Politics: I’m with Heinlein on this one
Those who know me well, know that science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein is my personal guru. Yes, I am one of those people who read “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” and became a libertarian.
One of the characters is the book is a character created by the book’s lunar revolutionaries, called “Simon Jester.” Well, someone (probably for the billionth time) has borrowed that name on the Web to make a point about politics. It’s a point I agree with:
What we are is a group of folks that think we see liberty and freedom eroding in our beloved United States. We see the policies and agendas of the hirelings in Washington D.C. heading toward an abbreviation if not outright abrogation of the Bill of Rights.
We think that the Federal government is grasping to consolidate power using the current crisis, since as Rahm Emmanuel said, it’s a terrible thing to waste. We think the Federal government, not just this administration, is more interested in self-serving personal, political, and party power than it is in actually doing its best to do the least.
This President didn’t make it this way. It has been heading along this path since Woodrow Wilson held political prisoners and FDR held four terms as president; since Johnson’s Great Society and Nixon took us off the gold standard; since Bush Sr. lied about no new taxes, Clinton desecrated the Oval Office, Bush Jr. rammed through the Patriot Act, and Obama wanted every high school kid to ‘volunteer.’
For almost a hundred years, our country has been heading towards becoming a Socialist, centrally planned, Nanny State where the Federal Government tells it citizens how to conduct business, what they could grow in their own gardens or on their own farms, and now even how much a private citizen is allowed to earn before punitive and illegal taxation takes it away.
Now is the time to make it stop.
Amen. We’ve got to stop attacking or defending politicians actions based on the party to which they belong and start thinking in terms of what is best for personal libertary, which is the same thing as what is best for overal economic prosperity.
March 27th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
What witless bunch of mostly unrelated points in that list of presidents:
“Since Wilson held political prisoners” — Hell John Adams did that.
“FDR held four terms” — Yeah so? Change the Constitution if you don’t like it… oh wait.
“Johnson’s Great Society” — Damn black people wanting to vote. Besides society has the same root as socialism. Obviously, society as a whole must be bad.
“Nixon gold standard…” — Ok, I’ll buy that one. Faith based money hurts everyone.
“Bush Sr. ‘read my lips’” — A lying politician… oh my… vote him out at the first available… oh yeah, that happened.
“Clinton…” — Yeah, I can tell you that him getting blown really really… uhm I can’t really figure what that is supposed to have to do with civil liberties or even vaguely with libertarianism in general.
“W… patriot act” — Well ya, but see John Adams, Abraham Lincoln et al.
“Obama…. volunteer” Because we wouldn’t want to ask citizens what they can do for their country… if they would like to make the free choice to volunteer.
Go back and read Walden again and remember that this tripe had been out there since the founding of the Republic, and then go read Rosseau again realize it’s been around a lot longer than that. Besides when the list of “socialist” policies contains one, possibly two (will concede the Great Society as socialist — oh and good policy on the whole), examples of socialism, it makes it pretty easy to chuckle.
I wish you’d simply made the good (if obvious) point, that, yes we should be judging the politicians by their positions and not their parties. Nutroots Paulism like the list above does little to advance a libertarian cause that does cross party lines. If the crunchy cons and the liberaltarians realized that they have a lot more in common than they do separating them, we would be better off. Claiming that the sky has been falling throughout the time frame that a country went through the best economic century in just about all of human history really isn’t going to help… even if the sky really is falling now.