You kill 3,000 of ours, we'll kill 100,000 of yours. Do that often enough, maybe people will learn not to fuck with us. Then crank it up to a million if not. Eventually either they'll stop, or they'll run out of people to send against us.
I can't argue with anecdotes, they have no meaning in the real world.
Those things occur in an alternate reality? Anecdotes are the real world. Statistics are anecdotes in aggregate. I see a guy buying expensive stuff with his EBT, and someone collecting data for statistics finds that instance in some other way -- by going through the grocery store's database, or even by asking people like me if they've seen it happening.
This was published in 1969, probably before you were born.
After. You remind me of something else in literature. I remember P.J. O'Rourke writing about his childhood, around the 50s. Dad had left and working mom had almost no money. Looking back, he had never realized he was poor because he never wanted for anything. He didn't realize mom did things like sewing socks when they got holes, his play shorts were last year's pants cut down, anything to save money and balance the family budget. These days, even someone on welfare isn't likely to spend that fraction of a cent to sew up a sock, but to buy another pair instead. The attitude today, "Why should I have to sew socks just because I'm poor?".
It was fine to be poor back then. You did what you could with what you had. You made the money stretch if you needed to. It's interesting to listen to Depression survivors talk about what they did back then. That still exists today, but IMHO in far less frequency. The reason: the entitlement thinking.
At the core of the entitlement thinking is the belief that a person is owed a comfortable living by the government vs. the government owes you nothing but an opportunity to attain that lifestyle on your own.
Another example, with real people I see all the time ("anecdotes" to you). I'm not into extreme couponing, but I do use a lot of them. So I do wonder why very few of the EBT or WIC check users in front of me in line use coupons. Cashiers are often shocked when people actually do that, especially with WIC. You see, WIC checks here are by item, not price, and using a coupon there directly saves the state money without any cash-in-hand benefit to the user. Of course few use coupons in that case because -- and here's the problem with entitlement thinking -- why bother since they're not saving any of their own money.
Milton Friedman outlined the basic truths that govern the above:
You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you're doing, and you try to get the most for your money.
You can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I'm not so careful about the content of the present, but I'm very careful about the cost.
I can spend somebody else's money on myself. And if I spend somebody else's money on myself, then I'm sure going to have a good lunch!
I can spend somebody else's money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else's money on somebody else, I'm not concerned about how much it is, and I'm not concerned about what I get.
As you can see, the list goes down in the return on investment, the frugality goes down, the waste goes up. Welfare recipients are at #3, explaining the expensive steak. The politiicans trying to funnel more money into the program are at #4. A person making his own money is at #1, most efficient.
"One vast and ecumenical holding company" -- Everybody belongs to the same country
"for whom all men will work to serve a common profit" -- Everybody works for the good of the collective
"in which all men will hold a share of stock" -- Everyone's equal, so they hold an equal share of and interest in the collective
"all gains and losses accumulate to the state" - the state being the people. If the communist collective is successful then the quality of life (stock value) of all people will rise (I know it hasn't happened in history, but for argument's sake).
When you grew up poor, you worked your way out of it. Why do you believe others are content to stay poor?
Everybody has a level of lifestyle at which he is satisfied. My problem comes where lifestyle above poverty is supported by the money of others by force. My problem comes when people don't think they should "work their way out of" poverty, but that the government should do it for them, not by helping them to get better work or creating an environment where business thrives so jobs are created (not a liberal strong point), but by simply giving them the money to support a better lifestyle.
You are only citing anecdotes and personal feelings.
The statistics you cite do not refute the millions of anecdotes that show we have a problem of an entitlement culture. In no sane world should a teenage girl get excited about becoming pregnant because that means the welfare money will start rolling in. But that's what's happening.
It's hard to believe there are people out there with such poor critical thinking skills.
I know how you feel. Do try to keep up though.
There is nobody "living large" on the Dole.
When somebody in front of me in line is buying $20 a pound steak with an EBT that I can't afford on my paycheck, he's living large to me. When somebody spends $520 on hair treatments, she's living large.
Of course she is an outlier. Because of her fame the company that supplies the expensive hair treatment has offered to give them to her for free. Others would keep doing it, effectively charging the taxpayers for their expensive hair treatments.
Just because someone manages money poorly, they are not an unfit parent.
It means that if they can't manage money, then they shouldn't be given some of mine to mismanage too.
should be providing them educational services to go with their income assistance
That only works for people who are interested. Millions of others like the system just how it is. The educational services will largely be a waste of money as the people take the class (if mandatory, you think they'd come if it were optional?) then continue life as usual. I've seen this concept in action. A lot of people just don't care. They're getting paid, all is good, no alteration of spending habits is necessary unless that payment is threatened.
And, in conclusion: if a priest ever did break the seal of confession, his bishop would basically crush him to dust.
And if a priest ever did get caught committing another mortal sin of raping altar boys, his bishop would basically crush him to dust. Oh, wait, turns out the bishop just covers it up.
There's how things are supposed to be, and how they are. You only trust this institution not to use your information against you, you don't know it doesn't.
anyone who knows even the basics of confession knows that the Priest is morally bound NOT to speak about anything that was discussed in the confessional
They're also morally bound to not diddle the altar boys, but that went on for a very long time with the church covering it up. An institution will defend itself, period.
Free will means we can choose to follow God, or choose to do our own thing.
The twisted logic I was talking about appears again. You have no free will other than your deity has granted you (him being omnipotent). In that he has granted free will, by the definition of omniscience and timelessness (past, present, future provide no limits to the knowledge) he already knows what choices you will make before you are even born.
If he does not know, then he cannot be omniscient. If he does not consent to a choice that is against his will, then he is not omnipotent. If you were destined to Hell, it was God's will, no matter how long he let out the leash during your lifetime. Appreciate the loving God who damned you to Hell before you were born.
If you want to check that out in an encyclopedia, refer to incompatibilism vs. compatibilism.
Parents love their children, but still punish them for intentionaly punching their sibling in the nose.
Good parents don't arbitrarily slash the throat of the younger sister who has done nothing wrong, then tell the siblings there is a good reason for it, but they can't possibly understand. The problem of evil in the world, another thing that can't be explained without tortured logic.
Knowing something will happen does not mean you caused it to happen.
That's omniscient. Omnipotent means that everything that happens is directly caused by you, or at the very least allowed to happen by you (with your direct knowledge, you being omniscient), giving implicit consent to the happening.
I'm not a fan of the current bishop of Rome, but calling him an "ex-nazi" is wrong. He was forced by law into the Hitler Youth at 14, drafted at 16 into an auxiliary unit of the Air Force, then later into the regular Army, after which he deserted. His story is much the same as any non-Nazi German of his age.
Christians define their god as omniscient and timeless, so there is nothing he doesn't know -- past, present and future. Thus, he already knows what you will choose to do under your free will. If God didn't know, then he wouldn't be omniscient, which would seriously mess with Christian theology.
Reconciling the deity's claimed states of omniscience, omnipotence, timelessness, pure good and pure love with free will, evil, etc., has been a source of absurd twisted logic for quite a long time.
I posted some statistics to back up my claims and I stand by them.
Octomom is working, too, so she would fall under those statistics as someone you think deserving of our tax dollars. However, there she is, blowing over $500 on hair care. I'd bet many of those I see buying $20 a pound steak with an EBT are working, too. Despite not having the money, they think they're ENTITLED to expensive hair care, luxury foods, and (remember the photo from post-Katrina) large-screen TVs, and that comes from the taxpayers. For many, the taxpayer money helps them live WELL, not just live. The "safety net" becomes a place to stay in order to keep up that lifestyle they couldn't earn on their own.
If someone's poor due to uncontrollable circumstances and needs help with food, heat or housing, that's fine. But the entitlement culture thinks they should be able to live large off the taxpayers, and that's not right.
It was all summed up in the Obama frenzy prior to the last election, where one of his supporters said "I wont have to worry about putting gas in my car, I wonâ(TM)t have to worry about paying my mortgage. You know, If I help him, heâ(TM)s gonna help me."
Find and replace and will still make complete sense: Vatican => United States Church => Nation
And we do sometimes put them in jail. Look at Louisiana Congressman William Jefferson. His fellow Democrats finally stripped him of his chairmanships almost a year after the infamous cash in the freezer was found in 2005. He was indicted for several bribery-related counts in 2007 and convicted in 2009, and he's still not in jail. Okay, maybe that wasn't a good example. But hopefully he'll finally be in jail next month.
OTOH, the guy who blew the whistle on the Secret Service thing down in Columbia is coming out quite well.
God supposedly already knows your sins whether you tell them or not. In fact, he knows them before you even commit the sins, or before you even think of committing them first place. Telling a priest does nothing.
Thus the purpose of confession is so that the Church has the goods on everybody in the community.
Sort of like a well-known Army private reporting certain actions of the US government to the entire world? Giving that video on a DVD to his congressman (within the structure as you say) would have been protected by law, but releasing it to WikiLeaks, go to jail.
When it's something that fits your agenda, it's a representative sample. When it's something that doesn't fit your agenda, it's an "outlier."
The problem is that what she does, and what millions of others do, is perfectly legal. It happens all the time, not outliers. My call to restrict EBT cards from buying luxury items will be called crass and uncaring. The poor people should be able to have those too it will be said. THAT is your entitlement society thinking. Just because you're poor shouldn't stop you from being able to buy the more expensive things. WTF? That's pretty much the definition of poor. EBT cards are meant to make sure your family doesn't go hungry, not to make sure they don't miss their $20 a pound steak.
A politician in Boston was recently approached by a guy offering 50 cents on the dollar for an EBT card. Nobody thought to arrest him. It's just an EBT card, who cares? That's your entitlement thinking. I care, because I remember it's other people's tax dollars he's peddling.
There is an old saying about walking a mile in someone else's shoes, I believe it applies here.
Eleven miles, precisely, if I needed to get to town or back home because I missed the bus, or for any other reason (not uphill in both directions, but definitely in lots of snow in Winter). Eventually I hitched enough rides to jobs washing dishes and bussing tables to be able to afford a bicycle, which opened my job prospects as a kid. As far as family income, let's just say we were lucky the local grocery owner was nice enough to accept IOUs for food.
I think it is easy for a certain kind of person to believe there are people that love living in poverty, however, there are not.
Just because you're on the dole doesn't mean you're living in poverty, or rather living in the lifestyle of a person in poverty. In the news today, the infamous Octomom is getting $2,000 a month from the state, and she just wrote a check for $520 to cover two haircuts and some hair care products, while she supposedly can't cover the $150 she needs to get the plumber to fix the water in her house.
And, yes, it does disturb me to see people with food stamps buying shopping cart loads of prime rib, lobster and shrimp. Wish I could afford that, but I'm earning the money I use to buy food for my family, so I have to spend it carefully.
Disabled: The scams are endless, people with no real disability living on disability for decades. All you need is a doctor to say you're too stressed to work.
Working: Including those who make sure to not work too much so that the government payouts stop coming.
And then there's the rest going to those with no cover. However you cut it, that's tens of billions every year going to people who think they are entitled to that money, and want to keep getting it for as long as possible. And then whenever Republicans, or even those few sensible Democrats, talk about forcing capable people out of the safety net and back to work, they're demonized your type as uncaring.
That's not a bogeyman, that's the government taking my money and giving it to people who are immoral enough to think it's their right to live off of it when they could be making their own living.
Where formal law and courts exist, it is Sharia law. Other than that, they have Xeer, a tribal-centric system of law. Neither of these are very libertarian, and they are not enforced throughout the country.
About the biggest part the state plays in libertarianism is enforcement and validation of contracts between individuals. That doesn't exist in most places in Somalia. It's the rule of the more powerful over the weaker. The biggest prohibition of libertarianism is that use of force.
You can describe Somalia in many ways, but it definitely is not even close to libertarian.
It gets harder as you move up in government... now you want me to leave the state... then leave the country. Your freedom of association becomes less and less.
This is why our system was designed with the most power with the people, then the local government, then the state, and finally leaving the federal government with very specifically-defined powers necessary to keep the overall peace between states and provide for the common defense.
Now the fed has taken most of the power, so our system isn't really working all that well anymore.
Do you know how many times I've heard libertarians tell me we should wipe every regulation off the books and start over?
That is a good idea, since current regulations are a jumbled mess. Note they don't say no regulation, they just want to make it sane again. There are over 81,000 pages of federal regulation alone, and then each state has its own regulations. This increases drastically every year. The cost of compliance alone sucks billions from the economy.
That any form of taxation is evil and wrong?
I have never heard a libertarian say that. However, income tax compliance and enforcement sucks several hundred billion dollars a year out of our economy. We started with 400 pages of laws, regs and rulings that must be complied with, and now we're near 70,000 pages. No one person can comprehend the entirety of the code relating to just this one type of tax, and it grows in complexity every year. The current paradigm is unacceptable and unsustainable.
Note I'm not addressing who pays how much, rich/poor, class warfare, what's fair, etc. The current regime affects everyone by draining our economy, although the rich are better able to hire teams of accountants and attorneys in order to keep as much of their money as possible.
That safety nets only encourage 'laziness and dependency on the government'?
The safety net metaphor is perfect. It's meant to ease the impact of a fall. The idea that a person who falls on a safety net takes up permanent residence there is absurd. He gets off and starts climbing again. When you hear a libertarian complaining about this, he's complaining about the permanent residents, the entitlement society.
has become a celebration of ignorance, shallow interests, self-interest, denial of scientific fact, rabid support of political positions with little or no thought about what they mean
I think I know what you're saying in part, politicians beholden to big business denying global warming. However, this statement also applies the other way. The environmentalists are a powerful lobby in themselves, especially when it comes to the EPA. Many of them are quite rabid and will also not listen to scientific fact, and they can easily rally the media to support their scare-of-the-year. Remember the Alar scare? The "most potent cancer-causing agent in our food supply" requires a kid to drink 5,000 gallons of apple juice a day for life to get carcinogenic levels?
Corporations seemingly give politicians their marching orders and they go enact legislation that benefits the corporations at the expense of the people for whom the government supposedly exists.
The politicians take their marching orders from a variety of rich special interest groups, only one of which is the for-profit corporations. Even then those corporations often lobby against each other, tech vs. content for example. The unions, which are themselves rather rich corporations, put out so much money and control so much influence that most Democratic politicians are beholden to them. Non-profits representing a particular group of citizens are quite influential, such as the AARP and the NRA. And, of course, the parties themselves are special interests. With few exceptions they control most of the votes of their members.
I can't honestly think of a single politician in office today whom I believe is honest and working for the benefit of their constituents.
Define "benefit." What some see as a benefit, others see as detriment. I believe freedom of speech is a paramount benefit, and infringement is a detriment. Others believe speech they don't like is detriment ("hate speech"), and prohibiting such speech is a benefit.
I can recognize that Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich are probably the least beholden to special interests in the US Congress, but they are on opposite sides of the spectrum on most issues. But both advocate things that they and their supporters consider beneficial, and that I consider harmful.
Why should birth control be special from antibiotics when it comes to healthcare.
The issue is not whether birth control should be available, but whether insurers should be forced to cover birth control.
But you are right about the religious connection. This blew up because of a woman complaining that a CATHOLIC university didn't want to cover birth control, which is against Catholic beliefs. Instead of doing the reasonable thing, like moving to a non-religious school, she demands to impose her beliefs on the school, forcing them to violate a sacred canon.
I'm not Catholic, and I don't agree with their stance on birth control, but it's pretty fucked up to try to force them to violate their beliefs by actively supporting birth control.
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You kill 3,000 of ours, we'll kill 100,000 of yours. Do that often enough, maybe people will learn not to fuck with us. Then crank it up to a million if not. Eventually either they'll stop, or they'll run out of people to send against us.
Those things occur in an alternate reality? Anecdotes are the real world. Statistics are anecdotes in aggregate. I see a guy buying expensive stuff with his EBT, and someone collecting data for statistics finds that instance in some other way -- by going through the grocery store's database, or even by asking people like me if they've seen it happening.
After. You remind me of something else in literature. I remember P.J. O'Rourke writing about his childhood, around the 50s. Dad had left and working mom had almost no money. Looking back, he had never realized he was poor because he never wanted for anything. He didn't realize mom did things like sewing socks when they got holes, his play shorts were last year's pants cut down, anything to save money and balance the family budget. These days, even someone on welfare isn't likely to spend that fraction of a cent to sew up a sock, but to buy another pair instead. The attitude today, "Why should I have to sew socks just because I'm poor?".
It was fine to be poor back then. You did what you could with what you had. You made the money stretch if you needed to. It's interesting to listen to Depression survivors talk about what they did back then. That still exists today, but IMHO in far less frequency. The reason: the entitlement thinking.
At the core of the entitlement thinking is the belief that a person is owed a comfortable living by the government vs. the government owes you nothing but an opportunity to attain that lifestyle on your own.
Another example, with real people I see all the time ("anecdotes" to you). I'm not into extreme couponing, but I do use a lot of them. So I do wonder why very few of the EBT or WIC check users in front of me in line use coupons. Cashiers are often shocked when people actually do that, especially with WIC. You see, WIC checks here are by item, not price, and using a coupon there directly saves the state money without any cash-in-hand benefit to the user. Of course few use coupons in that case because -- and here's the problem with entitlement thinking -- why bother since they're not saving any of their own money.
Milton Friedman outlined the basic truths that govern the above:
As you can see, the list goes down in the return on investment, the frugality goes down, the waste goes up. Welfare recipients are at #3, explaining the expensive steak. The politiicans trying to funnel more money into the program are at #4. A person making his own money is at #1, most efficient.
"One vast and ecumenical holding company" -- Everybody belongs to the same country
"for whom all men will work to serve a common profit" -- Everybody works for the good of the collective
"in which all men will hold a share of stock" -- Everyone's equal, so they hold an equal share of and interest in the collective
"all gains and losses accumulate to the state" - the state being the people. If the communist collective is successful then the quality of life (stock value) of all people will rise (I know it hasn't happened in history, but for argument's sake).
Everybody has a level of lifestyle at which he is satisfied. My problem comes where lifestyle above poverty is supported by the money of others by force. My problem comes when people don't think they should "work their way out of" poverty, but that the government should do it for them, not by helping them to get better work or creating an environment where business thrives so jobs are created (not a liberal strong point), but by simply giving them the money to support a better lifestyle.
The statistics you cite do not refute the millions of anecdotes that show we have a problem of an entitlement culture. In no sane world should a teenage girl get excited about becoming pregnant because that means the welfare money will start rolling in. But that's what's happening.
I know how you feel. Do try to keep up though.
When somebody in front of me in line is buying $20 a pound steak with an EBT that I can't afford on my paycheck, he's living large to me. When somebody spends $520 on hair treatments, she's living large.
Of course she is an outlier. Because of her fame the company that supplies the expensive hair treatment has offered to give them to her for free. Others would keep doing it, effectively charging the taxpayers for their expensive hair treatments.
It means that if they can't manage money, then they shouldn't be given some of mine to mismanage too.
That only works for people who are interested. Millions of others like the system just how it is. The educational services will largely be a waste of money as the people take the class (if mandatory, you think they'd come if it were optional?) then continue life as usual. I've seen this concept in action. A lot of people just don't care. They're getting paid, all is good, no alteration of spending habits is necessary unless that payment is threatened.
In the end, that basically describes worldwide communism.
You must have missed the "to the cynical" part.
And if a priest ever did get caught committing another mortal sin of raping altar boys, his bishop would basically crush him to dust. Oh, wait, turns out the bishop just covers it up.
There's how things are supposed to be, and how they are. You only trust this institution not to use your information against you, you don't know it doesn't.
They're also morally bound to not diddle the altar boys, but that went on for a very long time with the church covering it up. An institution will defend itself, period.
The twisted logic I was talking about appears again. You have no free will other than your deity has granted you (him being omnipotent). In that he has granted free will, by the definition of omniscience and timelessness (past, present, future provide no limits to the knowledge) he already knows what choices you will make before you are even born.
If he does not know, then he cannot be omniscient. If he does not consent to a choice that is against his will, then he is not omnipotent. If you were destined to Hell, it was God's will, no matter how long he let out the leash during your lifetime. Appreciate the loving God who damned you to Hell before you were born.
If you want to check that out in an encyclopedia, refer to incompatibilism vs. compatibilism.
Good parents don't arbitrarily slash the throat of the younger sister who has done nothing wrong, then tell the siblings there is a good reason for it, but they can't possibly understand. The problem of evil in the world, another thing that can't be explained without tortured logic.
That's omniscient. Omnipotent means that everything that happens is directly caused by you, or at the very least allowed to happen by you (with your direct knowledge, you being omniscient), giving implicit consent to the happening.
I'm not a fan of the current bishop of Rome, but calling him an "ex-nazi" is wrong. He was forced by law into the Hitler Youth at 14, drafted at 16 into an auxiliary unit of the Air Force, then later into the regular Army, after which he deserted. His story is much the same as any non-Nazi German of his age.
Christians define their god as omniscient and timeless, so there is nothing he doesn't know -- past, present and future. Thus, he already knows what you will choose to do under your free will. If God didn't know, then he wouldn't be omniscient, which would seriously mess with Christian theology.
Reconciling the deity's claimed states of omniscience, omnipotence, timelessness, pure good and pure love with free will, evil, etc., has been a source of absurd twisted logic for quite a long time.
Octomom is working, too, so she would fall under those statistics as someone you think deserving of our tax dollars. However, there she is, blowing over $500 on hair care. I'd bet many of those I see buying $20 a pound steak with an EBT are working, too. Despite not having the money, they think they're ENTITLED to expensive hair care, luxury foods, and (remember the photo from post-Katrina) large-screen TVs, and that comes from the taxpayers. For many, the taxpayer money helps them live WELL, not just live. The "safety net" becomes a place to stay in order to keep up that lifestyle they couldn't earn on their own.
If someone's poor due to uncontrollable circumstances and needs help with food, heat or housing, that's fine. But the entitlement culture thinks they should be able to live large off the taxpayers, and that's not right.
It was all summed up in the Obama frenzy prior to the last election, where one of his supporters said "I wont have to worry about putting gas in my car, I wonâ(TM)t have to worry about paying my mortgage. You know, If I help him, heâ(TM)s gonna help me."
That is your entitlement culture.
And we do sometimes put them in jail. Look at Louisiana Congressman William Jefferson. His fellow Democrats finally stripped him of his chairmanships almost a year after the infamous cash in the freezer was found in 2005. He was indicted for several bribery-related counts in 2007 and convicted in 2009, and he's still not in jail.
Okay, maybe that wasn't a good example. But hopefully he'll finally be in jail next month.
OTOH, the guy who blew the whistle on the Secret Service thing down in Columbia is coming out quite well.
God supposedly already knows your sins whether you tell them or not. In fact, he knows them before you even commit the sins, or before you even think of committing them first place. Telling a priest does nothing.
Thus the purpose of confession is so that the Church has the goods on everybody in the community.
Sort of like a well-known Army private reporting certain actions of the US government to the entire world? Giving that video on a DVD to his congressman (within the structure as you say) would have been protected by law, but releasing it to WikiLeaks, go to jail.
When it's something that fits your agenda, it's a representative sample. When it's something that doesn't fit your agenda, it's an "outlier."
The problem is that what she does, and what millions of others do, is perfectly legal. It happens all the time, not outliers. My call to restrict EBT cards from buying luxury items will be called crass and uncaring. The poor people should be able to have those too it will be said. THAT is your entitlement society thinking. Just because you're poor shouldn't stop you from being able to buy the more expensive things. WTF? That's pretty much the definition of poor. EBT cards are meant to make sure your family doesn't go hungry, not to make sure they don't miss their $20 a pound steak.
A politician in Boston was recently approached by a guy offering 50 cents on the dollar for an EBT card. Nobody thought to arrest him. It's just an EBT card, who cares? That's your entitlement thinking. I care, because I remember it's other people's tax dollars he's peddling.
Eleven miles, precisely, if I needed to get to town or back home because I missed the bus, or for any other reason (not uphill in both directions, but definitely in lots of snow in Winter). Eventually I hitched enough rides to jobs washing dishes and bussing tables to be able to afford a bicycle, which opened my job prospects as a kid. As far as family income, let's just say we were lucky the local grocery owner was nice enough to accept IOUs for food.
Just because you're on the dole doesn't mean you're living in poverty, or rather living in the lifestyle of a person in poverty. In the news today, the infamous Octomom is getting $2,000 a month from the state, and she just wrote a check for $520 to cover two haircuts and some hair care products, while she supposedly can't cover the $150 she needs to get the plumber to fix the water in her house.
And, yes, it does disturb me to see people with food stamps buying shopping cart loads of prime rib, lobster and shrimp. Wish I could afford that, but I'm earning the money I use to buy food for my family, so I have to spend it carefully.
Most goes to elderly, disabled or working:
Elderly: No argument there.
Disabled: The scams are endless, people with no real disability living on disability for decades. All you need is a doctor to say you're too stressed to work.
Working: Including those who make sure to not work too much so that the government payouts stop coming.
And then there's the rest going to those with no cover. However you cut it, that's tens of billions every year going to people who think they are entitled to that money, and want to keep getting it for as long as possible. And then whenever Republicans, or even those few sensible Democrats, talk about forcing capable people out of the safety net and back to work, they're demonized your type as uncaring.
That's not a bogeyman, that's the government taking my money and giving it to people who are immoral enough to think it's their right to live off of it when they could be making their own living.
Where formal law and courts exist, it is Sharia law. Other than that, they have Xeer, a tribal-centric system of law. Neither of these are very libertarian, and they are not enforced throughout the country.
About the biggest part the state plays in libertarianism is enforcement and validation of contracts between individuals. That doesn't exist in most places in Somalia. It's the rule of the more powerful over the weaker. The biggest prohibition of libertarianism is that use of force.
You can describe Somalia in many ways, but it definitely is not even close to libertarian.
This is why our system was designed with the most power with the people, then the local government, then the state, and finally leaving the federal government with very specifically-defined powers necessary to keep the overall peace between states and provide for the common defense.
Now the fed has taken most of the power, so our system isn't really working all that well anymore.
That is a good idea, since current regulations are a jumbled mess. Note they don't say no regulation, they just want to make it sane again. There are over 81,000 pages of federal regulation alone, and then each state has its own regulations. This increases drastically every year. The cost of compliance alone sucks billions from the economy.
I have never heard a libertarian say that. However, income tax compliance and enforcement sucks several hundred billion dollars a year out of our economy. We started with 400 pages of laws, regs and rulings that must be complied with, and now we're near 70,000 pages. No one person can comprehend the entirety of the code relating to just this one type of tax, and it grows in complexity every year. The current paradigm is unacceptable and unsustainable.
Note I'm not addressing who pays how much, rich/poor, class warfare, what's fair, etc. The current regime affects everyone by draining our economy, although the rich are better able to hire teams of accountants and attorneys in order to keep as much of their money as possible.
The safety net metaphor is perfect. It's meant to ease the impact of a fall. The idea that a person who falls on a safety net takes up permanent residence there is absurd. He gets off and starts climbing again. When you hear a libertarian complaining about this, he's complaining about the permanent residents, the entitlement society.
I think I know what you're saying in part, politicians beholden to big business denying global warming. However, this statement also applies the other way. The environmentalists are a powerful lobby in themselves, especially when it comes to the EPA. Many of them are quite rabid and will also not listen to scientific fact, and they can easily rally the media to support their scare-of-the-year. Remember the Alar scare? The "most potent cancer-causing agent in our food supply" requires a kid to drink 5,000 gallons of apple juice a day for life to get carcinogenic levels?
The politicians take their marching orders from a variety of rich special interest groups, only one of which is the for-profit corporations. Even then those corporations often lobby against each other, tech vs. content for example. The unions, which are themselves rather rich corporations, put out so much money and control so much influence that most Democratic politicians are beholden to them. Non-profits representing a particular group of citizens are quite influential, such as the AARP and the NRA. And, of course, the parties themselves are special interests. With few exceptions they control most of the votes of their members.
Define "benefit." What some see as a benefit, others see as detriment. I believe freedom of speech is a paramount benefit, and infringement is a detriment. Others believe speech they don't like is detriment ("hate speech"), and prohibiting such speech is a benefit.
I can recognize that Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich are probably the least beholden to special interests in the US Congress, but they are on opposite sides of the spectrum on most issues. But both advocate things that they and their supporters consider beneficial, and that I consider harmful.
The issue is not whether birth control should be available, but whether insurers should be forced to cover birth control.
But you are right about the religious connection. This blew up because of a woman complaining that a CATHOLIC university didn't want to cover birth control, which is against Catholic beliefs. Instead of doing the reasonable thing, like moving to a non-religious school, she demands to impose her beliefs on the school, forcing them to violate a sacred canon.
I'm not Catholic, and I don't agree with their stance on birth control, but it's pretty fucked up to try to force them to violate their beliefs by actively supporting birth control.
The third we saw was an NEC. They were all based on a Japanese Kyocera computer.