(no subject)
My biggest concern about Obama's policies is his wealth redistribution. It is an issue that I am utterly opposed to, and I really resent that the Republicans have created this lashback. I think Americans are intelligent, compassionate, caring people that would help others and spend wisely if we had a fair and reasonable financial system. The last eight years have seen an unprecedented concentration of resources under the control of a small, hyper-rich elite. There is no need for a government to redistribute wealth if its policies don't concentrate that wealth in the first place. Under W we have seen the largest concentration of wealth in the history of civilization, and thus the lashback with Obama of this Socialist concept of wealth redistribution. I don't agree with it, but I certainly understand why its happening: if you step on a rake, it will smack you in the head.
And once again I find myslef committed to being a Libertarian and not one of the other parties that have policies that slowly drive us toward Socialism. Its like a see-saw of stupidity: Republican concentrate wealth, then Democrats redistribute it. The concept of Private Property is fundamental to the American lifestyle. Socialism undermines and destroys the centuries of economic endeavor that has created the institutes that protect Private Property. I wasn't a real big fan of Clinton, but at least he stayed the hell out of the way of free enterprise and didn't foster a situation that reminds me more and more of the last days of the Romanov Empire before the Bolsheviks took over. Thanks W, you f'ing dickhead.
The transition to socialism, in the sense of an almost subconscious, sleep-walking sort of "maximax" strategy by the state, both to augment its potential discretionary power and actually to realize the greatest possible part of the potential thus created, is likely to be peaceful, dull, and unobtrusive. This is its low-risk high-reward approach. Far from being any noisy “battle of democracy … to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the state”; far from involving some heroic revolutionary break with continuity; far from calling for the violent putting down of the propertied minority, the transition to socialism would probably be the more certain the more it relied on the slow atrophy of initially independent, self-regulating subsystems of society. As their free functioning was constrained, the declining vitality of successive chunks of the “mixed economy” would eventually lead to a passive acceptance of a step-by-step extension of public ownership, if not to a clamour for it.
- Anthony de Jasay, The State [1985]
And once again I find myslef committed to being a Libertarian and not one of the other parties that have policies that slowly drive us toward Socialism. Its like a see-saw of stupidity: Republican concentrate wealth, then Democrats redistribute it. The concept of Private Property is fundamental to the American lifestyle. Socialism undermines and destroys the centuries of economic endeavor that has created the institutes that protect Private Property. I wasn't a real big fan of Clinton, but at least he stayed the hell out of the way of free enterprise and didn't foster a situation that reminds me more and more of the last days of the Romanov Empire before the Bolsheviks took over. Thanks W, you f'ing dickhead.
The transition to socialism, in the sense of an almost subconscious, sleep-walking sort of "maximax" strategy by the state, both to augment its potential discretionary power and actually to realize the greatest possible part of the potential thus created, is likely to be peaceful, dull, and unobtrusive. This is its low-risk high-reward approach. Far from being any noisy “battle of democracy … to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the state”; far from involving some heroic revolutionary break with continuity; far from calling for the violent putting down of the propertied minority, the transition to socialism would probably be the more certain the more it relied on the slow atrophy of initially independent, self-regulating subsystems of society. As their free functioning was constrained, the declining vitality of successive chunks of the “mixed economy” would eventually lead to a passive acceptance of a step-by-step extension of public ownership, if not to a clamour for it.
- Anthony de Jasay, The State [1985]