--- Matt Cramer <cramer at unix01.voicenet.com> wrote: >
>
> (being a libertarian
> != being a laissez
> faire capitalist!),
Surely to God, yes it freaking does! If you think that "initiation of force" (in the bizarre libertarian sense) is wrong, then you think it's wrong. You don't make exceptions for "trade regulation". You'll have to come up with quite a bit of fancy footwork to say why you think that the government should "defend our borders" unless you have some bizarre libertarian theory of the nation state.
And that != thing is a bit pretentious too.
> In Matt's Libertarian Utopia there is a Fed .gov
> doing only its authorised
> duties according to the COTUS,
errrrm .... is it possible for non-Americans to be libertarians under your definition? Or only if they agree to drop their own constitutions and take up the American. What about countries like France which don't have a federal structure -- do they need to create one? How about countries like Austria and Portugal which are about the same size as a US state?
Surely it's a defect in a political theory if its tenets depend on a single historical document. What if a few different amendments had been passed; would your Libertarian Utopia be different?
[snip]
> I object
> to the concentration
> of power in a centralised .gov, not the notion of
> .gov as a social
> contract.
Then you're not a libertarian. You're a federalist of some sort. Libertarianism, surely to Christ, can't be a simple belief that something the size of, say Austria is the optimal administrative unit. If that were all it was, nobody would care about it.
>I wouldn't mind paying the taxes I pay if
> they went into either
> programs I could choose (like say, the Space
> program) or into my local
> community. It isn't the level of taxation per se,
> but how the money is
> handled ($200 toilet seats, flood relief for people
> in far away states
> that choose to live on flood plains, random bombings
> of nations that annoy
> Klinton, corporate welfare, welfare for politicians,
> War on [some] Drugs,
> slaughters in places like Waco, etc.).
>
Hate to be the one to break the news to you -- you're not anything quite as exciting as a libertarian. You're a Reaganite. You seem to have no problem with taxation being forcibly extracted from the population in principle, but you have technical disagreements with the Clinton administration over fiscal policy.
> I don't speak for all geeks, since we aren't all
> libertarians, and I don't
> speak for all geek-libertarians, but there are a
> fair amount that share
> these sentiments.
Matt, have you ever read a book on libertarianism? This is only partly a flame. You don't seem to understand what you believe, or what libertarianism means, or both. Without wanting to be unduly offensive, there doesn't seem to be a theory of any sort beneath the grab-bag of radio platitudes which seem to make up your libertarianism.
dd
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