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

To: JohnM who wrote (26805)	8/18/2006 4:30:36 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 543331

A libertarian label works for me. And that's the problem. You don't seem to care if you don't have the right label. You don't care to differentiate. Next thing you know you'll be throwing the "nuance" epithet at me. <g> Seriously, maybe I should call you a socialist. Those labels work fine for me. Close enough. No need for me to differentiate. The Bushites took a core principle of libertarianism, its opposition to the welfare state, from which one may well deduce opposition to social security, they took that core principle and "wove it" into their push to privatize social security. They wove a lot of things into it. Some of those things had a libertarian basis and some did not. How do you know that the proposal failed because of fear of libertarianism. How do you know it didn't fail because people didn't trust the economy long term? Or because they figured the government would screw up the implementation. Or they were turned off by Bush's presentation, the way he never talked about what tax hikes would be needed or the way he was pushing so hard? Or because they didn't want the hassle of managing portfolios. Or because they don't trust big business, which after all is the essence of privatization. Or maybe they just don't like change. There were a lot of offputting things about the proposal. How do you know they rejected it because they rejected liberty? Your logic is that one of the threads woven into the proposal was libertarianism ergo libertarianism was the thread that sunk it. Yikes. That's not angels and pins. That's simple logic. It's like you have one hundred sheep, two dairy cows, a horse, and an angel in the back forty and you label it a herd of angels. "The Bushites took a core principle" of big business, too. In fact, they took the whole big business playbook. If you have to find one bogeyman, I'd say that's the more likely one.