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

To: Lane3 who wrote (26815)	8/18/2006 9:03:58 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 543335

Seriously, maybe I should call you a socialist. Those labels work fine for me. Close enough. No need for me to differentiate. Well, you could. Nothing stopping it. Save for the fact it's way off topic. I didn't label you anything--not libertarian or not not-libertarian. We are having the commonest of discussions which is the meaning of a political term. Not a debate as to what your or my political convictions are. You continue to say not only that you disagree with me but that I've got it wrong. Fine. Make your case. What's the content for you. That would then be your position. Then, next, chapter and verse as to why I should consider your argument as to the content superior to my own. That's a discussion. Would be interesting to try it. 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. Well, we don't finally know; without checking a vast number of polls, etc. But one clue might be that the Bush folk advanced as their prime, yeah, singular rationale for privatization, that it would give folk "control" over "their" social security contribution. That was rejected. Now you may call that language of "control" and "their" in the context of a social security debate whatever you wish. For me, it invokes classic libertarian arguments. My guess is we have now said the same thing to one another the requisite number of times to declare this discussion as one in which we'll have to agree to disagree. Agree?