Posted on 05/23/2007 9:05:49 AM PDT by Equality 7-2521
RKBA, property rights, free speech, ect... You seem fixated on drugs. Why is that?
Fine with me.
Oops.. I meant to say John Adams, not James Madison.
Blue laws had their genesis under out Colonial government. They have no place in a Constitutional Republic where certain government actions are off limits. This doesn't always stop legislators and litigators from slipping their leash. Which is why we also put and RKBA protection in place.
So you admit you are a "communist". At least in part. How interesting.
After seeing some of the postings to this thread, I couldn't agree more!
Innocent eighty-eight year old women shot dead in their homes.
Yes... because insisting that people act like responsible adults and not wanting a Nanny State is "infantile".
Do you people even listen to what you are saying?
For one thing, because communities tend to both pre-date and outlive individuals. For another, because anything I do affects the people who live around me, and there are more of them than there are of me.
Simple example: a man alone is perfectly free to dump his sewage in the river, safe in the knowledge that he affects nobody else. Now put a group of people along the river ... the untrammeled right to dump sewage in the river is properly denied to all -- even the guy who lives furthest down the stream. Community interests trump individual interests in this case.
That’s the real difference between the nanny-staters of the right and left, and the libertarians. Both neo-conservatives and lefties believe in some type of mob-rule.
This is another example of the difference between conservatives and libertarians. It's almost inevitable that libertarians resort to name-calling as a substitute for rational argument, and they usually do so early on.
Libertarians generally don’t accept that groups have any rights that aren’t derived from the individuals in the group.
Which is another way of saying, "there's no such thing as 'community interest.'" Thanks for clearing that up.
The problem is that you don't "insist" any such thing -- quite the opposite.
What you actually insist upon is that even stupid people must be allowed to suffer the consequences of their actions. That's not altogether bad. However, the "infantile and narcissistic" part comes in when you fail to recognize that other people are often affected by those actions as well, and as such they have a right to complain when it does, and to attempt to prevent those actions from affecting them in the first place.
Here in the real world, we realize that there is a balance between individual and community interests. And failure to realize that is the main reason why libertarians almost never get elected to any office at any level.
What surprised me about the Illinois Libertarians is that, in the previous gubernatorial election, they ran a guy who used to be a right-wing Republican state legislator. What they then became was as big a change as when, back in the 1970’s, the Lyndon Larouche outfit changed from having a communist bent to having at least a conservative facade. When I was in college, we had a professor who was a self-defined communist. One day a hairy and bearded Larouchie was outside the student union building handing out the U.S. Labor Pary newspaper and denouncing this professor as not being a real communist. A year later, they had an information table set up in the student union, and manning it were two short-haired, shirt-and-tie guys handing out a completely different kind of literature and on the front of the table were two photos: one of Jefferson, another of Paine.
Wrong. A lot of them were promulgated in the 19th century.
So you admit you are a "communist". At least in part. How interesting.
Uh, no. But your immediate leap to inanity is interesting. At least in part.
Many faux conservatives who don’t understand the difference get the two mixed up"
Michael Frazier
The Libertarian Party is to Liberty what the Republican Party is to a Republican form of government and the Democrats are to Democracy, all complete travesties of the basic description of the core word they employ for a party name.
I've developed an extreme disdain of most people that describe themselves as conservatives or liberals, associate themselves with the Democratic Party or Republican Party, or cannot find within themselves the most basic moral premise upon which our nation was born, that being liberty. Most all Democrats, Republicans, conservatives and liberals today share two common bonds. They are followers and they have embraced authoritarian rule. They must love it more than liberty itself. They all employ it whenever they rise to power.
In recent years we have seen legislation introduced that would force children at public schools to learn homosexual history. We've seen legislation passed that forces Social Security recipients to participate in Medicare prescription drug plans (Social Security that mandates involuntary participation is an older example). We've seen the government force upon our citizens a requirement for Passports to reclaim our birthright when reentering our native soil. We've seen the federal government pass legislation that sets federal workers as spies upon the citizenry. All have the earmark of authoritarian rule. Always they combine to nibble further at our liberty.
There is a need for authority when a person or group impairs or threatens the liberty of another person or group. We see this with speed limits within residential areas. It is present in our laws barring homicide, assault, slavery, theft and destruction of property.
Liberty is not having an unalienable right to force behaviors upon others, but respecting the liberty of all. One might argue that capital punishment is an exercise in authoritarian rule over an individual. It is not. Such punishment is given those that have destroyed the liberty of another.
I need look no further into the Libertarian Party than their stance on abortion. The Libertarian Party takes the position the issue must be left to individuals to determine. This would be fine if it did not involve the life of another, but make no mistake, a living fetus at any point in development is living, not even the host has the right to abort. Failing to accept this is to accept the destruction of most necessary component of liberty itself which is life itself. Once a false premise is accepted it will eventually corrupt other issues.
Were the Libertarian Party truly about liberty they would have one guiding principle all citizens could easily absorb and exercise on a personal level. Does a proposed law uphold or negate liberty where life and property are not threatened? No citizen or group has the right to impose behaviors upon another individual or group where life or property is not threatened. NO PERSON OR GROUP HAS A RIGHT TO TAKE THE LIBERTY OF ANOTHER WHERE LIFE AND PROPERTY ARE NOT THREATENED.
From the Libertarian Party web site:
The Libertarian way is a logically consistent approach to politics based on the moral principle of self-ownership. Each individual has the right to control his or her own body, action, speech, and property. Government's only role is to help individuals defend themselves from force and fraud.
(http://www.lp.org/issues/introduction.shtml)
Only when a political party can find a cohesive core message assuring liberty to the most vulnerable can it claim to stand for liberty. I take further exception with the final sentence in the cited paragraph above as it would prohibit the federal government from having a standing military force or border protections, but leave all matters of defense to citizens themselves with only assistance from the government.
No, I see no consistent Liberty theme in the Libertarian Party, just as I see little Republican principle in the Republican Party, or little Democracy in the Democratic Party. They are all distortions of principles once valued in our nation. Only when a majority of citizens set themselves to fight against authoritarian rule will we renew these principles and be great yet again.
That's what I thought until I ran into Libertarian Ron Paul. Here is some protectionist thinking from his campaign website:
"So called free trade deals and world governmental organizations like the International Criminal Court (ICC), NAFTA, GATT, WTO, and CAFTA are a threat to our independence as a nation. They transfer power from our government to unelected foreign elites."
I actually admire Ayn Rand’s pragmatic philosophy. However, I would not kiss her ring. Would you say that Libertarians were cultists?
My mistake, I thought we were discussing libertarianism, not the Libertarian Party.
I agree that political parties seldom represent more than the party itself.
I vote Republican in national races, because it’s clearly a two party system at the moment and the other choice is the DemocRATs, and my conscience in all others. 2008 could easily change things.
Michael Frazier
Not cultists -- I'm more inclined to guess that the majority of Libertarians work in technical fields, which is why they seem to have such a limited understanding of human nature and the dynamics inherent in social interactions.
...personal wants, like individual freedom? most libertarians don’t want to work within either party. seems as if both partys want to take care of those that think they’re grown up, but aren’t...
So why do you piss and moan at Libertarians when RINO Republicans lose close elections then.
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