is because the margins are fucking enormous, and every time ridiculous ideas like minimum sentencing get enacted, the margins just go higher, and the bar is raised so that you get more and more harder core people involved.
Compare this to alcohol: some subset of the population becomes addicted to it (incidentally, a rather substantial subset, compared to the illicit drug subset), but it is legal, there is quality control, the price is reasonable and there are very few people who commit crimes to obtain it (altho an enormous percentage of prison inmates were under the influence of it when their crimes were committed, again, a far, far larger subset than those who were under the influence of other, prohibited drugs when they committed their crimes).
Alcohol prohibition in the US should have taught law makers the results of prohibiting substances - hell, there remain, many generations later, crime families who got their start because of prohibition (no, I'm not talking about the Kennedys). But as others have pointed out, there are an awful lot of people who profit legally from its prohibition, like the DEA and the ATF and the FBI and the rest of the state apparatus, which never, ever gets smaller or goes away.
An ordinary person would look at a few decades of the "war on drugs", examine the costs (both financial and to liberties) and then examine the results: did the problem go away? Was it reduced? Or did it get worse, and more violent? Does having the largest prison population on the planet, about 2 million of whom are imprisoned for rather trivial drug offenses, make the country safer, or do they learn to become criminals while in prison? What's harder for a school-aged kid to get: heroin or alcohol? Anyone who sees those results and thinks it's money and effort and freedom well spent should get their head examined - prohibition is hurting an awful lot of people for no discernible upside.
The third point I'd add is that it eliminates any hope of quality control and dosage control. I used to live in Vancouver, which has a pretty damn hard core junkie area at Main and Hastings (and if I recall, the highest concentration of AIDS patients in North America, primarily due to needle sharing - that stretch was also just bloody nuts on welfare day, which was known as "Mardi Gras", and it's the same stretch where Pickton trolled for prostitutes, over the years taking 49 or so back to his pig farm for parties that ended with him killing them, which the police generally ignored because they were "just" hookers and junkies). Every now and then some ultra pure heroin would flood the market and a whole bunch of people would die.
Virtually every single problem associated with drugs like heroin is a function of its illegal status.
I think it's time people realize that humans like to alter their experience of reality in various ways, and that it is not possible to eliminate this human urge: some people like roller coasters; some people like meditation; some people like alcohol; some people like caffeine and some people like crack or heroin. A lot of people like to make arbitrary distinctions between these: some are "good" (like amusement parks and meditation), some are "acceptable" (like caffeine and alcohol) and some are "evil" (like marijuana or heroin). But these distinctions are exactly that: arbitrary. And more importantly: if someone wants to spend their day in their living room doing crack, why should that be anyone else's concern whatsoever? There are orders of magnitude more harm done by making substances illegal and then calling them "evil" and declaring a demonstrably failed, $1 trillion "war" on them.
You're right: she lost just $0.20 per cupcake at a 75% discount. So if the normal price of her cupcakes is $1/each, her gross margin is 55%, and if the normal price is $2/each, it's 65%. But I don't think anyone's getting rich making cupcakes - haven't heard of any "cupcake billionaires".
Fuck. Now I have a craving for a cupcake...anyone have a groupon handy?
While I'm profoundly opposed to internet regulation via SOPA (and via so-called "net neutrality" as well, which actually means "net regulation" except that it is regulated in a way some people find favorable), this proposal is a particularly poor idea.
As some others have pointed out, the US Constitution is not a place to enumerate people's rights - people have rights regardless of the Constitution. The Constitution exists to limit the government's rights. As soon as you start enumerating people's rights in that fine document, you've turned it on its head (and will open a line of attack on other, unenumerated, rights). Really, the onus should be on the government to prove it is acting within the limited confines of the Constitution, rather than the people having to prove it is not (with mixed results).
It is astonishing to me that a great many people think they only have rights because the government has deigned to give them those rights. That is not the case.
The book I mentioned touches a bit on that, ie "...if you've ever bought an expensive item you'd sworn you'd never buy, the salesperson was probably a master at creating the "illusion of choice," a core technique of magic."
It's all very fascinating stuff (at least to me), and as you mention, for the most part, we really don't know what the hell is going on in a lot of our day-to-day decision making/observations, and fill in our "reasons" after the fact.
I read a fascinating book on the topic, called "Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Everyday Deceptions" - highly recommend it - the authors investigate what happens from a neurological perspective when magicians perform tricks, and also how we routinely deceive ourselves about the "reality" we think we perceive (deceptions which magicians routinely rely upon).
I can't imagine any libertarian in favor of one in five people working for the government, which is the case in Greece (US isn't far behind, at about 1 in 7)...
I suppose it's only a matter of time until the government does indeed get into the act and dictate maximum compensation - they are already in the business of dictating compensation, insofar as demanding people sell their labor for not less than a government dictated price (ie minimum wage laws), so price-fixing of labor at the other end of the spectrum is a natural progression. People already accept that it is appropriate for government to remove the free will of an individual to sell his or her labor at the price of his or her choosing when that person picks a price point too low; it's natural that the government would next remove the free will of an individual to buy labor at the price of his or her choosing - really, it's all just a matter of degrees once you cede the principle that adults are free to decide their labor's price.
I currently live in Toronto, where they've privatized a lot of the offices which provide government services - they're all over town and are run independently. Having misplaced my license a while ago, I expected to lose half a day or so getting a replacement. Instead, I waited less than 3 minutes, paid $10 and I was out of there in less than 10 mins. It was quite startling, actually, compared to the usual government run operations.
Well, as I mentioned before, there is indeed profit in monitoring fault lines, and that profit is being made daily by providers of modeling systems to insurance companies. Likewise, insurance companies who provide coverage for such things as supply chain disruptions and contingent business interruption have a vested interest in monitoring volcanic activity (when a volcano blows and disrupts the supply chain, it can trigger coverage under some policies). Insurance companies rely heavily on geological data to help determine pricing for earthquake insurance coverage, where freedom to set prices still exists. I can tell you for a fact there is indeed a lot of money at stake on this data: I know first hand of companies walking away from tens of millions of dollars in premiums because the risk didn't make sense economically. I'm just suggesting these companies, or whoever else finds the data valuable, pay for its gathering themselves.
I won't comment on what the west coast of the US would or wouldn't do politically, because the people of those regions have shown an unfailingly consistent ability to preferentially select inept representatives. But don't you think it is the responsibility of people in those regions to handle these issues, perhaps at the state level? In other words, to your view, do you believe it is impossible for any entity other than the federal government to manage these responsibilities, if I grant for the moment that they are governmental responsibilities?
Where I think we'll agree is in your assertion that government's role is to protect people when it is outright impossible for the free market to offer adequate protection (ie the justice system, military defense (but not military offense), policing, etc.). I also think the points you are making aren't bad ones, because you are questioning items that may or may not be a fundamental role of government, and you have a strong argument that they may indeed be. This differs substantially from a lot of the debate, which centers around things which government was never permitted to do in the first place and which are unnecessary (see Dept of Ed, etc) and which US taxpayers certainly can no longer afford.
I do believe you are incorrect in equating the closure of certain Departments with the elimination of all services they provide. You do not necessarily need a Department, with all the bureaucracy it entails, to carry out these functions.
I have many more unkind things to say about FDR than I do about Lincoln, but we can agree to disagree on that:)
Interestingly, I see in the plan Ron Paul released the other day that he proposes to eliminate the TSA in its entirety. That's just the sort of common sense thing that's going to ensure his continued marginalization.
Yes, I've had a similar encounter at one of the arbitrary DUI check points:
Officer: "Have you had anything to drink tonight?"
Me: "No."
Officer: "Where are you going?"
Me: "That needn't concern you."
Officer: "Pull over to the side and park your vehicle and get out your papers, now!"
After producing my papers and waiting over half an hour while they no doubt looked for any possible way to arrest/ticket me, I was released. There was no cause to detain me, other than my refusal to reveal my destination (as is my right). It is odd, but not at all unusual anymore, that the government should exercise its power over individuals for asserting their rights.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it is - what is it you think pays for the operation of the aircraft and the fees they pay the airport such that the airport can operate? The cost of airline tickets (and incidentals like luggage fees) pays for the operation of the airline.
That's a very confused post.
"Liberty" does not equate to the right to have the government provide a course of study in any subject you desire. Of course, it does mean that you can pay to study whatever you want, provided there's someone willing to sell instruction in it.
"...we should...provide a basic income to everyone who wants one..." What you are saying here is that I should go to work such that part of my work day should go towards someone who does not go to work, because unless you have people who go to work and then forcibly take some of the money those people earn from them, there will be no money to give away for free. In case you aren't aware (and it seems you aren't), there is no such thing as "government money", except by way of expropriating money from people who work. In short, the solution to "provide a basic income" is to get a fucking job.
"...hold challenges to stimulate innovation..." These challenges are already held: you win a prize if you come up with useful innovation, and the value of the prize is determined by how useful people find your innovation. Contests are held all day, every day, and you can participate at your will or whim. These contests are lumped together under the banner of the "free market", and you can find examples of past winners in the iStuff you have and the flat screen TV you own and the refrigerator you use and many more things in your world.
A tenth of a trillion dollars to build this?!? A round trip flight from LA to SF costs about $100, which means you could provide just under one billion round trip flights between LA and SF for the same price (and reduce travel time to 1.5 hours).
Let's say for the sake of argument (and because I don't know the real figure) there are 10,000 people who travel between LA and SF each day. For that same tenth of a trillion, you could fly each of these people return, every day of the year, for almost 274 years.
Like all things managed by government, the economics come from bizarro land. It's like reading articles that a government is "investing" $300,000,000 in order to fulfil "short term housing needs" by providing 1,500 "permanent beds" for homeless people - make you wonder why they don't just give these 1,500 people $200,000 each (except that $290,000,000 ends up spent on the bureaucracy to "support" the exercise).
This guy has identified exactly the issue, which seems to elude almost every software company, and music and video publishers too (and an astonishing amount of executives in other fields too): it is all about putting the customer first. When companies put DRM on their product, and other impediments to product satisfaction, they are putting their customer last. The problem is fundamentally one of mistaken priorities at an executive level: sometimes that manifests itself as DRM, sometimes it manifests itself as not putting a superior product out for fear of "cannibalizing" an existing product, sometimes it shows itself in hidden fees and misleading terms. These are all symptoms of the same mistaken priorities.
Been a long day and perhaps my brain just ain't so sharp at the moment, but I don't get your point about "...keep the units straight": on average, in any arbitrary set of 100,000 Americans, about 1 will be killed by a drunk driver, 4 will be murdered and 11 will commit suicide (and somewhere around 146 will die as a result of tobacco smoking). In only one of those scenarios do police attempt to pre-emptively prevent the outcome by arbitrarily stopping people at police check points absent any probable cause. I'm also regularly shocked by the lack of relative attention suicide gets.
You're right: meth is very insidious - I too have a friend who is a "husk" - he went completely nuts on it, coke and ecstacy and ended up in the mental ward of the hospital and he never came back to normal. I visited him every day for the first 30 days he was in there and your description of "husk" is spot on: the guy I knew just didn't live there anymore.
However, there are lots and lots of things which are not particularly good for humans. My point is pragmatic, not Darwinian: prohibition has worse consequences and outcomes than non-prohibition. Are there still horrible outcomes? Yup. But fewer. And adults ought to be free to do what they want, including things which are demonstrably sub-optimal.
"Billions in the bank" does not equal, nor is it a prerequisite for, evil. But then again, I am not an ms shill like you.
"...there's only 40 years of oil left" is a ridiculous statement, because it presupposes numerous things:
- that the price of oil will not increase as it becomes more scarce (if oil prices were increased to $1000/barrel today, would you still say there are 40 years left?), which in turn would impact consumption, increase the economic viability of alternatives and spur investment in innovation to develop so far unknown alternatives; and
- that the quantity of all the oil in existence in known (hint: it's not - exploration and finds continue)
among other things...
I think you have that exactly backwards: microsoft had a "monopoly" because they are evil.
Drunk driving is one of the most over-hyped causes, just behind "terrorism" (which you rightly point out doesn't kill many people either). In the US, the percentage of the population which died from drunk driving in 2009 is around 0.0036%. Of those, 67% were the drunk drivers themselves. So your odds of being killed by a drunk driver are somewhere around 1 in 100,000. You have 4 times greater chance of being murdered and about 11 times greater chance of committing suicide.
Of course, it serves as a serviceable excuse for arbitrary police check points and routine 4th amendment violations, so at least there's something coming out of it...
Way off topic, but this is precisely why countries like Pakistan will never seriously make efforts to kill the people the US wants them to kill: as long as they get billions of dollars to "fight terrorism", there is very little incentive to stop "terrorism" and every incentive to make it appear they are occasionally helpful but never actually particularly effective. It's like anything whereby payment is made based on intentions or actions, rather than results.
The reason your meth head friend commits crime to support his habit is because the drugs are expensive. The reason they are expensive is because they are prohibited. The reason people kill to stake out territory in the drug trade is because the margins are fucking enormous, and every time ridiculous ideas like minimum sentencing get enacted, the margins just go higher, and the bar is raised so that you get more and more harder core people involved.
Compare this to alcohol: some subset of the population becomes addicted to it (incidentally, a rather substantial subset, compared to the illicit drug subset), but it is legal, there is quality control, the price is reasonable and there are very few people who commit crimes to obtain it (altho an enormous percentage of prison inmates were under the influence of it when their crimes were committed, again, a far, far larger subset than those who were under the influence of other, prohibited drugs when they committed their crimes).
Alcohol prohibition in the US should have taught law makers the results of prohibiting substances - hell, there remain, many generations later, crime families who got their start because of prohibition (no, I'm not talking about the Kennedys). But as others have pointed out, there are an awful lot of people who profit legally from its prohibition, like the DEA and the ATF and the FBI and the rest of the state apparatus, which never, ever gets smaller or goes away.
An ordinary person would look at a few decades of the "war on drugs", examine the costs (both financial and to liberties) and then examine the results: did the problem go away? Was it reduced? Or did it get worse, and more violent? Does having the largest prison population on the planet, about 2 million of whom are imprisoned for rather trivial drug offenses, make the country safer, or do they learn to become criminals while in prison? What's harder for a school-aged kid to get: heroin or alcohol? Anyone who sees those results and thinks it's money and effort and freedom well spent should get their head examined - prohibition is hurting an awful lot of people for no discernible upside.
The third point I'd add is that it eliminates any hope of quality control and dosage control. I used to live in Vancouver, which has a pretty damn hard core junkie area at Main and Hastings (and if I recall, the highest concentration of AIDS patients in North America, primarily due to needle sharing - that stretch was also just bloody nuts on welfare day, which was known as "Mardi Gras", and it's the same stretch where Pickton trolled for prostitutes, over the years taking 49 or so back to his pig farm for parties that ended with him killing them, which the police generally ignored because they were "just" hookers and junkies). Every now and then some ultra pure heroin would flood the market and a whole bunch of people would die.
Virtually every single problem associated with drugs like heroin is a function of its illegal status.
I think it's time people realize that humans like to alter their experience of reality in various ways, and that it is not possible to eliminate this human urge: some people like roller coasters; some people like meditation; some people like alcohol; some people like caffeine and some people like crack or heroin. A lot of people like to make arbitrary distinctions between these: some are "good" (like amusement parks and meditation), some are "acceptable" (like caffeine and alcohol) and some are "evil" (like marijuana or heroin). But these distinctions are exactly that: arbitrary. And more importantly: if someone wants to spend their day in their living room doing crack, why should that be anyone else's concern whatsoever? There are orders of magnitude more harm done by making substances illegal and then calling them "evil" and declaring a demonstrably failed, $1 trillion "war" on them.
You're right: she lost just $0.20 per cupcake at a 75% discount. So if the normal price of her cupcakes is $1/each, her gross margin is 55%, and if the normal price is $2/each, it's 65%. But I don't think anyone's getting rich making cupcakes - haven't heard of any "cupcake billionaires".
Fuck. Now I have a craving for a cupcake...anyone have a groupon handy?
While I'm profoundly opposed to internet regulation via SOPA (and via so-called "net neutrality" as well, which actually means "net regulation" except that it is regulated in a way some people find favorable), this proposal is a particularly poor idea.
As some others have pointed out, the US Constitution is not a place to enumerate people's rights - people have rights regardless of the Constitution. The Constitution exists to limit the government's rights. As soon as you start enumerating people's rights in that fine document, you've turned it on its head (and will open a line of attack on other, unenumerated, rights). Really, the onus should be on the government to prove it is acting within the limited confines of the Constitution, rather than the people having to prove it is not (with mixed results).
It is astonishing to me that a great many people think they only have rights because the government has deigned to give them those rights. That is not the case.
Thanks - I'll check that out!
The book I mentioned touches a bit on that, ie "...if you've ever bought an expensive item you'd sworn you'd never buy, the salesperson was probably a master at creating the "illusion of choice," a core technique of magic."
It's all very fascinating stuff (at least to me), and as you mention, for the most part, we really don't know what the hell is going on in a lot of our day-to-day decision making/observations, and fill in our "reasons" after the fact.
I read a fascinating book on the topic, called "Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Everyday Deceptions" - highly recommend it - the authors investigate what happens from a neurological perspective when magicians perform tricks, and also how we routinely deceive ourselves about the "reality" we think we perceive (deceptions which magicians routinely rely upon).
I can't imagine any libertarian in favor of one in five people working for the government, which is the case in Greece (US isn't far behind, at about 1 in 7)...
"...if it does not produce a sizable return in just a single 6 week quarter" - ya, they ought to give their products at least an 8 week quarter!
I suppose it's only a matter of time until the government does indeed get into the act and dictate maximum compensation - they are already in the business of dictating compensation, insofar as demanding people sell their labor for not less than a government dictated price (ie minimum wage laws), so price-fixing of labor at the other end of the spectrum is a natural progression. People already accept that it is appropriate for government to remove the free will of an individual to sell his or her labor at the price of his or her choosing when that person picks a price point too low; it's natural that the government would next remove the free will of an individual to buy labor at the price of his or her choosing - really, it's all just a matter of degrees once you cede the principle that adults are free to decide their labor's price.
I currently live in Toronto, where they've privatized a lot of the offices which provide government services - they're all over town and are run independently. Having misplaced my license a while ago, I expected to lose half a day or so getting a replacement. Instead, I waited less than 3 minutes, paid $10 and I was out of there in less than 10 mins. It was quite startling, actually, compared to the usual government run operations.
Probably because I got fed up and pulled out my phone and started filming it...
Well, as I mentioned before, there is indeed profit in monitoring fault lines, and that profit is being made daily by providers of modeling systems to insurance companies. Likewise, insurance companies who provide coverage for such things as supply chain disruptions and contingent business interruption have a vested interest in monitoring volcanic activity (when a volcano blows and disrupts the supply chain, it can trigger coverage under some policies). Insurance companies rely heavily on geological data to help determine pricing for earthquake insurance coverage, where freedom to set prices still exists. I can tell you for a fact there is indeed a lot of money at stake on this data: I know first hand of companies walking away from tens of millions of dollars in premiums because the risk didn't make sense economically. I'm just suggesting these companies, or whoever else finds the data valuable, pay for its gathering themselves.
:)
I won't comment on what the west coast of the US would or wouldn't do politically, because the people of those regions have shown an unfailingly consistent ability to preferentially select inept representatives. But don't you think it is the responsibility of people in those regions to handle these issues, perhaps at the state level? In other words, to your view, do you believe it is impossible for any entity other than the federal government to manage these responsibilities, if I grant for the moment that they are governmental responsibilities?
Where I think we'll agree is in your assertion that government's role is to protect people when it is outright impossible for the free market to offer adequate protection (ie the justice system, military defense (but not military offense), policing, etc.). I also think the points you are making aren't bad ones, because you are questioning items that may or may not be a fundamental role of government, and you have a strong argument that they may indeed be. This differs substantially from a lot of the debate, which centers around things which government was never permitted to do in the first place and which are unnecessary (see Dept of Ed, etc) and which US taxpayers certainly can no longer afford.
I do believe you are incorrect in equating the closure of certain Departments with the elimination of all services they provide. You do not necessarily need a Department, with all the bureaucracy it entails, to carry out these functions.
I have many more unkind things to say about FDR than I do about Lincoln, but we can agree to disagree on that
Interestingly, I see in the plan Ron Paul released the other day that he proposes to eliminate the TSA in its entirety. That's just the sort of common sense thing that's going to ensure his continued marginalization.
Yes, I've had a similar encounter at one of the arbitrary DUI check points:
Officer: "Have you had anything to drink tonight?"
Me: "No."
Officer: "Where are you going?"
Me: "That needn't concern you."
Officer: "Pull over to the side and park your vehicle and get out your papers, now!"
After producing my papers and waiting over half an hour while they no doubt looked for any possible way to arrest/ticket me, I was released. There was no cause to detain me, other than my refusal to reveal my destination (as is my right). It is odd, but not at all unusual anymore, that the government should exercise its power over individuals for asserting their rights.