I usually don't respond to ad hominem attacks, but your apparently excellent karma bothers me. Just to set the record straight:
I am an unmarried senior software engineer/architect at an internet company that isn't doing so hot these days. I own my own house and do my own work on it. I play hockey. My parents make less than half what I do, and I don't exactly make a killing.
Unlike many of my brethren, I understand that the economy has ups AND downs, and don't expect a handout from others.
I fail to see how my business dealings are anything less than an extension of me. My personal affairs and my business affairs may seem distinct to an outsider, but the closer you look, the more intertwined they will appear. I challenge you to effectively limit the "rights" of a business while not infringing on the freedom of association rights of individuals. You can't. That is the essence of the free market.
Why do people feel the need to violate my rights in order to make their lives easier? As I've said many times before: I'm very sorry blind (or deaf, or stupid) people have problems with my website, but why am I required to spend more of my resources (money, time, whatever) to accomodate them?
Why is it OK for the government to violate my right to present information the way I see fit and my right to do business with the people I choose in the manner I choose?
Why do people think that our only rights are the ones enumerated in the Bill of Rights, in direct contrast to what the ninth amendment explicitly says?
What compelling national interest using powers specifically granted to the federal government by the Constitution allows them to restrict my rights in this manner?
I don't want to spend the extra effort to make my website accessible to everyone with every conceivable type of disability. As far as I am concerned, it is their responsibility to make my site accessible if they want to view it. If they want to donate the resources required to do this, or come up with a general, client-side solution that requires no extra work on my part (that means: no ALT tags, no text-only pages, etc.), great!
Hell, if disabled people were simply grateful instead of indignant, I might even donate the time to make my site more accessible.
But don't expect me to expend more resources to make your life easier. Anyone who feels entitled to the fruits of my labor just because I have something they don't have should go form their own socialist country elsewhere where they can violate each others' rights to their hearts' content.
This country was founded on a different concept---that of individual responsibility and personal freedom---that is being eroded with law after law and court decision after court decision. Is no one else concerned about these violations of our rights?
That it is possible for a person to tell the difference between brands of instruments simply by hearing them is not in dispute, whether it is true or not. My problem is with the garden-variety audiophile working at the local A/V specialty shop, who looks positively assaulted when you suggest that you might want to listen to your heavy metal or new age CD's when auditioning equipment there. As in, "You can't possibly get anything more out of that music from our equipment that a pair of $50 KLH 2-ways wouldn't give you."
It's fine to know a lot about audio. I applaud people who are experts in a field (well, most fields, anyway). But one shop has already lost my business because the fools who ran the shop were elitist assholes who refused to admit the mere possibility that I can tell the difference between Megadeth played on a shitty $300 setup and Megadeth played on a $2,000 system.
After an awful experience purchasing a (great) HSU subwoofer from this store, I then proceeded to drop over $2,000 at a competitor, Ensemble Audio in Arlington, MA, because the salesfolks there were both audiophiles (in the literal sense) and great guys (in letting me listen to my music the way I wanted to). I highly recommend them, by the way.
> The space industry would not be an industry > without government stepping in and jump starting > it. Look where we are with private rocket > launches and only now plans for the first private > trip to the moon.
I know you think the concept of real-life space travel is cool, but I would ask you to name why it's objectively good. Perhaps private launches are becoming popular only now (33 years after the moon landing) because there hasn't been sufficient demand before this, due to lack of anything truly useful being done in space. (I am, of course, neglecting the decades of private launches of unmanned satellites; right now, I'm talking about manned launches.)
Now that there are things that can be produced by actual humans only in zero-gravity (large quantities of carbon nanotube, certain crystalline structures, etc.), private launches will actually be feasible from an economic standpoint. I would argue that this would have been no different had government-sponsored launches never happened: given the static nature of manned launch technology over the past 22 years since the orbiter was first deployed, I seriously doubt even private launch technology would have been seriously hindered by the non-existence of NASA.
Bottom line: LET THE MARKET dictate what happens! =)
...how a known plaintext attack can be made against a OTP? You can find out the parts of the key associated with the parts of the message you already know, but that doesn't help you determine anything else about the text: the keys in a OTP are random, not periodic.
Security is like public health and education--if you think it's expensive, consider the alternative.
Is this really necessary? Slashdot's editors too often present opinions about important political issues as fact in the middle of what should be a news story. Every bit of this sort of bias and leftist pandering makes Slashdot less a place for geeks to gather and more of a voice for Rob's political views.
.5% of the federal budget is over 2,500,000,000 dollars. If you don't think that's a lot of money, then you can pay it and let me and everyone else get our share of that back.
Socialist policies, regulation, and high taxation never net create jobs. They may shift jobs into new industries designed to manage and mitigate effects of the changes (tax lawyers and accountants, environmental lawyers, "public interest" lawyers fighting for poor peoples' rights to others' money), but they never result in more jobs.
For more jobs, you should be voting Libertarian and opposing bigger government.
> Flat out wrong. Efficiency is defined as doing > more, for less. Translation: People of existing > means will be able to do more -- without you.
I believe you are the one who is flat-out wrong. Free trade increases efficiency by moving production of a good or service to the arena in which it costs least. Output/price is the definition of efficiency.
This statement is utterly ridiculous. Without US companies moving their jobs overseas, several things will happen: (a) fewer people overseas will have jobs, meaning they will have a lower standard of living; (b) steel workers in the US will continue to keep jobs with artificially high wages instead of moving to fields in which America competes more effectively; (c) the price of steel will remain high, increasing the price of goods and services that use steel anywhere along the line.
To benefit workers in industries in which American companies can't compete due to very expensive regulation (minimum wage; workplace environment standards; disability; collective bargaining; parental leave; health care; etc.), some dumbnut president is bound to suggest that we try to keep foreign goods out with tariffs or quotas.
Witness W.'s protective tariffs for steel.
The natural impulse for government will be to protect special interests (in this case, unionized voters) against the evils of the free market, instead of telling them what they don't want to hear: that they should find a new profession, since the one they're in can't make them the amount of money they are used to making without artificially inflating prices for the rest of the public.
I don't know about you, but I am simply not willing to pay more than I absolutely need to in order to get the goods and services I want, just to subsidize the ability of someone to continue working in a job that would be better sent overseas. If the quality of the Chinese-made goods is the same as or similar to the quality of the USA-made goods, and the price is lower, then I'm going to buy Chinese; done and done.
Free trade increases efficiency and, in the long run, will raise standards of living for all people. Pat Buchanan and the Jurassic-era conservatives are living with leftist union shills in a fantasy world of 50's America. Libertarians and the 80's-90's conservatives are the ones who truly understand what makes America great, and it isn't artificial trade barriers. =)
The problem I always hear from people is that they think the beings at the end are aliens. It didn't even occur to them that those "aliens" were the evolved descendents of the original mechas.
Copyright is necessary as incentive for the creation of new works. I and others are happy creating GPL'ed software, but we are a very small minority of people producing creative works. So, I don't see copyright going away anytime soon.
What will have to change, however, is our perception of copyright. At this point, copyright is considered (however incorrectly) an inalienable right that often trumps even the first amendment. This situation is untenable. What I already see happening is the start of a movement to put the teeth back in the public side of the copyright bargain.
In the best case, I see copyright terms decreasing significantly and fair use rights being enforced by law. The first increases the incentive to produce by shortening the term of the artificial monopoly we the People grant to authors and artists.
The second means that the People's right to use works protected under copyright in any reasonable way they choose will be formally encoded, perhaps even to the point of outlawing fair use prevention technologies (what is usually called "copy protection") on works protected by copyright: this would restore the same balance that used to exist for patents before the DMCA.
Do you realize that the average person received ~$300 benefit from this tax cut, while Dick Cheney realized ~$1 million?
Class warfare. What's the point?
Certainly if they are earning 50% of the revenue but only paying 30% of the tax, there is a problem.
Why? Even if we had a flat 20% tax, 20% of their income is still waaaaay more money than 20% of your income. The rich are more than paying their fair share.
The rich are also far less likely to be audited by the IRS, despite having an overwhelming advantage in being able to hire high-priced tax lawyers to weasel them out of more tax, which the rest of us end up paying.
The incidence of audits among lower-income individuals correlates well with the percentage of incorrectly-filed tax returns. Your argument sets up a straw man similar to that used as evidence of racism in sentencing, and is about as correct.
If your problem is truly that rich people have better access to information that informs them of deductions they are eligible for, then perhaps you should be arguing for a simplification of the tax code. I can't argue with that.
However, I suspect the real issue is just that you think the rich aren't being milked enough.
Let us also say that bill gates is worth 50 billion dollars, probably a conservative estimate. If I make $65,000 / year, I can work for 40 years and still make only 1/40,000th of that amount. You don't think there's some disparity there?
From your attitude, I can see that the possibility of you going out and doing something that might net you more than $65,000 a year is nil. Bill Gates did something very high-risk and got rewarded for it. Lots of people who risk leaving college to start a business fail and end up bitter and envious like... well, I don't want to point any fingers.
In 10 years when the graying boomers really start hitting social security and dying en masse because there's no system there to support them, you can thank W.
I'll be laughing all the way to the bank because I was smart and started my retirement account early. I'm not especially intelligent in doing so: it's just common sense. Lack of self-control, initiative, or ambition shouldn't be rewarded, but it seems that's what we do.
The top 1% do not own more than 80% of all wealth. I think you made an error there.
However, even were that true...so what? The right question in my opinion is, "Do they use 30% of all government services?" Probably not. (Note understatement.)
An even more important question is, "Why do you believe people more wealthy than you owe you anything at all?" Until you answer this question honestly, your ranting will have little weight. However, I suspect it boils down to "envy," so perhaps you feel that providing no answer is actually better for your leftist crusade. That's a shame.
I just don't buy into the "my problems must be caused by someone else" mentality. Being rich is not a sin. My success doesn't preclude yours. If you are a failure, my success is not your problem.
Surely there are actual examples of rich people who got that way by defrauding others, but this poster highlights no such example. Instead, we get a rant about how the Bush tax cuts are taking food out of starving mouths.
I'd like to take this opportunity to point out that the top 1% of earners pay over 30% of all income tax. If you find yourself agreeing with Dr. Strawman there, the question you've got to ask yourself is, "Just how much do those rich people owe me?"
I've found that the answer "zero" correlates highly with success. Whether this is a causal relationship or not is still anybody's guess.
[Apologies for this being slightly off-topic, but chrissy asked for it.]
You should have gone with your initial impression. Not running this, I mean. Could you please try to stuff more leftist tripe in your next article summary?
"destabilizing, unworkable '80s missile defense"? I'm sure most people didn't think anything like that laptop sitting on your desk was possible back in the early 1900's. The technology for reasonable missile defense may be in its infancy now, but that doesn't mean it always will be.
For those who argue missile defense is just another unnecessary aggressive move on the USA's part, I'd say that defensive weapons are the least threatening because they are the ones least likely to get us involved in foreign entanglements: it's hard to send a stationary anti-ballistic missile launcher into a land war in Asia.
And for those who argue it is unnecessary because terrorists will just ship a bomb over on a cargo freighter, I'd ask you if you keep your windows unlocked over vacation just because a thief is most likely to try the front door first. If we start covering our bases now, we won't be caught with our pants down when every rogue nation in the world has a long-range ballistic missile and a wacko with his finger on the button.
As for "deathplane"...I'm not even sure I should touch that one. I'll just say that deathplanes like it are the very reason east coasters aren't speaking German and west coasters Japanese. As a libertarian, I believe it's your right to avoid compulsory service in the military, but you should at least have the decency to respect those who fought and died for your freedom.
The powers the FBI claimed in its reorganization announcement yesterday are truly frightening to me, and should be to you as well.
However, that's not directly what I wanted to say. I'd instead like to point out the two main reasons we got to this point:
Envy and Righteousness. Starting sometime in the early 20th century, the unsuccessful started believing that they were owed something by the successful. The turning point was FDR's New Deal, which was the birth of Big Government in the United States.
And you do it too. Every time you say, "I wish the federal government would just regulate <foo>" or "I can't believe those ball players/lawyers/neurosurgeons make so much money," you're demonstrating envy and righteousness. Realize that if you think someone you don't know owes you something just because of your circumstances or his, someone else thinks the same about you. Realize that if you have the power to take away another's liberties, he has the power to take away yours. The only way to combat this is to deny government the power to forcibly take away any of our liberties.
Inaction. Citizens who are concerned about the ever-expanding powers of our Big Government complain and complain and complain, but then continue to vote for the GOP (or, I suppose for the Democrats, though I definitely can't figure that one out) are just another part of the problem. Read my lips: The GOP is NOT a small-government party anymore! They have become addicted to your money just as the Democrats have, and now see the benefit to themselves of increasing the reach of the federal government.
If you're not voting Libertarian, donating to the EFF, the ACLU or the Institute for Justice, and the NRA, your complaints about big government taking away all your freedoms one-by-one is pointless blather.
Slashdot Mirror
I usually don't respond to ad hominem attacks, but your apparently excellent karma bothers me. Just to set the record straight:
I am an unmarried senior software engineer/architect at an internet company that isn't doing so hot these days. I own my own house and do my own work on it. I play hockey. My parents make less than half what I do, and I don't exactly make a killing.
Unlike many of my brethren, I understand that the economy has ups AND downs, and don't expect a handout from others.
I fail to see how my business dealings are anything less than an extension of me. My personal affairs and my business affairs may seem distinct to an outsider, but the closer you look, the more intertwined they will appear. I challenge you to effectively limit the "rights" of a business while not infringing on the freedom of association rights of individuals. You can't. That is the essence of the free market.
Why do people feel the need to violate my rights in order to make their lives easier? As I've said many times before: I'm very sorry blind (or deaf, or stupid) people have problems with my website, but why am I required to spend more of my resources (money, time, whatever) to accomodate them?
Why is it OK for the government to violate my right to present information the way I see fit and my right to do business with the people I choose in the manner I choose?
Why do people think that our only rights are the ones enumerated in the Bill of Rights, in direct contrast to what the ninth amendment explicitly says?
What compelling national interest using powers specifically granted to the federal government by the Constitution allows them to restrict my rights in this manner?
I don't want to spend the extra effort to make my website accessible to everyone with every conceivable type of disability. As far as I am concerned, it is their responsibility to make my site accessible if they want to view it. If they want to donate the resources required to do this, or come up with a general, client-side solution that requires no extra work on my part (that means: no ALT tags, no text-only pages, etc.), great!
Hell, if disabled people were simply grateful instead of indignant, I might even donate the time to make my site more accessible.
But don't expect me to expend more resources to make your life easier. Anyone who feels entitled to the fruits of my labor just because I have something they don't have should go form their own socialist country elsewhere where they can violate each others' rights to their hearts' content.
This country was founded on a different concept---that of individual responsibility and personal freedom---that is being eroded with law after law and court decision after court decision. Is no one else concerned about these violations of our rights?
That it is possible for a person to tell the difference between brands of instruments simply by hearing them is not in dispute, whether it is true or not. My problem is with the garden-variety audiophile working at the local A/V specialty shop, who looks positively assaulted when you suggest that you might want to listen to your heavy metal or new age CD's when auditioning equipment there. As in, "You can't possibly get anything more out of that music from our equipment that a pair of $50 KLH 2-ways wouldn't give you."
It's fine to know a lot about audio. I applaud people who are experts in a field (well, most fields, anyway). But one shop has already lost my business because the fools who ran the shop were elitist assholes who refused to admit the mere possibility that I can tell the difference between Megadeth played on a shitty $300 setup and Megadeth played on a $2,000 system.
After an awful experience purchasing a (great) HSU subwoofer from this store, I then proceeded to drop over $2,000 at a competitor, Ensemble Audio in Arlington, MA, because the salesfolks there were both audiophiles (in the literal sense) and great guys (in letting me listen to my music the way I wanted to). I highly recommend them, by the way.
Power to the free market!
Here's an "audiophile to English" dictionary:
"warm" = crackly
"proven" = bigger, less convenient, less versatile
"superior" = elitist
"music" = jazz and classical
> The space industry would not be an industry
> without government stepping in and jump starting
> it. Look where we are with private rocket
> launches and only now plans for the first private
> trip to the moon.
I know you think the concept of real-life space travel is cool, but I would ask you to name why it's objectively good. Perhaps private launches are becoming popular only now (33 years after the moon landing) because there hasn't been sufficient demand before this, due to lack of anything truly useful being done in space. (I am, of course, neglecting the decades of private launches of unmanned satellites; right now, I'm talking about manned launches.)
Now that there are things that can be produced by actual humans only in zero-gravity (large quantities of carbon nanotube, certain crystalline structures, etc.), private launches will actually be feasible from an economic standpoint. I would argue that this would have been no different had government-sponsored launches never happened: given the static nature of manned launch technology over the past 22 years since the orbiter was first deployed, I seriously doubt even private launch technology would have been seriously hindered by the non-existence of NASA.
Bottom line: LET THE MARKET dictate what happens! =)
> if, on the other hand, your OTP is not truely random
This makes no sense. It's not a OTP if it isn't truly random.
...how a known plaintext attack can be made against a OTP? You can find out the parts of the key associated with the parts of the message you already know, but that doesn't help you determine anything else about the text: the keys in a OTP are random, not periodic.
.5% of the federal budget is over 2,500,000,000 dollars. If you don't think that's a lot of money, then you can pay it and let me and everyone else get our share of that back.
Let's make this clear:
Socialist policies, regulation, and high taxation never net create jobs. They may shift jobs into new industries designed to manage and mitigate effects of the changes (tax lawyers and accountants, environmental lawyers, "public interest" lawyers fighting for poor peoples' rights to others' money), but they never result in more jobs.
For more jobs, you should be voting Libertarian and opposing bigger government.
> Flat out wrong. Efficiency is defined as doing
> more, for less. Translation: People of existing
> means will be able to do more -- without you.
I believe you are the one who is flat-out wrong. Free trade increases efficiency by moving production of a good or service to the arena in which it costs least. Output/price is the definition of efficiency.
This statement is utterly ridiculous. Without US companies moving their jobs overseas, several things will happen: (a) fewer people overseas will have jobs, meaning they will have a lower standard of living; (b) steel workers in the US will continue to keep jobs with artificially high wages instead of moving to fields in which America competes more effectively; (c) the price of steel will remain high, increasing the price of goods and services that use steel anywhere along the line.
...for imports from China?
To benefit workers in industries in which American companies can't compete due to very expensive regulation (minimum wage; workplace environment standards; disability; collective bargaining; parental leave; health care; etc.), some dumbnut president is bound to suggest that we try to keep foreign goods out with tariffs or quotas.
Witness W.'s protective tariffs for steel.
The natural impulse for government will be to protect special interests (in this case, unionized voters) against the evils of the free market, instead of telling them what they don't want to hear: that they should find a new profession, since the one they're in can't make them the amount of money they are used to making without artificially inflating prices for the rest of the public.
I don't know about you, but I am simply not willing to pay more than I absolutely need to in order to get the goods and services I want, just to subsidize the ability of someone to continue working in a job that would be better sent overseas. If the quality of the Chinese-made goods is the same as or similar to the quality of the USA-made goods, and the price is lower, then I'm going to buy Chinese; done and done.
Free trade increases efficiency and, in the long run, will raise standards of living for all people. Pat Buchanan and the Jurassic-era conservatives are living with leftist union shills in a fantasy world of 50's America. Libertarians and the 80's-90's conservatives are the ones who truly understand what makes America great, and it isn't artificial trade barriers. =)
The problem I always hear from people is that they think the beings at the end are aliens. It didn't even occur to them that those "aliens" were the evolved descendents of the original mechas.
Just because a criminal may attack you with a gun (or knife, baseball bat, etc, etc) does *NOT* give you the right of self defense.
Unbelievable. There's nothing else to say.
Agreed. I don't want a world without copyright; I just want a world with much weaker copyright.
Copyright is necessary as incentive for the creation of new works. I and others are happy creating GPL'ed software, but we are a very small minority of people producing creative works. So, I don't see copyright going away anytime soon.
What will have to change, however, is our perception of copyright. At this point, copyright is considered (however incorrectly) an inalienable right that often trumps even the first amendment. This situation is untenable. What I already see happening is the start of a movement to put the teeth back in the public side of the copyright bargain.
In the best case, I see copyright terms decreasing significantly and fair use rights being enforced by law. The first increases the incentive to produce by shortening the term of the artificial monopoly we the People grant to authors and artists.
The second means that the People's right to use works protected under copyright in any reasonable way they choose will be formally encoded, perhaps even to the point of outlawing fair use prevention technologies (what is usually called "copy protection") on works protected by copyright: this would restore the same balance that used to exist for patents before the DMCA.
I'll leave the worst case to others. =)
Whoever owns the root name servers should control the delegation of all the top-level domains. Period.
Do you realize that the average person received ~$300 benefit from this tax cut, while Dick Cheney realized ~$1 million?
Class warfare. What's the point?
Certainly if they are earning 50% of the revenue but only paying 30% of the tax, there is a problem.
Why? Even if we had a flat 20% tax, 20% of their income is still waaaaay more money than 20% of your income. The rich are more than paying their fair share.
The rich are also far less likely to be audited by the IRS, despite having an overwhelming advantage in being able to hire high-priced tax lawyers to weasel them out of more tax, which the rest of us end up paying.
The incidence of audits among lower-income individuals correlates well with the percentage of incorrectly-filed tax returns. Your argument sets up a straw man similar to that used as evidence of racism in sentencing, and is about as correct.
If your problem is truly that rich people have better access to information that informs them of deductions they are eligible for, then perhaps you should be arguing for a simplification of the tax code. I can't argue with that.
However, I suspect the real issue is just that you think the rich aren't being milked enough.
Let us also say that bill gates is worth 50 billion dollars, probably a conservative estimate. If I make $65,000 / year, I can work for 40 years and still make only 1/40,000th of that amount. You don't think there's some disparity there?
From your attitude, I can see that the possibility of you going out and doing something that might net you more than $65,000 a year is nil. Bill Gates did something very high-risk and got rewarded for it. Lots of people who risk leaving college to start a business fail and end up bitter and envious like... well, I don't want to point any fingers.
In 10 years when the graying boomers really start hitting social security and dying en masse because there's no system there to support them, you can thank W.
I'll be laughing all the way to the bank because I was smart and started my retirement account early. I'm not especially intelligent in doing so: it's just common sense. Lack of self-control, initiative, or ambition shouldn't be rewarded, but it seems that's what we do.
I don't know where this 80% lie is coming from, but my most recent sources indicate that the top 1% of households control 47% of the wealth.
The top 1% do not own more than 80% of all wealth. I think you made an error there.
However, even were that true...so what? The right question in my opinion is, "Do they use 30% of all government services?" Probably not. (Note understatement.)
An even more important question is, "Why do you believe people more wealthy than you owe you anything at all?" Until you answer this question honestly, your ranting will have little weight. However, I suspect it boils down to "envy," so perhaps you feel that providing no answer is actually better for your leftist crusade. That's a shame.
I just don't buy into the "my problems must be caused by someone else" mentality. Being rich is not a sin. My success doesn't preclude yours. If you are a failure, my success is not your problem.
Surely there are actual examples of rich people who got that way by defrauding others, but this poster highlights no such example. Instead, we get a rant about how the Bush tax cuts are taking food out of starving mouths.
I'd like to take this opportunity to point out that the top 1% of earners pay over 30% of all income tax. If you find yourself agreeing with Dr. Strawman there, the question you've got to ask yourself is, "Just how much do those rich people owe me?"
I've found that the answer "zero" correlates highly with success. Whether this is a causal relationship or not is still anybody's guess.
Absolutely! I agree! We should license it to other countries!
Kinda takes the wind out of your sails, doesn't it?
[Apologies for this being slightly off-topic, but chrissy asked for it.]
You should have gone with your initial impression. Not running this, I mean. Could you please try to stuff more leftist tripe in your next article summary?
"destabilizing, unworkable '80s missile defense"? I'm sure most people didn't think anything like that laptop sitting on your desk was possible back in the early 1900's. The technology for reasonable missile defense may be in its infancy now, but that doesn't mean it always will be.
For those who argue missile defense is just another unnecessary aggressive move on the USA's part, I'd say that defensive weapons are the least threatening because they are the ones least likely to get us involved in foreign entanglements: it's hard to send a stationary anti-ballistic missile launcher into a land war in Asia.
And for those who argue it is unnecessary because terrorists will just ship a bomb over on a cargo freighter, I'd ask you if you keep your windows unlocked over vacation just because a thief is most likely to try the front door first. If we start covering our bases now, we won't be caught with our pants down when every rogue nation in the world has a long-range ballistic missile and a wacko with his finger on the button.
As for "deathplane"...I'm not even sure I should touch that one. I'll just say that deathplanes like it are the very reason east coasters aren't speaking German and west coasters Japanese. As a libertarian, I believe it's your right to avoid compulsory service in the military, but you should at least have the decency to respect those who fought and died for your freedom.
However, that's not directly what I wanted to say. I'd instead like to point out the two main reasons we got to this point:
And you do it too. Every time you say, "I wish the federal government would just regulate <foo>" or "I can't believe those ball players/lawyers/neurosurgeons make so much money," you're demonstrating envy and righteousness. Realize that if you think someone you don't know owes you something just because of your circumstances or his, someone else thinks the same about you. Realize that if you have the power to take away another's liberties, he has the power to take away yours. The only way to combat this is to deny government the power to forcibly take away any of our liberties.
If you're not voting Libertarian, donating to the EFF, the ACLU or the Institute for Justice, and the NRA, your complaints about big government taking away all your freedoms one-by-one is pointless blather.