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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (26793)	8/18/2006 1:08:21 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 543227

Rather that we agree about the relation between libertarianism and Bush's attempt to privatize social security. We do? I missed that. That's all I'm arguing, at the moment. Or, better put, joining Lind in arguing. Whoops, I think not. If you're on Lind's side, we don't agree. I cannot accept that the essential counter to the welfare state is libertarianism or that his examples are essentially libertarian. The counter is economic and it is moral and it is waged by Republican conservatives. Any libertarian argument that might add heft is just argument of convenience to the key opponents. But it's that ideological frame that is the Grover Norquist frame that lies behind the notion of privatizing so many things Perhaps you're confusing tactic with principle. This reminds me of the complaint from the Bushies that the Dems don't have any options but cut and run. I tried to explain this to someone the other day on another thread. Probably won't have any more success here. If it's pre-Iraq, you can argue that action would be a mistake. Once the mistake is made and the mess is in full flower, what do you do? It's hard because you want to say that you wouldn't have gotten us in the mess in the first place. As for what to do now... Same goes for the welfare state. We're in it now. Can we get out now that we're in? How would we do that? Better not to have gotten in in the first place. Any ideas for extrication would be clumsy contrivances, not essential non-Republican principles. If someone gathered together all the non-Republican ideas for extrication and claimed them as the essence of the non-Republican philosopy, he'd be way off, because the non-Republicans wouldn't have been there in the first place. You cannot claim a collection of extrication proposals as essential principles. Even if all the examples Lunt gave were validly libertarian, which they aren't (denying an increase in the minimum wage is an economic issue and a moral issue, not a liberty issue) you couldn't claim the collection as libertarian principles. At most they would be a bunch of convenient libertarian tactics for extrication.