2006-10-11 09:18![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
digitaldiscipline
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rachelll asked]
I was a Republican when I was a kid (say, from realizing politics existed up until my college years), because trickle-down economics made sense to me, and the notion that the government should spend less money than it earns seemed like a smart fucking concept.
I still rankle at any talking head of any stripe who says "the budget deficit shrank this year" like that's a good thing... what they're cleverly failing to say is that the overal government debt -is- still increasing, and that, to me, is unacceptable. If I can't continue to run up debt without consequences, neither can the fucking government. Period. It's not a matter of it being "fair," it's a matter of it being smart fiscal policy.
Anyway, once the GOP started swinging further into conservative asshat waters and abridging civil liberties and personal freedoms, I ended up identifying with the Democrats, because, even though my own moral compass has been unwavering ("Your rights and laws end at my skin. Fuck you if you don't agree with that."), they were the ones who were espousing the most similar views (as a child, my concerns were economic; later, they were social; now, they're both).
My admittedly incomplete understanding of the Libertarian platform is that it's pro-responsibility, anti-controlling asshattery; that's aligned with my own thinking. At root, I'm a fiscal conservative who believes that taxes should be low and government spending should be justified, fully accountable, and within its means; I am also what, these days, would be considered a social progressive, being in favor of such amazingly weird ideas that people should be allowed to do pretty much whatever they want to themselves physically, spiritually, or chemically, as long as they're not fucking up anyone else without their consent.
I am pro-freedom, and see both the established parties as having serious shortcomings in this regard (these days, the democrats just have fewer of them).
rachelll asked]I was a Republican when I was a kid (say, from realizing politics existed up until my college years), because trickle-down economics made sense to me, and the notion that the government should spend less money than it earns seemed like a smart fucking concept.
I still rankle at any talking head of any stripe who says "the budget deficit shrank this year" like that's a good thing... what they're cleverly failing to say is that the overal government debt -is- still increasing, and that, to me, is unacceptable. If I can't continue to run up debt without consequences, neither can the fucking government. Period. It's not a matter of it being "fair," it's a matter of it being smart fiscal policy.
Anyway, once the GOP started swinging further into conservative asshat waters and abridging civil liberties and personal freedoms, I ended up identifying with the Democrats, because, even though my own moral compass has been unwavering ("Your rights and laws end at my skin. Fuck you if you don't agree with that."), they were the ones who were espousing the most similar views (as a child, my concerns were economic; later, they were social; now, they're both).
My admittedly incomplete understanding of the Libertarian platform is that it's pro-responsibility, anti-controlling asshattery; that's aligned with my own thinking. At root, I'm a fiscal conservative who believes that taxes should be low and government spending should be justified, fully accountable, and within its means; I am also what, these days, would be considered a social progressive, being in favor of such amazingly weird ideas that people should be allowed to do pretty much whatever they want to themselves physically, spiritually, or chemically, as long as they're not fucking up anyone else without their consent.
I am pro-freedom, and see both the established parties as having serious shortcomings in this regard (these days, the democrats just have fewer of them).
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More and more, I am seeing this. Too bad the current Libertarian party is full of such whack jobs.
Saaaaay... wanna run?
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I lack the time and money to be anything but a loudmouth who happens to be right.
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Fiscal conservatism means that you can't have social freedom, at least not to have them guaranteed (someone has got to pay to have stuff like that enforced). Nice to have the freedoms on paper, but if you're not going to pony up to have them backed, they wouldn't even get trampled on -- they wouldn't exist. Fiscal conservatism is a great idea -- but until *everyone* is willing to give up something, there will be too much infighting for it to happen. Everyone wants a bigger slice of the pie -- making a bigger pie won't help because someone needs to give up the materials that go into that pie.
Tiny government? Not only is it not right, it is not possible. Even if you cut off all the dead wood (or better yet, transfer the useless people to do clerical jobs in overworked offices), you still need a pretty darn large government to take care of 300 million people (which we should hit sometime this week).
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The pie needs to be the right size, and made with the right ingredients, and cut up the right way. This is, as I think we can pretty much all agree, not the case today.
I think that burning off the dead wood and repurposing a lot of the dross to do meaningful if menial jobs is a good start. By "small," I don't mean sixty-seven people in the whole Federal government, I mean reducing redundancy, waste, and inefficiency at all levels.
In a hypothetical scenario, this would be propagated outward, both via indirect influence (efficiency is good) and direct action (K street would be turned out on its collective ass).
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