Following up on the steroid post immediately below, I confess that there are some things that make me angrier than others. It is those things that I don’t understand how a person of average education and intelligence, with a sense of decency and respect for others, would endorse.
For example, while there may be a special place reserved in hell for Alan Greenspan who should know better, who can expect the average person on the street to have any opinion at all on the Federal Reserve, or fiat money vs. the gold standard? But what I will say about that “average person” is that he is without excuse if he supports gun control - he really ought to know better, both Constitutionally and in terms of the basic right to self-defense, which is nothing other than the right to life.
What really gets me angry, then, are those things which shouldn’t even be on the table. Extreme poverty? Pollution? Unsafe goods and services? Dangerous working conditions? Land rights? I can see how they are on the table. I can understand why people do not trust the free market, even when I disagree with them.
What shouldn’t be on the table are issues related to invasions of foreign countries and invasions of privacy, and blazingly obvious violations of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. I have a gut hatred of these things, do not understand why anyone can support them, and believe the politicians who bring them about are bad and dangerous people who deserve to be called the F-word (fascist). There are no "good intentions" with any of these; at best a smug self-righteousness and lust for power. There are lots of other things in the government I hate that are not on this list, but not quite as viscerally; the issues are too complicated and/or the intentions are good.
In no particular order, here's an incomplete list of things I hate:
1. Smoking bans in restaurants and bars.
2. Campaign finance reform.
3. The War on Iraq
4. The War on Yugoslavia
5. Gun Control
6. Tax-funded abortions
7. The War on Drugs
8. Attacks on the federal structure of government by the judiciary
9. The federal Department of Education
10. The expansion of NATO
11. Foreign military aid
12. Congressional investigations of steroids, gambling in college athletics, and other interventions in sports
13. The National Endowments for the Arts (and Humanities)
14. Congress delegating legislative, executive, and even judicial powers to “independent” bureaucratic agencies.
15. Congress delegating its authority to declare war to the President
16. Federalized airport security
17. The PATRIOT Act
18. The Department of Orwellian Phraseology (Homeland Security)
19. Protective tariffs
20. Subsidies to corporations
21. Restricted ballot access
22. Calling up the National Guard for overseas combat duty in undeclared wars
I could probably name more, but righteous indignation, I think David Brin once wrote, is a powerful drug. I should probably stop.
James Leroy Wilson's one-man magazine.
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In relation to your view of gun control: Are there any weapons that private citizens should be forbidden to own? --Everett Wilson
ReplyDeleteI hate most of those things, too.
ReplyDeleteAnd of course, Everett asks the age old question, to paraphrase: "Should everybody be allowed to own a nuclear bomb...?"
Understandable that one would ask that but I suggest we're so far from that the question isn't even worth considering. We're moving too far in the other direction, imo.
Just like people suggesting if the support the Libertarians, we'll have no government at all. Again, we can't even slow the growth of government, much less reduce the size of it. No need to worry about anarchy in our lifetimes.