In my post about the idiotic over-reaction to a New Jersey 10-year-old posing with his new squirrel rifle , Dana Garrett left me this response: One waits, apparently in vain, for you to post the annual rates of children who either shoot themselves or someone else with a gun. But then you Libertarians are notoriously ambivalent to and silent about data and facts and would rather talk abstract principles and fear monger (like the government will confiscate your guns). It doesn't require any degree of subtlety to see why you are data and fact adverse. The facts indicate we have a crisis with gun violence and accidents in the USA, and Libertarians offer nothing credible to address it. Lives, even the lives of children, get sacrificed to the fetishism of liberty. That's intellectual cowardice. OK, Dana, let's talk facts. According to the Children's Defense Fund , which is itself only querying the CDCP data base, fewer than 10 children/teens were killed per year in Delaw
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Think about it this way: we just discovered that the bureaucrats who run Homeland Security didn't actually keep real case files on the Gitmo detainees. We have a country that accepted the idea that the way to fight a flexible tactical organization like Al Qaeda was to build the largest bureaucracy ever housed under the American government, staff--by the way--with lots of outcasts from other departments.
This is exactly the recipe that liberals believe will bring the country effective health care.
I'm not against monopolies. Not natural monopolies, at least. I am, however, against government mandated monopoly. I'm against the government prohibiting business that it doesn't control. I'm against creating monopolies where they wouldn't have come into existence on their own. Because they wouldn't have.
Not really. In libertarian capitalism, government creations such as corporations, patents, trademarks, restrictive regulations, etc. wouldn't exist.
It's those government-created tools that allow monopolies to form and thrive. In fact, no monopoly in history has ever emerged without being closely allied with, and protected by, government.
PS -- one of the funniest things I hear from the left in defense of regulations is "without government, who would protect us from corporate predation?!?!" Without government, there would be NO CORPORATIONS, which are themselves a creation of the state that endow certain people with special rights -- such as the right not to be sued personally for activities undertaken as a corporation -- in exchange for payments made to the state!
Just because Social security exists doesn't mean that IRA's and annuities are illegal and don't exist.
Then I'm apparently missing the meaning of single payer. I was always under the impression that the government was THE single payer in question.