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Politics : GOPwinger Lies/Distortions/Omissions/Perversions of Truth -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Selectric II who wrote (29441)	10/15/2004 12:41:22 AM
From: TigerPaw	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 173976

What's your point? It's a rather involved point, not a slogan. I don't think it will be understandable in the paragraph or two allotted to these chat messages unless you assimilate some of the background material from which it is based. Here is another bit of background data. This is the goal, the preamble, of a document written by people who had just tried and failed to form a government based on individual liberty. We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. Notice that the goal is a common goal. They had already discovered the limitations of a weak central government under the Articles of Confederation. Now the explicit goal is to promote a collective good which they could not obtain as a set of individuals. The basic flaw in libertarianism and excessive emphasis on individuality is that nobody has the time nor skill to be an expert in everything. Having a representative be an expert in some things frees up the person to concentrate on the areas that they do best. For example, if I have the freedom to invest my social security (and I already have basicly the same thing in my 401K) I also have the responsibility to analyse my choices and decide where to place my bets. If I guess wrong I will be relatively worse off since inflation and returns will be decided more by average performance than by my individual performance. I also have to continue to make these decisions long after my skills may have decreased due to age or strokes. In this example the disposition of my social security has been relegated to a commons. In the commons the best performance will be obtained by those who already have the resources to analyse the data, or hire an expert to analyse the data for them. My apparent gain in freedom in this aspect of my life becomes more of a burdon. Most decisions about whether a policy should be geared toward individual choice or cooperative regulation can be analysed in terms of commons. Such analysis yields better decisions than choosing by slogan. TP