Have you heard the persistently advocated Republican/Libertarian message that the evils of socialism will ruin the United States? It should be understood that the originator of that belief was a Satanist, a very hard-working advocate of the first demon's message. Her name was Ayn Rand.
Excuse me. I'm a small-l libertarian philosophically and a capital-L registered member of the Libertarian Party. I don't appreciate your slanderous words.
We believe in small government because we see large governments as being slow, inefficient, poorly run, and out of touch with their constituents. The current gridlocked U.S. government is a perfect example. Both wings of the Republocrat Party seem determined to push our economy over a cliff in January. They would rather posture and pander than compromise and actually govern. If the U.S. economy collapses, it could quite literally bring the entire world economy down.
A government can be seen as an organism, and what do we know about organisms as they become larger and larger?
- Slow-moving
- Insensitive to external stimuli
- Slow to react
- More focused on their own internal metabolism than the outside world
Is that a pretty good description of the U.S. government since FDR, even more so since LBJ and GWB? (I chose examples from both parties because there's nothing partisan about incompetence.)
They don't know how many people are working on government projects. They don't even have a central list that identifies all the projects. They pass laws that do more harm than good, such as criminalizing drugs, resulting in 10,000 Mexicans killed every year by shootouts between rival cartels--more people than were ever killed by all now-illegal drugs combined.
The one thing that the government probably should actually exercise control over is the banks--and that's the one thing they have not controlled. By simply not paying attention, the Controller of the Currency allowed the subprime mortgage debacle to occur--something that my wife, an
English major, foresaw. This was arugably the primary precursor of the current economic catastrophe.
Sure, many truly competent, dedicated people are in the government work force, and they
try to do many good things. But the organization itself is inefficient and incompetent, hamstrung by rules that have been in effect so long that the people who passed them
are dead. Many agencies are still required to operate according to rules that were enacted
before there were computers.
This is not an organization which I wish to have substantial control over my life. Do you???
Our detractors are fond of saying, "Libertarians believe that the solution to bad government is no government." That's a lie. What we believe is that the solution to too much government is less government. And if you look around, you'll notice that we have way too much government.
Have you had the misfortune of going through an airport lately? How much time and money is wasted, how many insults, indignities and inconveniences do we have to endure, in response to terrorism, a phenomenon that kills three thousand Americans per decade? That is almost exactly the same number as are killed by peanut allergies!
Look at the way they handle welfare. If all the money the federal, state and municipal governments collect for the alleged purpose of "helping the poor" were simply put in a pile, divided up, and
given to the poor people, every family under the poverty line would suddenly have an annual income of $40K! Instead, most of them remain in poverty, just a tiny bit less poor, while most of that money pays the salaries of an army of bureaucrats who do nothing all day except sit around and "administer" each other. Private charities like the Salvation Army and the Red Cross, in contrast, operate at a 10-20% overhead level. And in addition, they have the wisdom and ability to turn away cheats and scammers.
Would you like me to keep going and point out what the government has done to all of the industries they have effectively nationalized? The transportation industry: our bridges and highways are falling apart. The energy industry: we'll run out of generation capacity in your lifetime, but the distribution network is already collapsing. The communication industry: despite draconian regulation, it's a hodgepodge of incompatible systems run by providers who don't give a damn. Other utilities: my watershed (the Potomac River) is full of hermaphrodite fish, the result of hormone supplements in our sewage not being removed at the processing plants. The education industry: kids come out of college with student loans that will take as long to pay off as a home mortgage, yet they can't get jobs and have to sleep on their parents' sofa. The healthcare industry: we pay twice as much for almost every procedure as people in other western countries, and most of the money goes into the pockets of lawyers and bureaucrats rather than care providers.
How about defense, which throughout history has been the province of government? Due to sheer incompetence, ours has started a New Holy War that has destroyed what little stability the Middle East ever had. It's becoming frighteningly possible that we'll see the Christians, Muslims and Jews lobbing nuclear weapons at each other until they finally succed in "bombing us back to the Stone Age," a time when people were too ignorant to challenge the foolish ideas of their religions.
Isn't Social Security just an efficient, very reasonable, government-run insurance policy?
It's working for my wife and me, and with a little luck it might hang together for the next decade or two while we're still alive. Each generation's benefits are paid by confiscating the contributions of the next generation. That is
not an insurance policy. Insurance policies, in aggregate, not only cover their own benefit payouts, but also return a profit to the insurer. Social Security is a
textbook example of a Ponzi scheme. It relies on an ever-larger population of suckers to pay off the original investors.
But that won't happen. The nation's birthrate is only barely above replacement level because of immigration. Native-born American women are having less than 2.1 children. The only thing that keeps Social Security afloat is the immigration that the Republicans rail about. This cannot continue. Look at Japan, where the birth rate has been below replacement level for years and the country is so xenophobic that there's virtually no immigration. Their economy is about to collapse because of social security. Ours will too, but hopefully on your watch, not mine.
Finally, why are so many Christians parroting the propaganda of a demon-inspired agenda?
You need to jettison the religous metaphors. Perhaps you haven't spent enough time on SciForums to understand the culture, but this is not a community that has even the slightest respect for religion. Comments like that will be laughed at. No one will take you seriously if you keep it up.
