Posts here have been in short supply as I have been living life and trying to get a campaign off the ground. But "11 questions to see if Libertarians are hypocrites" by R. J. Eskrow, picked up at Salon , was just so freaking lame that I spent half an hour answering them. In the end (but I'll leave it to your judgment), it is not that Libertarians or Libertarian theory looks hypocritical, but that the best that can be said for Mr. Eskrow is that he doesn't have the faintest clue what he's talking about. That's ok, because even ill-informed attacks by people like this make an important point: Libertarian ideas (as opposed to Conservative ideas, which are completely different) are making a comeback as the dynamic counterpoint to "politics as usual," and so every hack you can imagine must be dragged out to refute them. Ergo: Mr. Eskrow's 11 questions, with answers: 1. Are unions, political parties, elections, and ...
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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.