Quote:
Originally Posted by Hedons
Government takes more and more as it inches into more and more corners of our lives; it never does with less. Government is a cancer, and no, Liberterians are not the cure, unless you consider laughter to be good medicine.
-Hedons
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I'm definitely a freer is better person when it comes to the marketplace. There really is no way that the economy can function productively with heavy legislated and central bank interference. The problem with the free market, however, is very much like the problem with social planning, in that you need people of true honesty and integrity to protect it. The difference, of course, is that with a free market you eliminate the possibility of bad things coming from good intentions (in planning).
For a free market to function, and not simply degrade into outright anarchy (or worse, back to governmental distortion), you need to have laws in place which guarantee and protect fundamental property and personal rights. Expecting the kind of people who aspire to political success to respect that kind of non-interference philosophy is really not too different from expecting them to interfere, but only with selfless intentions. It's just not going to happen.
The Founding Fathers set up checks and balances to attempt to force humans to act in ways which reflect only one side of their nature. The old "It takes two thieves to strike an honest deal" kind of philosophy. Yet, in spite of all that effort to force everyone to keep each other honest, the constitution has been used for ass wipe almost continuously since the nation's inception.
You just can't expect humans to respect each other when they stand to gain by not doing so. All you can do is the best you can to frustrate their efforts when they strive to misbehave, and even that is only going to slow them down. There's no road back, and we are never going to get less government without revolution, and that's all there is to it.
The Rev