World's Smallest Poltical Quiz

[Don Galt]

Cool Hand Luke--

Sure the constitution defines citizenship. But that does not mean the government has the power to prevent non-citizens from living here.

People who's principles require that the constitution be respected who vote for the republican party are violating thier principles. Or they are ignorant. The republican party certainly doesn't respect the constitution. Same thing with people who vote Democrat on those same principles.

Religious fundamentalists have worked for homeschooling, but they are still authoritarian. That does not disprove my point.

Oh and if you want the defense of this country to be a priority, you would take all of NASA's funding and give it back to the taxpayors.

IF we'd never created NASA, we'd have vacations in space by now. NASA is the primary impediment to space travel in this country-- they want to protect their funding, and so they will not approve launch for any commercial endeavors that threaten their monopoly on space travel. And if you've been told that without NASA there wouldn't be any space travel--- don't fall for it. The early rocket pioneers in this country were private citizens. Just like the airline industry developed without government help-- in fact, despite government hassles--- the space industry would have as well.

Also, look at the firearms industry. From 1800-1930 there was a lot of private development in arms. Now there are almost none. The 1934 NFA put a stop to that.

Government regulation and taxation UNDERMINES the security of this country.

Nothing that government does can ever provide more benefit than its costs.... because much is lost in the process, and money is redirected from economically valuable investment to non-economically valuable investment--hurting the economy. IF the economy were not damaged by this activity, it would grow and throw off far more funding than is necessary, or even taken b y the government, for such defense.

For example, if we didn't have welfare and welfare taxes, the charities that picked up the slack would be well funded and able to do a better job. There would be MORE money for welfare in the hands of private charities... because the economy would grow, and while people would give less (As a percentage) of their income for welfare, the result would be much more in terms of dollars.

 

[Don Galt]

Bill Hook---

The report you cite-- at least in conclusions-- does not even address the percentage of drug use among whites or middle class. They are not even mentioned in the conclusion as I can see.

And even so, since it is on a different topic-- percentage of a given ethnicity that use drugs-- rather than percentage of drug users that are a given ethnicity, it cannot address the question here. Furthermore, it talks about ethnicity, not socioeconomic status.

Simply given the demographic breakdown of this country, most drug users are likely to be white.

 

[CaesarI]

The government stats are biased towards government arrests. Any statistic claiming to accurately report the number of people doing illegal activity is bound to be unreliable.

Claims that somehow drugs automatically make a person a criminal are easily disproven by the number of successful and famous people who were addicts/users in the late 19th century. Sigmund Freud comes to mind. Let's also not forget that Rush Limbaugh managed a rather successful career, and still maintains a very sharp intellect despite his abuse of prescription pain-killers.

"Crack babies" don't exist, for those of you who thought they did, the studies making the claims all had one thing in common: they were observation studies. As such, they can only prove correlation, not causation. Later someone pointed out that most women who abuse crack also abused other drugs... like alcohol. All of the claimed effects of "crack babies" are explainable through the mother's abuse of alcohol.

Regardless, I missed the chapter where the constitution gave the federal government the power to regulate chemical substances that are used in human consumption. Care to list it for us? Or is it totally, utterly, and wholly unconsitutional?

 

[Cool Hand Luke 22:36]

Don Galt:

I agree with most of what you have written with a few points of difference:

1) I still think that based on my reading of the Constitution that the Federal Government has the power to determine residency status as legal or illegal by virtue of the power to define standards for citizenship and the power to require loyalty oaths for citizenship. It's there implicitly also by the grant of power to levy tarriffs and customs duties which implies control over travel and trade accross the US border by non-citizens.

A strict constructionist view of the Constitution for most of our history was antiethical to the positions taken by most Libertarians. Anti-sodomy laws are a good example. At the time of the writing and signing of the Constitution every State had anti-Sodomy laws on the books, and did so for 200 years after 1787. Depending on your view of those laws one could argue that the Libertarian view is more progressive and gives more freedom to the individual than does the US Constitution.

2) There are somethings so big and costly that even the pooled resources of a lot of big private corporations won't provide sufficient funding IMO. The Super Conducting Super Collider and also the accelerator facility at CERN are good examples. The space program is another story and you're right about the Federal Government's involvement having skewed all efforts to big ticket programs that ultimately have slowed us in our move out into space. Apollo was a good show but it set back development of space plane(SSTO) development by 25 years.

 

[Bill Hook]

The report you cite-- at least in conclusions-- does not even address the percentage of drug use among whites or middle class. They are not even mentioned in the conclusion as I can see.

And it won't, lest someone become offended.

 

[Don Galt]

Cool Hand Luke--

I think I have to concede point one-- the feds probably do have the right under the constitution to restrict immigration. Which is relevant to my statement that if you support the constitution, you support libertarian ideals. Here's a situation where you can support the constitution and not support a libertarian ideal. So I agree my statement was overbroad.

Regarding state Sodomy laws, its true the states had them, but the constitution does not allow them, as the supreme court recently ruled. So, while the situation you describe is probably correct, it seems you're showing an inconsistency in the country. It took quite a long time for the supreme court to get aroudn to ruling them unconstitutional, and in the mid 80s they ruled them constitutional because of "a thousand years of christian tradition"! Dont' remember seeing the mention of christian tradition in the constitution. Things were not perfect when the constitution was written, and I've had it pointed out to me that the constitution itself is a document for big government (though not the leviathan government we have)...

At the bottom of all this, and behind the Bill of Rights is the concept of self ownership. IF you own yourself-- your own body-- and not the state, then you can be an individual and make your own decisions for how to treat your body. This is where all human rights come from--self defense, free expression, religious rights, and very importantly, capitalism. I think the bill of rights was trying to get this concept across, assuming everyone understood that in america you were not subjects, but people who own themselves-- individualists. So, while the country has had many violation of this principle--- conscription for Vietnam being a good example, and even the Civil War (the south had the right to secede) -- it is endorsement of this principle that libertarians hold true, and the bill of rights attempted to restrict the federal government from violating it, without enumaerating all the rights in minute detail.

Finally, on the space program, part of your argument for government, it seems, is that we need them to be able to pull money from everyone in order to have the big budgets necessary to go into space. But I think you're missing an important point. IF the government wasn't doing it, a big budget would not be necessary!

The government didn't fund the development of the airline industry. Private entities did. That's why a Jumbo jet only costs $90M, instead of $90B. Without government waste, we would be in space now, and it would be the major airlines flying us there.... NASA simply won't allow it. Theres a prize for spurring development of space travel called the X Prize. There are a couple dozen teams working to be the first one to fly a passenger into the edge of space, return them safely, and then make the same trip within 14 days-- demonstrating commercially viable space travel. All the teams put together don't have more than $10M in budget, and I think most of the teams-- teams with viable programs-- have budgets in the half million dollars range. I could be wrong, but they are all competing for a $10M prize.

Thing is, I doubt NASA will let any of them be successful-- it has sabotaged all previous private efforts, and in the end they can simply deny launch permits.

Don

 

[Cool Hand Luke 22:36]

Don:

Thanks for the comments on the philosophical underpinnings of Libertarianism. I haven't looked at it since the first time I voted back in 1976. It looks like the Libertarian school of thought has evolved towards a more sophisticated canon over the past 30 years. I see a lot of similarities between the Libertarian concept of "ownership" of self and Christian principles.

I disagree with you that there isn't at least a very strong implicit reference to christianity in the DoI or Constitution. Both speak of inalienable (i.e. devinely endowded) rights of man, as for example the enumerated rights in the BoR.

I must not have been clear in my previous post. I agree with you on Federal funding of the space program. It's done more harm than good despite the big Apollo show. There is a very strong profit motive that would drive private enterprize to develop space technology. Governmental involvement has done more to retard that then anything else. Given the cold war I don't see how this was aviodable however.

My point is that there are some fields where the profit motive is too vague or absent entirely to motivate private concerns to undertake them. Yet they are still worthwhile and should be funded. Basic reserch into particle physics is such an area. I don't see private enterprize as funding the SCSC or CERN facilities. Perhaps they would find a cheaper way of conducting such research.

 

[Don Galt]

Cool Hand Luke--

I see your position better now. Regarding particle accelerators, I still disagree. I actually believe that if the government was not socialist-- if we had pure capitalism going on here, there would be so much profit and so much wealth in this country tha the Texas Superconducting Supercollider would have been built by the Time-Life "Boys Science Club".

Capitalism, when let loose, generates so much profit and causes an economy to grow so fast that the costs of things are drastically out of proportion to the way they are now. So what is "too expensive" to be done by private agencies, becomes very cheap for them to do--- both the costs go down, and the funding availible goes up.

The government destroys massive amounts of value in the economy every year. Just look at how well this country has done compared to slightly more socialist countries. Imagine what it woudl be like if we were free of government regulation, and other government burdens?

I don't see the DOI or constitution endorsing christianity. "God given" is not a phrase that bothers me. I'm not a christian, but I see it as the approrpriate way of saying "universally endowed" or "necessary by objective reality". Or, put another way, human rights can be argued for without relying on the bible. That doesn't mean you can't use the bible to argue for them from your perspective. But that means that all the positive rights-- springing from self ownership-- we should probably agree with. I would call this objectively defined morality as universal morality. It is common among most religions, all rational philosophies and does not rely on faith to derive it.

Where we would disagree, and wher you would probably disagree with libertarians, is on christian beliefs that are not derived from the self-ownership or objective morality. Best example I can think of is that a christian might endorse a law that prohibited sex outside of marriage, whereas a libertarian would not endrose such a law.

Self ownership gives the right of self defense (to defend what you own) and free association (to develop what you own, etc). Free association confers the right to have sex out of wedlock.

Now I don't know where you come down on that issue-- but there is a percentage of americans who would say that their religious faith is more important than the objective morality, and would endorse such a law. Certainly there are many religious people who think that the intentions of the law may be good, but it is not the governmetns right to pass it, or that such things are choices that indivdiuals have to make for themselves. These latter people are not the onese I'm calling religious fundamentalists.

The ones that I grouped into the authoritarian group (along with non-religious marxists) are the ones who put their religion before objective morality-- the ones who will violate human rights when human rights (eg: self ownership) comes in conflict with their religion.

The marxists, who have a religion of a different sort, an economic religion, will also readily violate human rights to achive their goals.

Clearly most christians are not among that %30 I was talking about, or it would be more than %30.

Don

edit: typos

 

[Glock Glockler]

Don,

To a someone that claimed to be a Christian and endorsed such a law, I'd ask them why they think they should even be allowed by law to be a Christian if someone else's religion forbade it. If I'm breaking God's law that's between me and God, I sincerely doubt God is in need of them to do his work.

Just a wee tip, you'd probably have more success by pointing out to Christians the similarities between their faith and your belief in individual rights than to refer to them in less-than complimentary terms. Something about flies and honey...

 

[Don Galt]

I've been trying to delineate between groups of christians. Which is why I used the term "Fundamentalists" I assume most christians don't think that would apply to them.

I don't know of another way to distinguish between the two groups of christians, since they both call themselves christians. I'm happy to hear of better terms.

 

[pax]

I've been trying to delineate between groups of christians. Which is why I used the term "Fundamentalists" I assume most christians don't think that would apply to them.

Dangerous assumption. Trust me on this one.

"Fundamentalist" has a really negative implication in common culture, yet among some Christians (and not necessarily the types you were referring to), it is simple shorthand for "those who believe in the fundamentals of the Christian faith." The fundamentals being the virgin birth of Christ, His sinless life, atoning death, and coming return (some add inerrant Scripture to that list).

Anyway, the upshot is that it's not really useful to use the word "fundamentalist" to separate one group of Christians from another group if you are using the word in the common-culture sense -- because to many Christians it has a different meaning and connotation entirely.

pax

 

[CaesarI]

In general I find that Christianity and Libertarianism can co-exist as long as Christians are willing to allow the laws of men, and the laws of god to be different. They are of course, under no obligation to obey laws that would place their faith in jeopardy. I find significant support for the separation of church and state in the bible, among them the famous line, "render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's and unto God that which is God's" which occurs almost verbatim in 3 different sections of the bible.

The "wall of separation between church and state" was placed there* as much for the protection of religion as it was for the protection of the state. Of course Waco violated this separation as much as Jerry Fallwell.

-Morgan
*-I'm aware it does not occur in the Constitution.

 

[Don Galt]

Ok, what's the term to use christians who think that the government should violate the first ammendment and start passing laws purely based on biblical teachings?

Or as Morgan put it, the ones who are unwilling to keep seperate the laws of man, and the laws they follow for themselves.

The ones who believe the government is a "christian government" and that it should criminalize everything the bible condemnse *because the bible condemns* it.

This is not a characteristic particular to a specific church. Or any other delineation I can think of. But there are people like that out there, and the only term I've heard for them is fundamentalist. I'll be happy to use a different term, please give me one.

It would be nice to be able to talk about positions held by some christians without every christian in earshot taking offense.

 

[pax]

Don,

The technical and precise term you're looking for is "theonomist."

Unfortunately, no one knows that word.

pax

 

[Don Galt]

Maybe I should just make one up: Theocratists. Theocratics. Theoaddicts?

Theocracy advocates-- parsable and I think close enough.

 

[BigG]

Christian people who try to combine religion and government are not supported by the bible, imho.

Why would it be referred to as "this present evil world" if it was supposed to be governed by some people who also headed up the state religion. Again, did it not say to obey rulers (gov't) as they are a minister of God (appointed by God) to thee and bear not the sword in vain; i.e., are ordained by God to punish transgressors.

 

[Aleko]

 

[Cool Hand Luke 22:36]

BigG wrote:

Christian people who try to combine religion and government are not supported by the bible, imho. Why would it be referred to as "this present evil world" if it was supposed to be governed by some people who also headed up the state religion. Again, did it not say to obey rulers (gov't) as they are a minister of God (appointed by God) to thee and bear not the sword in vain; i.e., are ordained by God to punish transgressors.

I think that the vast majority of Christians in the US agree strongly with your view. Most abhor the thought of a "State Church" even if Christian. They oppose it on principle and based on thier view of how it works in countries that try it; Italy, Russia, the Scandanavian countries, UK, etc.

Most Christians would be satisfied with a general recognition that the founding fathers grounded the governing principles of our republic in Christian thought. And that's not to claim that those principles are held exclusively by the Christian faith.

As for government involvement in the Church, most Christians would like to see it limited to the greatest extent possible. For example they don't think that use of thier own money to pay for tuition at parochial schools is a "State subsidy" of their church nor do they want the Government breathing down their necks dictating the curriculum.

As for Church involvement in Government, most would limit it to voting for candidates that hold positions that jibe with their own and, overall, don't seek to impose thier values through legislation on very many issues beyond some fundamental ones like abortion or gay marriage. Ralph Reed acknowledged this before leaving the CC and stated that he didn't think Christans would be successful in fighting the culture war through involvement in Government.

Reed finally acknowledged something that gun owners are coming to realize: that the Republican Party will not stand by or promote conservative values.

 

[Roper]

80-80

 

[MicroBalrog]

Economical Freedom: 50%
Political Freedom: 100%