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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Grainne who wrote (97980)	3/14/2005 8:08:35 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

Your post states that you are clarifying the libertarian approach, but really I do not see a clarification in it. What am I missing? I engaged this subject because of your assertions that libertarian meant libertine and selfish and I wanted to disabuse you of those impressions. Apparently we've had some success with the former but there's still work to be done on the latter. As I said earlier, I'm not trying to convert you. From what I've read of you, you seem to be from the social democrat school. [Please forgive me if I am somewhat off on that label. I don't know you that well nor am I as familiar with that part of the political spectrum as I am with my own. I mean no disrespect and you can label yourself as you choose. We libertarians are for individual choice in everything. <g>] A social democrat is polar opposite from a libertarian in terms of approach to government and I would not expect you to embrace a polar opposite. My hope is that your disagreement of libertarianism would be more thoughtful and on point as a result of my attempts to clarify. And the problem as I see it with money going to Washington is not that our taxes go there, but that the current administration is spending them very unwisely, cutting programs for the needy, college students, schools in general, food stamps, etc. but giving huge tax advantages to the very rich and corporations. This statement would seem to suggest another misunderstanding. It suggests that you consider the Bush administration libertarian, otherwise why bring it up. Not! Bush is the most un-libertarian president we've had at least since Johnson. The man wants to dictate school curricula from Washington, for heaven's sake, and supports a constitutional amendment to define marriage. So please don't expect me to be an apologist for him and his adminstration's policies. I didn't even vote for him and I sure won't defend him. If libertarianism is an ethical philosophy, it seems to me that someone should be able to articulate why that is so. First things first. I'm still trying to get rid of the misconceptions. I think I can argue that it is ethical but I can't do that until we have a common understanding of what it is. I am unclear what the libertarian "solution" would be. ...when you offer no really plausible concrete solutions to the homeless problem... I do not believe my spirit is stuck in a mindless rut at all. I think part of the problem we're having communicating on this is that you are looking for specific libertarian program proposals for centralized management if not implementation because that's the way the Washington approach does it. I am not offering a libertarian program because there is none. Call it the un-Washington approach. It's myriad and individual, in its pure form. So I think that you're in a rut because you automatically gravitate to a big government program and you think I'm not offering solutions because I haven't proposed a big government program. And therein lies the difference in approach. I think it is clearly immoral that any child in a society as rich as the United States goes hungry. Children cannot really rebound from malnutrition, and yet they are innocent. Healthy children benefit the entire society. Do you really think it's feasible that no child ever go hungry? How would you assure that all children are fully nourished? You'd have to get the bureaucrats to devise the optimum menu, prohibit the manufacture, cultivation, and sale of non-nutritious, non-approved edibles, and hire millions of enforcers to go house to house to force-feed the recalcitrants. Or maybe we should institutionalize all our kids and let the bureaucracy feed them directly. And how moral would that be? Unless you're prepared for such draconian measures, no matter how we approach the problem, some kids will be malnourished. That some kids are malnourished is not a matter of morality but rather reality. How we choose to go about optimizing the nutrition of youngsters in the context of all the other things we're trying to optimize and in the context of our values is an open question involving more than the federal budget. So I will be satisfied if I can persuade you to consider the theoretical possibility that something, anything, other than a federal program can be moral.

To: Grainne who wrote (97980)	3/14/2005 9:02:21 AM
From: Lane3	Respond to of 108807

...the current administration is spending them very unwisely, cutting programs for the needy, college students, schools in general, food stamps, etc... A few thoughts on the subject of budget cuts, in general. The administration is cutting all "discretionary" programs, not just the ones you care about. There are two reasons for this. One is that the discretionary programs are the only programs over which the government has budget control, those and the military. So since the administration ran up this huge deficit and needs to cut back, there is nowhere else to cut. Entitlement programs, by definition, cannot be cut via the budget. You cut the discretionary programs, you run up the deficit even higher, or your raise taxes. Those are the choices. Since Republicans can't raise taxes and often take heat about deficits, cutting the discretionary programs is their only choice. The second reason is the "starve the beast" approach to government programs. It has been part of the Republican repertoire for some time. I do not know if the administration has that objective in mind or not. "Starving the beast" is a technique for cutting the size of the government by squeezing it into uselessness. Some pragmatic libertarians subscribe to this. It seems that the Libertarian Party does, or has in the past. I don't know. I don't keep up with the doin's at the LP. I disapprove of the starvation approach. I find it crude, wasteful, and deceptive. I am a retired fed who was in a good position to observe the impact. Federal agencies, too, have constraints on how they can respond to cuts. They cut what they can cut, which is supplies, equipment, facilities, training, travel, and the like. So you end up with a bunch of feds sitting around shivering in their cold buildings without accomplishing anything. You've cut back the budget by, say ten percent and reduced the output to near zero. Some cynics find that acceptable. I don't. If you're going to cut back on the government, IMO you should drop entire specific programs and give the programs you want to keep the funds to do their jobs. The Bush budget proposal suggested dropping a number of programs. Typically these programs have lobbies, which stop their dissolution, so we drift back to across the board starvation. Sorry situation.