I'm still mystified by Ron Paul's statement about racism in 2008: "Libertarians are incapable of being a racist, because racism is a collectivist idea."
HOW is racism is a collectivist idea? I'm clearly too obtuse to under it.
I also question the "Free Market" in a nation where let's say, AAPL stocks is the number one constituent of the nation's hedge funds (true, look it up).
At that point, you have people astroturfing and pimping iPads because they can spend a few billion spooking the public in order to make a trillion.
So, I often say that Capitalism, like Catholicism, is a great ideology...but one which is rarely understood or practiced by its adherents.
@7: If I'm not mistaken, the photograph in your avatar was accompanied both by a headline along the lines of "Jennifer Aniston is not boring" and by an article that demonstrated how excruciatingly boring Jennifer Aniston is.
@Paul: I usually just respond that, on the basis of any number of productivity and quality-of-life metrics, "Social Democracy (i.e. the Scandinavian welfare state) works...in practice."
It sounds like you're saying you leave the party the moment somebody expresses a political view that you either disagree with or (heaven forbid) agree with but find banal. You must leave a lot of parties.
Hey if you want absolutely free libertarianism go to Somalia. No effective government or laws to spoil free enterprise at all. Just the unfettered free market and human free will to let the strong prey on the weak with no obsticals
"We libertarians, never burdened with an excess of governing power, have always had a utopian streak, a penchant for imagining what rich organic order would bubble up from the choices of free and equal citizens governed by a lean state..."
Translation: Because we have never been forced to confront reality, all we do is spend our time wet dreaming about a theoretical order without any actual regard to whether it would work in the real world with real people. Pay attention to us only if you are as ignorant of human nature as we are.
HOW is racism is a collectivist idea? I'm clearly too obtuse to under it.
I also question the "Free Market" in a nation where let's say, AAPL stocks is the number one constituent of the nation's hedge funds (true, look it up).
At that point, you have people astroturfing and pimping iPads because they can spend a few billion spooking the public in order to make a trillion.
So, I often say that Capitalism, like Catholicism, is a great ideology...but one which is rarely understood or practiced by its adherents.
If what you say is true, it would violate the entire chain of first order logic on which our science and society is based.
As opposed to all of the time as the Republicant Party of No is.
Translation: Because we have never been forced to confront reality, all we do is spend our time wet dreaming about a theoretical order without any actual regard to whether it would work in the real world with real people. Pay attention to us only if you are as ignorant of human nature as we are.