Tex, well said.
The US government is literally driving people to go to other places to do business - even some small business owners like me. I came here because I couldn't run a small business easily (although my company is still US-based), the taxes were killing me and everyone else I was trying to hire. More and more regulations, taxes, etc.
After I left, the government decided to put a bureaucratic monstrosity, ill-planned, ill-funded and ill-conceived (as far as resolving the problems it was supposed to fix) because the politicians feel like it's important to do something in order to ensure the people see them as the saviors of the country instead of actually doing something productive that would really, really help things. If they really wanted to do something, they could have visited the whole health-care thing, together, and figured out what was the best way forward instead of one party deciding everything. In this case, in Nancy Pelosi's words: "You go through the gate. If the gate’s closed, you go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we’ll pole vault in. If that doesn’t work, we’ll parachute in. But we’re going to get health care reform passed for the American people." That's not "democracy", that's forcing one group's will over the others.
What cracks me up is that because the people who follow a party think it's right to do something, the other party doesn't get any say if the other party is weak enough. That's politics in the US now, very little cooperation and it's all about getting as much for one's own party (and therefore garnering votes and more power), not doing what's best for the country as a whole.
Washington and Jefferson and Franklin and those of their ilk, were indeed libertarians. They called themselves Liberals! Imagine that, how the terms got so changed around (and it was on purpose, happened around the end of the 1800s that the "federalists" became "liberals"). They weren't for a strong government that would take care of the people, quite the opposite!. They wanted a much less powerful central government so that the individual states could have the freedom to experiment with what worked best for their population and not adversely affect others. But people like Alexander Hamilton, who was basically a Royalist (though not a Loyalist - he wanted a monarchy under the guise of a powerful President, just not England's king or queen), overrode that idea and Washington et al had to compromise to get anything of value created (hence a stronger Constitution rather than a looser Articles of Confederation). Hamilton began almost immediately with his desire to have a central bank, for example, that Andrew Jackson had to squelch in his years. The US' experiment with personal liberties overriding that of the individual State was ruined pretty early in the game.
Today, when so many people hate "rich" people (who create jobs and are as important a lynchpin to creating wealth as the workers themselves) and think it's "unfair" that they have so much, the way to "solve" that problem is to redistribute money by force. The business environment in the "freest country in the world" (ha) has become so oppressive that people who want to make money are fleeing the country to do so. And that's "unpatriotic". People like me are seen as a nemesis now, we are bad because we don't want to just take it up the rear so people can get paid to have babies, to not work, to not grow crops, etc.
Kind of sounds a whole lot like the country I currently live in, to me; the US is just better organized and more serious about things. I see the US becoming less and less taken seriously around the world, more and more vulnerable to its debt, and one day the US will become the biggest sovereign defaulter in history and the results will make Argentina's woes look like a walk in the park.
In the meantime, I'm unpatriotic and the bane of people who think they know best how to make everyone happy.
I still maintain that the US should break up into something like 10-15 different countries and let each one figure out what is best for its own population the way those more homogenous populations see fit. I guarantee that what's best for New York or California isn't best for Texas, and so on down the line. I doubt there would be a Libertarian country among them if the breakup ever occurred, but at least there would be more competition and the possibility of things changing in individual places, a lot more now than a huge monolithic government that wants to place everyone in the same peg, round, square or what have you.
Well, I hijacked my own thread, but the truth is that talking about Argentina's economic woes is talking about many government's (and therefore their people's) woes as well.
The US government is literally driving people to go to other places to do business - even some small business owners like me. I came here because I couldn't run a small business easily (although my company is still US-based), the taxes were killing me and everyone else I was trying to hire. More and more regulations, taxes, etc.
After I left, the government decided to put a bureaucratic monstrosity, ill-planned, ill-funded and ill-conceived (as far as resolving the problems it was supposed to fix) because the politicians feel like it's important to do something in order to ensure the people see them as the saviors of the country instead of actually doing something productive that would really, really help things. If they really wanted to do something, they could have visited the whole health-care thing, together, and figured out what was the best way forward instead of one party deciding everything. In this case, in Nancy Pelosi's words: "You go through the gate. If the gate’s closed, you go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we’ll pole vault in. If that doesn’t work, we’ll parachute in. But we’re going to get health care reform passed for the American people." That's not "democracy", that's forcing one group's will over the others.
What cracks me up is that because the people who follow a party think it's right to do something, the other party doesn't get any say if the other party is weak enough. That's politics in the US now, very little cooperation and it's all about getting as much for one's own party (and therefore garnering votes and more power), not doing what's best for the country as a whole.
Washington and Jefferson and Franklin and those of their ilk, were indeed libertarians. They called themselves Liberals! Imagine that, how the terms got so changed around (and it was on purpose, happened around the end of the 1800s that the "federalists" became "liberals"). They weren't for a strong government that would take care of the people, quite the opposite!. They wanted a much less powerful central government so that the individual states could have the freedom to experiment with what worked best for their population and not adversely affect others. But people like Alexander Hamilton, who was basically a Royalist (though not a Loyalist - he wanted a monarchy under the guise of a powerful President, just not England's king or queen), overrode that idea and Washington et al had to compromise to get anything of value created (hence a stronger Constitution rather than a looser Articles of Confederation). Hamilton began almost immediately with his desire to have a central bank, for example, that Andrew Jackson had to squelch in his years. The US' experiment with personal liberties overriding that of the individual State was ruined pretty early in the game.
Today, when so many people hate "rich" people (who create jobs and are as important a lynchpin to creating wealth as the workers themselves) and think it's "unfair" that they have so much, the way to "solve" that problem is to redistribute money by force. The business environment in the "freest country in the world" (ha) has become so oppressive that people who want to make money are fleeing the country to do so. And that's "unpatriotic". People like me are seen as a nemesis now, we are bad because we don't want to just take it up the rear so people can get paid to have babies, to not work, to not grow crops, etc.
Kind of sounds a whole lot like the country I currently live in, to me; the US is just better organized and more serious about things. I see the US becoming less and less taken seriously around the world, more and more vulnerable to its debt, and one day the US will become the biggest sovereign defaulter in history and the results will make Argentina's woes look like a walk in the park.
In the meantime, I'm unpatriotic and the bane of people who think they know best how to make everyone happy.
I still maintain that the US should break up into something like 10-15 different countries and let each one figure out what is best for its own population the way those more homogenous populations see fit. I guarantee that what's best for New York or California isn't best for Texas, and so on down the line. I doubt there would be a Libertarian country among them if the breakup ever occurred, but at least there would be more competition and the possibility of things changing in individual places, a lot more now than a huge monolithic government that wants to place everyone in the same peg, round, square or what have you.
Well, I hijacked my own thread, but the truth is that talking about Argentina's economic woes is talking about many government's (and therefore their people's) woes as well.
