[Phred]

This is an endless argument on your part.

And it always will be when we meet, because you refuse to acknowledge the validity of unalienable human rights. To you, what matters isn't the rights of Joe and Bob and Carol and Kaneesha, but the pseudo-rights of groups. If the majority says it is okay to violate the rights of the minority - even if in doing so they violate their own - then for you, it is okay. Mob rule wins. You would have been right at home in the pre-Civil War South.

The FACT is that I do not maintain that the government may be spent "on anything in any amount" and your continued hyperbole is not helping us take you seriously.

Your justification for violating my rights extends not just to things that you personally approve of, but of things the mob does (or may come to one day, as the whims of popular opinion change) but you don't. Your argument puts no restraint on government at all other than the whims of the mob. This makes you in principle no different from any other tyrant justifying running roughshod over the populace. The only difference is you require a just-barely-big-enough plurality of people enthusiastic enough to vote for Statist representatives who solemnly promise them goodies bought with other people's money, while the tyrant needs just the consent of most of his flunkies.

I DO maintain that the government has the right to levy taxes and spend the money for whatever they choose to the extent the people acting through their elected representatives give them the right to do so.

Mob rule. Might is right.

I utterly reject the notion that an individual has any practical right that is not given them by those same people.

Of course you do, because - despite your hollow protestations about being a conservative - every post you make espouses Lefty-Libbie principles. And Lefty-Libbies believe in the power of the mob above all else.



Phred

[Name Placeholder]

Taxes are such a minor thing that affect all of us, not just the rich or poor, but everybody in between. Everybody thinks taxes are unfair, but instead of seeking a solution, the two philosophies bicker within themselves. Absurd!!

Get creative and find ways to raise federal revenue that doesn't include taxing US citizens. And cut the budget down and make government actually small. So chit can the military, foreign aid, corporate and citizen welfare, etc.

Here are a few things we could tax to pay for a small government.

1.Import taxes on everyone, not just American corporations.

2.Export taxes on all foreign owned and partially owned corporations, etc.

3.Income/any source of profits, raised on foreigners here in America, or working for the US government in any capacity abroad.


And if those items and other items you dream up won't cover federal government, then cut federal again. Get creative! Cut Congress pay and benefits back to 1825 standards, $8. a day, no benefits, no pensions, NO. That ought to draw in people who love America and actually care about you.

[Drlee]

And it always will be when we meet, because you refuse to acknowledge the validity of unalienable human rights. To you, what matters isn't the rights of Joe and Bob and Carol and Kaneesha, but the pseudo-rights of groups. If the majority says it is okay to violate the rights of the minority - even if in doing so they violate their own - then for you, it is okay. Mob rule wins. You would have been right at home in the pre-Civil War South.

Are you really that childish? Mob rule? You do not understand the concept. Sir you are not acting like you have the depth to continue this conversation. Lets extract some quotes from you idiotic drivel:

Kaneesha

Mob rule wins

It is interesting that you believe that a constitutional democracy is mob rule.

Pre-civil war South: I see. You are asserting that a person you called "Lefty-Libbie " is in favor of returning to slavery. That is idiotic. Smart people do not make fools of themselves like that. I must really be getting to you. You are unable to make a cogent argument. Color me surprised.

This is really ho-hum. Maybe there is someone out there who wants to step in and rescue you.

[Negotiator]

[...] Everybody thinks taxes are unfair, [...]

I'm sorry ? What ? Do you refer to yourself as "Everybody" now ? Or do you refer to, I dunno, children with "Everybody" ?

Taxes are an obvious necessity if the country is supposed to offer ANY services at all. Police, hospitals, military, streets, ... all these things are paid with taxes.

As a conservative of the 19. century, Oliver Wendell Holmes, put it: "I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization."

[Rainbow Crow]

Do liberals hate rich people? It depends on the individual liberal and just what you define as "rich."
I for example think that with the exception of a very small number of Steve Jobs-like individuals, most people in the 1% of 1% don't deserve the amount of wealth that they have.

[Negotiator]

Do liberals hate rich people? It depends on the individual liberal and just what you define as "rich."
I for example think that with the exception of a very small number of Steve Jobs-like individuals, most people in the 1% of 1% don't deserve the amount of wealth that they have.

Well, that is IMHO a contradictional statement.

There is no core difference between Jobs and the average rich person. One had the luck of being there at the right time, the other had the luck of birth. Thats all.

A modern Steve Jobs wouldnt stand the slightest chance to succeed. Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Sun etc already exist. You cannot create a new Apple company in this sector, no matter how creative you are. At best the big companies would copy you, or employ you. A new Jobs might manage to get into Apple or Microsoft or whatever, but he wouldnt end up as rich as the original Jobs. And thats the best case scenario. Very much more likely is that you end up like many smaller companies in the beginning of this market. Companies that have been at least as creative as Jobs at their time, such as Comodore with their Amiga. They really didnt get destroyed because they made the worse product. MSDOS was the worst operating system on any PC ever, and yet its successor Windows is now dominating the PC market.

The only reason a Steve Jobs could succeed because he was there when the market was young and new and just forming. Its the same with past geniusses. Such as Siemens. Only because they have been there when the market was young and new they could occupy it.

And it doesnt need any personal genius to do so, as in the case of Jobs and Siemens. The example of Bill Gates clearly shows it. Gates never invented anything. He was just an even better merchant than Jobs, and he got even much richer than Jobs.

So in saying "Steve Jobs was justified" you are stating that the people who FORM another rich family have the right, but their children do not. How so ?

Its the same thing. Jobs wouldnt have succeeded if he wouldnt also posess the qualities of a good merchant. In fact that was the main disadvantage of Comodore.

The profit margin of an i-Pod, for example, is over 60%. Over 60% that you only pay for the name of Apple. It would still be 50% if they would produce the i-Pod in America, by the way. Making chinese workers commit suicide because of their working conditions isnt THAT much of a profit improvement.

In fact, when IBM was looking for a computer operating system and they asked Jobs, they rejected him because he was, gasp, barefeet. So Jobs could be the Gates today and Microsoft could have crumbled into nothingness, just because Jobs would have made the decision to dress to the occasion.


That said, I could see the point of your statement in case of artists. Or if people like Gates and Jobs wouldnt be so insanely well payed for just being at the right place at the right time.

[Drlee]

A modern Steve Jobs wouldnt stand the slightest chance to succeed.

Of course he would. There is plenty of room for smart people to succeed and do it big.

[nucklepunche]

A modern Steve Jobs wouldnt stand the slightest chance to succeed.

A modern Mark Zuckerberg wouldn't stand the slightest chance to succeed. Oh wait, Mark Zuckerberg is modern.

[Rainbow Crow]

Well, that is IMHO a contradictional statement.

There is no core difference between Jobs and the average rich person. One had the luck of being there at the right time, the other had the luck of birth. Thats all.

That is one of the core disagreements. According to liberals, luck of birth does not make someone deserve to be in the 1% of 1%. Only personal achievements, like what Steve Jobs did, can make someone deserve such a thing. You can insist that being born already on Steve's income level makes you his equal but you would just be outing yourself as un-American in my book.

Sure, part of it is luck. He was an orphan building circuit boards in his adoptive parent's garage, and I'm sure that luck factored into it somehow. But to suggest that luck of birth is equivalent to what someone like him accomplished is ridiculous and frankly also very petty.

[Drlee]

According to liberals, luck of birth does not make someone deserve to be in the 1% of 1%.

According to conservatives, like myself, luck of birth does not makd someone deserve anything. There are a few conservatives and liberals who oppose inheritance taxes and I suppose that could be some kind of a similar argument but... I would maintain that there are very few Americans of any political flavor who believe wealth is something that can be deserved at all.

There are some very few conservatives who believe that there should be no welfare system at all and very few liberals who do not believe that we should have one but at the end of the day there are very few Americans who do not believe in a robust government safety net. The assertion that these universal differences between those who identify as liberal and those who identify as conservative are mostly a popular fiction.

[Rainbow Crow]

No offense, but you strike me as someone who doesn't mesh with the majority of the Republican party. You should check out the Blue Dogs

[nucklepunche]

No offense, but you strike me as someone who doesn't mesh with the majority of the Republican party. You should check out the Blue Dogs

I think the issue that keeps Dr. Lee in the Republican Party is his longtime loyalty. I sort of share a similar perspective to you and him and I can say this. We have a center-left party and a center-right party in this country. There are extremes on the left and the right that need to be kept in check which is why I think having a two party system is important. The problem is the Republican Party has in the past few years become less and less of a center-right party and more and more of a far right party. That is not healthy. We need a two party system in this country but we need a two sane party system. Still as an individual I find it hard for me to support many Republicans. I don't really mind Michigan's Republican governor Rick Snyder because he has tried a more moderate path and avoided the extremes of Scott Walker and John Kasich which many rank and file Republicans want. He understands that you will make no progress unless you can reach across the aisle. I'm guessing he probably agrees with Walker and Kasich philosophically but chooses not to pursue it because he realizes the whole union thing is a mostly ideological fight that Walker and Kasich picked to fire up their base but in turn it overshadowed everything else and made progress impossible. I like Jon Huntsman too. If Mitt Romney would have stayed moderate I would have liked him too but Mitt Romney is a shill and an opportunist. Who knows how he would govern if elected, of course it is looking less and less likely Mitt Romney will govern. David Frum is not an elected official but he is a Republican intellectual I like as is David Brooks. Some of the far-right would say people like that are not conservatives. The problem is this. In a given election I am probably always going to be more liberal than the Republican and more conservative than the Democrat. I recognize that and accept that. That being said I will accept the foibles of the other side if one side gets too extreme. That is what happened in Michigan. The Democrats nominated somebody who came across as quite radical in his rhetoric, Lansing Mayor Virg Bernero, over a moderate candidate in State House speaker Andy Dillon. The Republicans meanwhile split the conservative vote among Pete Hoekstra, Mike Cox, and Mike Bouchard and selected Snyder. Snyder won by huge margins in a somewhat blue state. The same thing is the case with the presidency. I have a hard time explaining this to my right-wing friends but there are plenty of things I disagree with on Obama, but I refuse to view politics as a zero sum game. Disagreeing with Obama is one thing but I look at the Republican Party and how radical it has become and so God help me I refuse to allow that party to control the Congress, Senate, and White House all at once. I will not let them rubber stamp Tea Party radicalism. That's the thing. Are there some Democrats too liberal for me? Absolutely. You are not going to see me at the NARAL convention or starting a Draft Pelosi for President 2016 movement. Still there are maybe four moderate Republicans in the Senate, Olympia Snowe, Mark Kirk, Susan Collins, and Scott Brown. Some would say Lindsey Graham and John McCain are moderate but that just shows how extreme the GOP has become that they could be considered as such. Rick Snyder is maybe the only moderate Republican governor in the country. Meanwhile look at all the prominent moderates in the Democratic Party: Mark Warner, Brian Schweitzer, Tim Kaine, Bill Clinton, Andrew Cuomo, Jerry Brown, Ron Wyden, Jim Webb, Joe Donnelly, Max Baucus, Jon Tester, Jim Matheson, Mary Landrieu, and I could name several more. Some would say these people are "liberal" because some of them supported Obamacare but Obamacare is conservative by international standards and is as different from socialized medicine as a cow is from a monkey. If you think it is socialized medicine there is absolutely no reasoning with you. We can debate Obamacare on its own merits and I do think it has its flaws but you cannot use the socialized medicine argument. It does not work. Anybody who uses that argument against Obamacare has their head up their ass because their mind has become warped by Fox News.

[Drlee]

No offense, but you strike me as someone who doesn't mesh with the majority of the Republican party. You should check out the Blue Dogs

I agree with you to some extent. I could certainly surround myself with more like-minded people if I left the republican party. But I wonder if that is the best course of action. I think Nucklepunch has characterized it pretty well. I am disturbed by the Republican party's move so far to the right. I am even more concerned by is abandonment of it core principles.

Please remember that I go back pretty far in the party. I am a Goldwater republican which is to say a social libertarian and fiscal conservative. So what does that mean? What if I said I favored a balanced budget. That would be republican all the way. But how to do it? I believe that there is no way to do it without raising taxes. Somebody ought to pay, but who? A flat tax is not a political possibility so I favor raising taxes on the wealthy and reject the notion that these taxes are excessively regressive. In fact I believe that they could very possibly be stimulative if structured properly. Some of the new 'idiots' in the republican party would foam at the mouth and call me a liberal for that. (They call everyone who disagrees with them on anything a liberal not to put to fine a point on it.) So am I a liberal because I favor increased taxes or a conservative because I want a balanced budget? I say the later.

I am not opposed to gay marriage. Why? Because I am a social libertarian. So was Goldwater (who is also seen as a conservative icon.) The key is to read what I just said. I did not say I favor gay marriage. I said I am not opposed to it. There is a difference. I am not opposed to it because I believe that the government should get out of our bedrooms, off our computers and out of our churches. In other words I embrace the conservative notion of equal protection and non-interference. What could be more essentially republican than that? I should in fairness point out that I have many good friends who are gay and want to marry and would like to see them happy. What's it to me anyway? I flatter myself that I am a thinking person and I simply see no down-side to it so I can't imagine why I want the government to prohibit it.

Republican does not equal Christian conservative. The republican party has never had a member of a conservative Christian denomination. Even baby Bush was a member of a moderate Christian denomination. The democrats have elected, in my lifetime, three members of a very conservative denomination, the Southern Baptists. Carter, Truman and Clinton. I am a practicing Christian. I believe I come closer to doing Christ's work on earth when I am helping the poor than I would if I devoted that time to trying and stop a person from Sunday traveling or marrying thier the love of their life.

What if I told you that I favored national health care not only because it would cover more people and help us be far more healthy as a nation. It would undoubtedly do both. ALL of the evidence points to those two results as a given. But I also favor it because I believe it would be immensely stimulative to the economy. We are pouring FAR to much money down that rat hole. I believe that covering all Americans would put more money in the pockets of employers who would use it to expand their business and more money in the pockets of consumers who would spend it on stuff. Ours is, after all, an economy largely driven by consumer spending. What could be more republican than that. Remember that - I rememeber when the republican party was the one forwarding a bill to provide universal health care. And the democrats defeated it.

Finally I think Fox isn't News, Limbaugh is a Corporatist tool and Glen Beck a sociopath. None of these guys are smart enough to govern. I find the dumbing down of the republican party particularly disturbing. These folks (like their clones the so-called libertarians and tea party idiots) are frighteningly shallow. As Clinton used to say, "there is no there there". Limbaugh pronounces that the reason health care is expensive in the US is because of government intervention in it. This without a shred of evidence to support his claim and the dumb ass Tea party people simply accept it. Never mind that there is not a single country in the world with universal health care that pays anything like what we pay as a nation nor accepts such poor results for their money.

Finally I am angry that some staggeringly unintelligent and mostly bigoted people have stolen the party of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and Richard Nixon. So I stay in the party because I am a republican and a conservative. William F. Buckley said that a conservative is someone who stands athwart history and shouts stop! I want the republican party to stop its slide into ignorance. I want it to be the thinking person's party again. So I stay because I can show people what it means to be an educated, compassionate conservative.

[Rainbow Crow]

Wow, well said, and I really feel for you. Like many young people (I'm under 30, anyway) the Republican party to me is the party of George Bush Jr. and Sr. I've never even heard of some of the things you referenced but I can certainly respect the reasoning behind all of them. It is unfortunate that things have ended up where they have.

I personally believe that eventually, the people taking the Republican party down the deep end will find themselves irrelevant. As that happens, I would expect conservative Democrats (the Blue Dogs) to gain more support. Eventually, what's left of the Republican machine will be begging the Blue Dogs to leave the Democrats and merge with them, and they would probably do it once the undesirable factors have burned out.

So, as a Democrat I think that there is hope for the Republican party, if not the exact kind of hope that their more vocal members would want.

[nucklepunche]

I do think if the GOP continues on its course we will see an era where the Democrats will be the predominant party and Republicans will be a minority. The Democrats of course will have many factions and be a big tent party while the Republicans will be the party of extremists. This is not without precedent. From Abraham Lincoln's election in 1861 until Woodrow Wilson's in 1912 we had one Democratic president elected, Grover Cleveland. Andrew Johnson was a former Democrat turned independent who became president because of Lincoln's death. In Canada the Liberal Party, now reduced to a joke, held power for 69 years of the 20th century. From 1922 to 1964 the Conservatives ruled England for all but 12 years. It is not unprecedented to see one party dominant in a democracy. Since the end of the Truman presidency we have been relatively split in America but that could come to an end.

[Rainbow Crow]

Yup... similar thing happened in Japan for a long time. As much as people complained about the two party system, we're headed into a one party system phase it would appear.

The Democrats had a lock on the Presidency for about 30ish years starting with FDR, if I remember correctly...

[Wintermute]

Liberals hate bad ideas, not rich people.

[nucklepunche]

Yup... similar thing happened in Japan for a long time. As much as people complained about the two party system, we're headed into a one party system phase it would appear.

Yes, who honestly do the Republicans have waiting in the wings besides Christie? Long term trends show young people overwhelmingly Democratic and hispanics as well, the fastest growing minority. You will start to see more states in play in the long term, states Republicans should win. The point is people in the middle are getting fed up by the antics of the far right.

[powertoolsculpture]

Liberals don't hate rich people, they hate people who aren't a member of their cult. Nobody cares if Barry O'bomber is a thief, a multi-millionaire and a mass-murderer because he's part of the club.

Political affiliations are basically like religions. Even if the originators of their doctrines actually believe and care about them, 99% of the rest are there for social-status/mate-seeking reasons.

The point is people in the middle are getting fed up by the antics of the far right.

Evangelical Christians: Jacobin internationalist pietist pro-democratic Zionists.
Progressive Democrats: Jacobin internationalist pietist pro-democratic Zionists.
NeoConservatives: Jacobin internationalist pietist pro-democratic Zionists.

Now where is this 'far right' you speak of? All I see is leftists squabbling over who gets to run Leviathan.

[nucklepunche]

Evangelical Christians: Jacobin internationalist pietist pro-democratic Zionists.
Progressive Democrats: Jacobin internationalist pietist pro-democratic Zionists.
NeoConservatives: Jacobin internationalist pietist pro-democratic Zionists.

I daresay all the following apply except Jacobins. As for the far right I speak of I am sure you would know it, considering you have a quote by Rousas Rushdoony in your sig. I would say he is far right. Even if the TP has not taken up his ideas they are getting closer to them. The old neo-con evangelical Christians were more on the social scale anyway, but the economic stuff is getting more popular.