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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Giordano Bruno who wrote (245835)	4/7/2002 5:37:53 PM
From: MSI	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

I don't know much about what the classic definition of that political philosophy would be. I believe good government is all about disclosure and accountability. Government as Jefferson knew tends toward lying and attempting to become all-powerful when concealed from the people. This is the mechanics of any large bureacracy that lives on the ability to extract money from the governed. I also think the secret police forces have grown in this prosperous nation over the decades to become much more of a threat than any kind of help. But because it is secret and has powers that help entrenched bureacracy, corruption is almost impossible to root out, so continues to grow. That said, government has major positive role in the Information Age, and it's primary value-add is this: to increase information flow among people, businesses and social institutions. By doing so, which is an incredibly cheap activity, it accelerates the value of the civilization, standard of living, and the economy. Once straying from the core role of government as the arbitrator of disputes and provider of common defense, its tricky, esp. when infinite elaboration of rhetoric tries to grab the public treasure. The best way to decide who's telling the truth: look at the results, regardless of what they say. - "Voodoo"-type Reaganomics supposedly ended the Cold War, but were those trillions necessary? The Soviet Union was unable to support its flawed system and was rapidly failing anyway, and would have failed faster if it was allowed to dispurse the Taliban in Afghanistan. The US was too wealthy and meddled too much, causing more harm than good. - Johnson's welfare state - did that cause improvements? If you look at the change in illigitimate births from 15% to 85% among the population served by welfare, and crime stats, education stats, you'd have to say it was an absolute disaster, and would have been better served by local charities, and greater education and job initiatives, rather than a giant mechanical process of income distribution and vote-buying. - DOD budgeting for secret police, as the 12 intel agencies, has been an unmitigated disaster, considering every measure, whether in prediction, such as the state of the Soviet military or economy, or in covert action as in the Middle East and Latin America. They attract intelligent sociopaths among their leadership. - FBI budgeting - due to decades of secrecy, has corrupt and in many cases malicious leadership. I suspect once you open all of government to the daylight of full accountability, and cut out anti-American anti-human activities, you save 50% of the budget, and increase the economy dramatically. In addition the idea of mandatory public service of a couple of weeks per year per person has a lot of merit, both for the boost to the economy from relieving a lot of public works and defense activities, but more importantly also from getting the idea that public service is just that - it isn't for the purpose of making a living or getting rich. And just as important, mixing everyone in a public service effort socializes everyone in the American Way, so to speak. I think that would be an effective addition to the Neighborhood Watch to detect pathological organized activities, such as terrorism. The problem with the above is that spreading out the work of making and maintaining a confident, safe, growing America detracts from the power-crazed leadership, who prefer a small party of fanatic Republicans, and some method for grabbing the election quadrennially. That may be an unfair assessment, but I'd love to be proven wrong. Is that Libertarianism?