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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: geode00 who wrote (263068)	4/29/2008 7:26:27 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 281500

The rise of industrialized agriculture may get us cheap calories but I think there is a good argument to be made that it fuels obesity, diabetes, heart disease and general lack of health in the US as well. Cheap calories may mean we eat more, and thus get fatter, and are subject to the negative effects of obesity. But we don't have to eat more we choose to eat more. And the alternative is much worse. Get rid of mechanized mass production agriculture and we don't produce enough food. Many people starve, others just go hungry. And on top of that we need to make most of the population in to farmers, so we lose all the goods and services they would have produced. It would be a bigger disaster than WWI, the depression, and WWII combined with the dust bowl, and the man made famines in the USSR, and all the other bad things that happened around that time. What in the world is a mild libertarian philosophy? On some things you want no government, on other things you are fine with big government? That isn't libertarian, that is your own idea of picking and choosing what you personally like or dislike. Its generally being skeptical of government solutions, but considering the merits of ideas without being totally blinded by ideology. Its also living in the real world. And its what liberals and conservatives also do. As much as conservatives might think or say that they do, few liberals want the government to try to solve every single problem (just quite a lot of them), few cultural conservatives want a theocracy in the US, few (perhaps zero) supporters of an aggressive military stance want to invade every other country, or even every other country that is, or is in any way perceived as being, an enemy or rival to the US. Absolutism is rarely a virtue, and its not normally perceived as either a virtue or a requirement. You apparently want to try to push others to it, so you have an easier straw man to knock over. If you want to raise money for roads efficiently, you can use the internet. The internet is a tool, or really the infrastructure that supports the use of various tools. It isn't a method. Saying "use the internet" is saying just about nothing in this context. You can try placing a toll booth at the end of everyone's driveway or have some mechanism for detaining people if they drive on private roads without having paid a monthly fee. Doesn't sound very efficient does it? The monthly fee idea would work a lot better than the toll booth on every road or driveway, but it would require very expensive and intrusive enforcement which would probably infringe on liberty more than just taxing people for the roads.