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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (339755)	6/7/2007 2:38:28 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573930

On domestic policy we have some differences... but also some agreement. I don't know the full list of domestic policy ideas you support, and how much you care about your position on each issue, but from what I've seen on SI, it sounds as if your differences are quite serious in this area. It still surprises me that you support Iraq... nation building is so un-libertarian. About the opposite. The invasion liberated Iraq from a brutal dictator. That's not anti-libertarian, even its hardly something that gets universal support from libertarians. Once that happened there is a need to provide security. Libertarians aren't anarchists. They support the idea of the government providing security and protecting the population from aggressive use of force. One country assisting another in this effort also isn't anti-libertarian. OTOH why the war isn't anti-libertarian in principle, some of its practical consequences are. It costs money, that means more government spending. War also tends to, at the margin, push security over privacy. And the political trading to get support for a war often results in government spending more on things totally unrelated to the war. If the war effort succeeds, I think the net effect will be positive from a libertarian sense. Of course that positive effect is for Iraqis not Americans. The only way it would have a really positive effect for Americans in libertarian terms is if the war succeeded to the limits of the most wild "neo-con" dreams, with the whole "drain the swamp" idea working in a very strong way, and the long term security threat from the ME receding. That's clearly not going to happen any time soon, and the odds of it happening at all as a consequence of this war don't seem as high as they used to (and they never seemed extremely high to me). I think a good argument can be made that the war should not have been started, but having been started the consequences of not seeing it through are worse then the consequences of not having done it in the first place. That combined with the fact that I do not see the situation as being as bleak as you do, leads me to still support the effort at this time.