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Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Land Shark who wrote (33225)	5/11/2011 4:10:05 PM
From: TimF	4 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 36921

I notice you can't actually respond to the arguments, instead you just go on the attack. And even your attack is inaccurate. Libertarian != "ultra-right wing". Until they get old and frail... A quarter of what you make for a lifetime, can by a lot of savings and insurance to cover yourself. Also there is family, friends, private charity, etc. Government action weakens and crowds out these factors, leaving people more reliant on government. Taxes leave you with less for savings and insurance, and leave your friends and family with less to support you. Government spending means people don't form charities for the same purposes to the same extent. Now if you think the government program is a great idea, and that it does a good job of executing that idea, arguably the weakening and crowding out of private alternatives is worth it, but even if the program is a good idea, and something we should do, it doesn't change the fact that the weakening and the crowding out are real. In the context of those factors, and the fact that one has contributed large amounts of money to the government for many years, its not hypocritical (or at least not inherently, automatically, or certainly so) for a libertarian to accept government benefits. That's esp. true for purely consequentialist libertarians, who are not libertarian because of a belief that something is highly immoral about government, government spending, taxation, big government, the particular program in question, etc., but are libertarian simply because they think libertarian ideas work best. Of course Rand was not a purely consequentialist libertarian (in fact she would claim that she wasn't a libertarian at all, considering "objectivism" something distinctly different, but I consider that silly), but even for largely ethical libertarians (not meaning that other libertarians are not ethical, but that they are libertarian for largely non-ethical reasons, while "ethical libertarians" are libertarians because they consider big government, or the actions necessary to put big government in place, to be morally wrong), its not inherently unreasonable to think that its ok for you to take some of your own money back, while still arguing for canceling the program.