What Exactly Do You Mean By Libertarian/Socialist?

I am a libertarian first but if not enough liberty is allowed it is a path back to monarchy much like Russia is currently marching towards.  If I cant have liberty, and I do mean the extremist kind, then all laws and regulations made will benefit someone and that will most likely be someone in with the political structure as we have seen since Reagan.  40% of our economy is government based and that is after 30 years of Republican rule promising libertarians their liberty while taking it away.  How did that happen?

So a bunch of wealthy connected white guys moved to the colonies from Europe.  Their wealth grew through the use of slavery and indentured servitude, what they did to white people and we like to forget, and of course markets that they had little to no competition in.  After a few decades these men looking over their fields and piles of money looked at the slaves around them and their lack of liberty and saw no crime yet decided that taxation without representation for them, to be specific white land owning males, was akin to slavery and therefore completely unacceptable.  If there is one thing I have found to be true in this country during the last 30 years or so its that if you want to see someone cry the blues of how unfree they are look to those with the most freedom as they actually know what enslavement is as they enslave others.  

Why did you have to be a landowner though? That is a very good question with a very revealing answer, land owner's were largely of aristocratic or merchant class bloodlines, in other words those that had always been in power under the monarchy were now the only ones allowed to vote.  In fact most white males were not allowed to vote until 1850, up to then it was between 10-16% of the white male population that could vote.  So much for the revolution of the people, more like of the gentry.  This explains why most of our leaders are related even though usually distantly as they are the ones that are legacies in the top schools in the country, Yale was founded in 1701, Harvard in 1639 and Princeton in 1746; the early bird gets the worm I suppose.  Those men voted in people that served their interests no matter what the constitution said about equality and rights they made sure they took care of them and theirs first by creating fun little laws and groups to give us Lawyers and Doctors and then allow those industries to control how many of them could be created and the standards they would be judged by.  Imagine a computer programming group given that much power, do you think anyone would learn programming to bring down costs if it will hurt their profits?  It does bring into focus though why multi-generational career families from banking to law to medicine also tend to be of the ruling class, their money and foundations mixed with their legacy entrance status to the right schools ensure the American aristocracy the same edge that the top colleges in Europe do their own aristocracy.  With or without great wealth the deck is stacked in their favor, again much like in Europe.  I am not saying this is something to go and get the pitchforks out for I am merely saying this is the reality of our history and the current state of our civilization so when judging bumper sticker slogans filled with common sense realize that the structure of our civilization, as in much of the world, is irrational and nonsensical by design(or at least no one suggests changing things).  One last note on those best schools that is also why the best and brightest from the underclasses get free rides, they may out compete the ruling class so they assimilate them into their culture and build bonds and connections with them which of course further ensures their own futures as well.

The reason we are a Republic is a deal that was made between those with wealth and those without and its not in the spirit of the French Republic of rights but actually Plato's Republic with the phantom shadows on the wall for all but the wealthy that actually control the shadow puppets and the ruling class that are its stewards behind the scenes with foundations and think tank investment all written off on their taxes.  In a democracy the voters get what they vote for, in a Republic the people vote and the leaders tell them what they will get.  A good example is the Emancipation Proclamation that though it sounds good in reality was used to give Corporations personhood so they had rights but not being a person cannot be incarcerated or controlled like a man can.  This is why we love to stack our supreme court with ex-corporate lawyers.

The bumper sticker "Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner" can honestly be rebutted with "A Republic is two wolves forcing a sheep at gun point to decide which one will eat it, every four years or so."  

Are you confused and think you have rights?  Go call some cop an asshole over and over again, or any annoying name for that matter, and once he finally finds a reason to arrest you try to tell them about your rights.  You do not have rights in this country unless you have the money to pay a lawyer to fight for them after they have been trampled on, which of course means if you do not have a lawyer you have only the rights respected by those around you that enforce the law and the law is created for those in power.  This is why they are called negative rights, they are the things you can't have taken from you but to prove that they have been taken you have to sue.  It is a wonderful money maker to the lawyer class though as they tend to make very large cuts of any settlements, see how trading away titles for professions wasn't such a bad deal for them after all?  Think about that the next time your city gets hit with a huge civil rights lawsuit, maybe you should be a little less upset by the cost and a little more about those whose rights in the moment were trampled and what if it had been you.  Let me let you in on a little secret we get really upset about those lawsuits and they will pass new laws to make them harder or impossible and then we will have no way of even enforcing our rights, how's them apples.

Let us jump ahead to FDR, when he came into office the country was on the edge of revolution.  In fact before the Russian Revolution America was believed to be the fertile ground for a communist revolt not Russia do to the social unrest that the gilded age had created.  One interesting thing is that only twice in US history has the top 1% owned 20% of the wealth, 1929 and 2008.  I am not saying this is the only reason but the money supply is not infinite if more money exists I know for a fact inflation goes up so that means if those at the top are getting all the extra money but prices are going up others at the bottom are being priced out no matter how hard they work.  My favorite argument for 100% inheritance tax is that its wonderful you want to leave your child 100k but if everyone above you is handing their kids 100m your child is still more screwed every day then they were the day before financially as that 100k can only afford a house until the 100m kids want to buy it or run out of houses to buy or space to build.  Not to mention your child did not earn it and therefore you are hobbling them and their future by not allowing them to learn the power of earning something while still giving them less then they need to compete in an ever inflating market with finite resources more and more of which are accumulating interest in large bank accounts.  If money were infinite this would be fine but if it were infinite it would have no meaning and no spending power.  One last point on this is that the only people who "create" wealth in this country work for the Federal Reserve and the nations banks and they invent it out of thin air, not because they are smart or skilled.  Sales people do not "create" wealth neither do inventors, they take pre-exisiting money and shift it too their industries from other industries which creates profits not wealth.  

FDR was not comfortable with socialism, which is not to surprising he did come from the ruling class.  His method was to make a deal with US industry to fund US workers health, also partially caused by wage controls during WWII, and retirement instead of higher taxes.  It was at this moment that American industry and government became wed, which when it was done in other nations was called Fascism as defined by Mussolini but since this is the US we are not allowed to say this out loud.  If it would have helped the population that would have been classic Socialism, if they take our money to fund the companies that is Fascism though since it is done to create jobs and redistribute wealth it is more akin to Hitlers Fascism than Mussolini's and is now more popularly called Corporatism.  I think you are now starting to see why the entire Socialism and Fascism debates in this country are basically useless, we are both and no one who lives here admits it because they would lose ratings and most importantly advertising dollars.  

Up until FDR and WWII we also considered arial bombing of civilian populations to be a war crime, but then decided it was to fun and convenient to stop.  One of many things the Nazi's exported to the entire world.  Well that and the space race, the CIA and many darker things I don't even like to think about like South American death squads and the training they learned at The Schools Of The America's now re-named due to political pressure to close it.

Once FDR made the deal with industry the political winds changed little until the battle for Civil Rights gave the Republican party a candidate that for the first time was actually a Libertarian, Barry Goldwater.  Unfortunately for all but the racists his brand was based largely off of keeping Civil Rights, which according to the constitution is a national concern, to be left to states choices to keep the Jim Crowe laws in place.  He was defeated in a land slide.  

Then came Nixon, Nixon set the stage for a lot of how the world now works.  First he gave us "the southern strategy" which involved either openly race baiting or alluding to it in the hope of attracting white southern votes, the code words used were big government(like the ones that made african americans their equals) inner city crime(minority crime)urban decay(other races moving into white neighborhoods) the war on drugs(Nixon began the war on drugs, which was largely understood at the time to be a way to incarcerate large numbers of inner city youths and other undesirables(those that vote Democratic)).  Its actually a brilliant political strategy that tipped the balance of the voting public, in many states if you commit a felony you lose your right to vote for life and many drug offenses are felonies, this is akin to a Democratic president having a war on evangelicals and then wondering why suddenly Democratic candidates always win.  One of the interesting things about Nixons presidency is that he was the last to use price controls on gasoline, he also defied the middle east in his support for Israel which both directly lead to Carters oil crisis.  Actually one final Nixon point is that he gave us our current health care system that is now imploding.  The idea of paying for care that you were discouraged from using seemed like a winning strategy for him and investors and for them they were right.  

The reason this is important is that the "horrible" President Carter then had the energy crisis and a budget nightmare to deal with when he got into office not to mention paying for Vietnam which regardless of what people say was not paid for by fairies kisses.  Despite all of this he was the last president to come close to balancing the budget, and his fiscal plans had methods in them to continue that trajectory.  Nixon had requested an intelligence assessment of Russian military capabilities because he did not trust any of the intelligence agencies and thought a hand picked assessment team could give him the results of his nightmares, he was right.  The result was an assessment from fantasy land, their numbers were inflated by multiples, but that and the economy helped to frighten the public into voting against Carter even though at that very time Reagan was negotiating with terrorists(the Iranians were traded arms for hostages on the stipulation they would not be freed until after he was sworn in).  Please look this stuff up, I can't make up stuff this crazy.  One last note about Carter many stories exist of a pre-election intelligence briefing in which the CIA really felt they had an ally moving into the White House he was intelligent and really seemed to understand though he was mostly quiet on many things during the meeting.  Later it was realized he had been quiet due to his horror of our backing of dictatorships with some of the worst human rights abuses in the world at the time.  What was read as understanding was actually confirmation of something he wanted to change.  This is why Iran fell, he refused to continue propping up our Iranian puppet regime that Eisenhower had put in  place to avoid having to invade the country back in the 1950's.  This is also why they took our people hostage, because they new the real power in the country and real danger of a counter-revolution stood not with the Shah nor with his supporters but from the US embassy and the CIA which had always kept the Shah in power regardless of his unpopularity.  It is my opinion that this crossing of the CIA is directly tied to him losing the next election as according to some works on the history of the CIA they felt they had now found a friend in Reagan.

Of course when Reagan was voted in those big scary defense assessments meant we had to spend and spend big to save our souls.  The problem of course is that Russia was bankrupt in the 1970's and Afghanistan completely destroyed them, we of course helped by starting Al Qaeda.  They were not only not building arms they were preparing to dissolve the country the question was when.  All of those arms needed to be built somewhere so Reagan insured with many rural representatives that they largely went to rural areas where jobs were hard to find to avoid all of the children moving to the city and voting Democratic or having their votes watered down by non-Republicans.  

So the Russians stepped aside once they could no longer feed their people and Reagan took credit for something he had nothing to do with.  To me it is akin to Nixon taking credit for the Moon landing.  Speaking of Reagan taking credit where none was due he also cut taxes without cutting spending, this was such a brilliant plan that we decided to do it for 30 more years until we stopped(I hope we have stopped).  If you cut taxes sooner or later you will have to pay for what you spend, cutting spending is the only way to save money.  Then he also expanded the war on drugs and therefore our prison population and when wages began to go up he signed an amnesty for undocumented workers that again lowered labors pay.  I know this is a strange gripe but I am reminded of a story from the black plague.  After the plague hit England so few peasants were still alive that they could actually ask for better wages and better treatment, when the gentry refused they refused to work based off of market principles, so the king made a law forcing them too on penalty of death.  

This is my way of saying capitalism sounds like a good idea but you may want to check where you stand first.  Capitalism has nothing to do with keeping what you earn that would be Propertisim and since it would be hard to tax no government has tried it.  In fact Adam Smith himself considered a tax on wages akin to slavery and instead suggested taxes on rent of property as then only those that could afford to pay it since they were making a profit off of their invested capital would have to pay.  Before you go and build him a statue though you may want to keep in mind that this concept would have made it easy to keep in place the land owning men to be the only vote as many states tied voting rights to taxes that were then only charged on property, again allowing only those at the top to vote.  Capitalism means that you live off of what your capitol generates, so instead of laboring FOR capitol, your capitol generates more capitol via investment.  This leads me to my favorite quote while debating capitalists "You're a capitalist?  How much capitol do you have invested?"  401k's do not count its not yours or you would not be taxed for accessing it not to mention if you do not vote at share holder meetings you still lack any control over your investment.  If you can't make a living off of your investments alone in my book your not a capitalist because you earn your bread from your labor and hard work.  We have had a few names used to describe those people throughout history slave/peasent/serf though we now have the freedom to starve wooohooo; hold it I do not see a time when you were not free to starve, never mind.  Let me ask from a historical perspective in a world with Billionaires and Millionaires(more than 100M) and small 'm' millionaires(less than a 100m) what will those that have under 1m to their name be considered?  Thats right the poor.  Middle class would be small 'm' millionaires, just for a bit of historical perspective.

One little discussed factoid is that manufacturers and farmers used to have a good deal of control of the prices of their products but around a hundred years ago, right around the time that the Federal Reserve was created that all changed and Capitol from then on trumped all.  If you invest money and I work to make it and Joe came up with the idea and the engineering why does only one person get to make all of the profits and then choose how why or if he compensates the others?  The common answer is that they can choose to work with someone else or not to work at all, the real reason of course is because they write the contracts using societal coercion.  Is freedom to starve freedom or coercion?  When taxes are takin or you will lose all you have it is considered coercion but those same people do not consider a lack of choice by those on the bottom coercion though they are being coerced via homelessness and starvation.  I know we can't just give them food but this is also not what I am actually saying either, FDR's New Deal was created for an incentive for rural people to leave the safety of the farm where they had food and shelter with all of their relatives to the city to work in the industry that America needed to compete in the world.  Though some of it was created to answer growing social problems by those that had already left for the cities due to the dire economic times.  It was a new social safety net to take the place of the farm.  Reagan brought an end to, or a beginning of the end to the social safety net as we new it but did not replace it with anything other than rhetoric.   

During the early 80's the Reagan revolution was built on the back of two things, first southern white rage at having to pay for the same social programs they had always voted to support for races other than just themselves and two that no one should be able to lay around and get money for doing no work.  America was supposed to be a magical land where if you worked you would not only survive and be respected you would excel.  Now if you watch movies or TV or the current political right its about those lazy people that do not make enough, not about those that do not work.  The reason why is that though inflation has gone up since 1980 when Reagan stopped Carters programs, that were meant to balance the budget and ballooned our national defense budget to astronomical proportions, income for everyone but the top 5% has flatlined or actually gone down.  People work 2-3 full time jobs to have a small apartment, not to buy a new home, but just to make rent.  

So after Reagan or as I like to call him Chief Smoke Up The Ass went full blown Alzheimer's, this happened while he was still in office his second term was mostly H.W. Bush(which may have something to do with why he couldn't remember anything about Iran Contra, or he was lying).  H.W. Bush took over which is probably my second favorite Republican president since Eisenhower as he was more the country club conservative type which want more to balance the budget and save the nation rather than pushing a radical agenda that may destroy it, like um cutting taxes and not cutting spending.

My first favorite Republican president since Eisenhower was William Jefferson Clinton.  Why was he a Republican you ask, well not only did he cut spending and raise taxes to responsibly pay our bills he also reformed welfare and gave us welfare to work programs.  Classically Democratic Presidents are supposed to help the poor and middle class, Republican presidents help balance the budget pay the bills and give us programs that sound like they will help the poor and middle class, think Nixon with managed care, but in reality make a handful of their friends huge amounts of money and screw those it was supposed to help when it melts down somewhere between 10-30 years later.  Clinton gave us NAFTA, or as I like to call it the trade agreement that ensured the midwest would become an employment black hole; welfare reform where we bus people 2-3 hours away from where they live to make minimum wage at a mall in a rich neighborhood and then get bussed back 2-3 hours where they are then judged for not properly raising their kids who they never actually see and the welfare payments they do get are then cut by the amount they make which makes it even harder to get ahead as now they are not only stuck in a minimum wage job they are stuck on welfare.  

The other thing to keep in mind about welfare is that most welfare recipients live in areas with few jobs but since it is handed out by the states and not the federal government if they leave in the hopes of finding a job they may be leaving only to starve and have nothing and its pretty impossible to save up money on the amounts paid to welfare recipients to give a cushion for a move and they have kids to feed as well.  I am not saying no options exist I am just saying the specter of welfare we have been sold is not the welfare we currently have and was barely the welfare we once had.  My mother was on welfare when my father took off and left his three kids to fend for themselves in the late 70's.  She worked a full time job and went to college full time while raising those three kids, if the government wants my money to help people like that I have no issue with it because the other options were starvation or pimping out herself or her kids(feel the freedom).

Due to the 90's welfare to work programs, even welfare recipients work, so what is the difference between a minimum wage worker at WalMart who gets a subsidy from the government of a few hundred a month to take care of her kids over and above what WalMart pays and the military contractor getting no bid contracts?  Call me crazy but I believe that we should respect those that work.  What a person makes from the job they have is sadly not usually a matter of choice but location and availability not to mention talent and intelligence or just down right skill and parenting.  Factors that we can manipulate a bit but not very often control, but when there I do believe they should be allowed to get ahead.  So in short what is the difference between a welfare to work person and a military contractor except that the welfare to work person makes a whole lot less and costs me less in my taxes.  Of course if we allowed the government to manufacture there own arms it would be more difficult for them to be sold to our enemies and they would be in house and cheaper and maybe we could even move some welfare to work people into the area to work real jobs that are needed instead of making them work at Orange Julius but maybe I am just crazy.

I am a huge fan of Ron Paul and brought him to many peoples attention but he was not allowed to win for a reason.  The Dems and the Rep's are both socialist.  Dem's want to build infrastructure, education and healthcare which build the countries future prospects(remember when people talk about the "good old days" of the US they discuss the 50-60's which was when we were at our most socialist).  Rep's invest in the military and prison industrial complexes through public private partenerships which involve someone telling them how much they will be charged and then us paying it no matter the cost with our tax dollars.  Both sides invest in public/private partnerships largely owned by parent mega-corporations that give us our media and news as well as cover our debates, if he cut off the tax dollars from them 40% of our economy would disappear over night. 

This is why Kucinich's seemingly crazy idea of a Peace Industrial complex is actually a brilliant idea though it is openly mocked as the only way to stop the military industrial complex, from lobbying for more wars through their parent companies media outlets and lobbyists, is to refocus their profits to things that do not involve killing brown people.  This is also why Ron Paul made very valid arguments for gutting government programs across the board.  In our current structure when more people go to prison Wall Street profits go up.  When a war or bombing campaign is declared the stock market goes up.  When a new law is put in place that will involve more prisoners staying in jail longer the stock market goes up.  We as a nation have become vampires of the poor of the world, not because we want to but through complicity, when our 401k's go up some of it is from blood money.  It was not done because we wanted that but because we listened to what people said and what made sense and then never actually watched what they were doing no less thought about the consequences as a nation.  It is because we were in search of a free lunch so they gave it to us the only way they could, by making deals with unsavory characters and back room deals that involved the upper and middle classes to generate most of their revenue and profits from those at the bottom via penalties and hidden taxes then handed to those better off as Credit Card "bonus points" low interest rates and the like(good reasons exist for this but the more money you have the less you need to spend and the less you have the more you need to spend and that is pretty twisted culturally).  For examples look at Pay Day Loan places and the like, many more exist.  We do not do this to be evil, we do this because it is easy.  The poor are the least educated and the least likely to have access to resources as they spend most or all of those on either food and shelter or on intoxicants the deal with the hell that is their lives.  Do not get me wrong they too need to stand up and do their part but drug addiction is a symptom of a problem not a problem in and of itself and when a society is stricken it is the society that has a disease not just the individuals.  

Another few things to ponder about the drug war, why was it suddenly so much of an issue immediately following the civil rights movement?  I know that suddenly drugs were everywhere but why then, who benefits?  Why is it that the drug war was accepted in the early years when it was largely used in minority neighborhoods and as the savageness of the enforcement went up and then the brutality of the criminals and the prison system grew more and more out of control that we never investigated the correlation for possible causation.  Why is it now with police brutality incidence on the rise nation wide as well as cases of civil rights abuses regardless of color we do not see that we created this beast by allowing our fears to fuel the laws that would "only affect those other people."  Why are we again making the similar but drastically worse mistakes of ceding our and our fellows citizens and humans rights in the hopes of protecting us from our neighbors?  

Listen all of the people I truly fear in this world wear three piece suits and mostly reside in DC, NY and LA and they are not liberal or conservative but they run everything, and if they do not they have a buddy down the hall or an old family friend that does because that is how aristocracy works.  A guy on the street regardless of race can at worst take my life and that by the stats is even doubtful, I have lived in some of the worst cities in this country and I have yet to have a problem.  People are people no matter where you go but if you run across desperate people turn and run away but that goes for the city or the country, in fact in the country it is harder to lose them as there are fewer targets to choose from but I digress.  I have been threatened with being sued and ruined by many a person in a business suit though, and thats a threat that should be much scarier to people than it is.  They can take away everything via charging you to pay for a lawyer for years if nothing else, not to mention what their connections can bring down on you like a swarm of locusts.  In fact come to think of it I know a good deal more people that have lost everything due to legal or health problems than I know that have ever been mugged or really touched by crime in anyway.  I am not saying it is a scientific sample I am saying look at your own life and think about that and then think of our cultures ingrained fear of crime, it's actually completely irrational.

I will predict the future for you though, the drug laws will change over the next twenty years to be much more lax and centered around treatment, we are in the process of trading the scary drug war for another scary war with the intent of taking away further freedoms and making piles of cash.  Do not think that all of this is just government power grabs because it is much more complicated than that.  

The media that gives us our news and entertainment is based off of fear, fear of loneliness/rejection/crime/government/our neighbors/weird people also sells us many products to help us calm those fears as well as manufacturing arms and other investments that make our fear make them money.  The one crime of Michael Moore was ruining a perfectly good message with Heston's interview that turned off the NRA crowd because the documentary was not about guns, Canadians have guns and they don't have this problem.  What they do not have is a little fear machine in their living rooms selling them everything known to man that they absolutely must have or the terrorists will get 'um.  This topic did get me to thinking though about when exactly we as a nation began to hate and fear our nation and I think it is pretty traceable to around 1964 or so.  Which is my nice oh so subtle way of saying the inability of most to explain rationally why they fear a government made up of people like them(not that it is reality but that is the myth they spout while fearing it) is because we really do not have a rational reason but more a vague cultural meme.  The major group aggrieved that had this reaction historically was the segregationist south which was exported to the north in the 70's via music and a hunger for independence from the nation that gave us Nixon and Vietnam and then into a string of Hollywood movies discussing the horrors of government(often about coverups and conspiracy theories and corruption).  By the time I was a teenager I was staunchly anti-government though now those federal officers were being used against drugs and moonshining and gun bunnies so it was a little closer to home.  I then stapled the current version of the Federal Government to the rhetoric and bumper sticker statements of the baby boomer generation without understanding their historical relevance.  This is my long version of if you fear your government please tell me why and really put thought into it.  Comparing services that are local or national and small company versus mega corporation could those problems and inefficiencies be more due to size than the provider of the service?

Another good point about Reaganisim is to ask what our unemployment rate would look like if the prison population had not boomed?  We have 5% of the worlds population but 25% of the worlds prisoners, if we went back to pre-Reagan prison numbers our unemployment rate would look apocalyptic which is my way of saying that the economy has not done well in the last 30 yrs, it has stayed largely the same but less people are around to complain(illegals can't complain, and ex-felons are ignored) and fewer people are making any profits.  Now think about bringing the troops home from all of our wars and our bases over seas and emptying the prisons to that level and you have the numbers that are a bit more honest, at least immigrants are leaving due to falling wages *weeps*.  

Is it in the prison industrial complex's best interests to let out prisoners or rehabilitate them?  Wouldn't that bring down their profits and therefore their numbers on Wall Street?  On the military industrial complex, those oh so scary weapons that Saddam supposedly had we(our military industrial complex) sold them to him, if we had not how difficult would it have been to destroy him?  It is my belief that the military and prison industrial complexes until destroyed and turned back to only the public sector will continue to destroy or morals/image and nation as that is how they make profits.  

The truly dark secret is that this is new.  Before the 80's a handful of families controlled most of our economy but they were patriotic and therefore put the nation before even profits more often than not.  Now the people that run our nations corps and banks are citizens of the world only out for their own profit and what has happened is that our economy was gutted and the homes/savings and retirements(think 401k's) funded their ability to gut it.  Ever notice how public/private partnerships always start cheaper but then end up costing more and more but we have stopped questioning their costs and now just question whether the program should exist because they cost too much.  It seems that we have decided that a few people always must make an incredible amount of money for our government to function because if we ran it ourselves we could not pay those giant salaries and therefore things would be much cheaper, not to mention that no profit would need to be made to pay investors instead the job would just need to be done.  I feel few things should be treated this way but in Canada they pay $98 a month for their socialized health care plan, let that number roll around in your head for a bit while you think of the evils of their single payer system while reading this Snopes article about the reality of the Canadian system.

Speaking of the reason we can't have a single payer system(Wall Street) I am not a friend of 401k's, I believe my exact argument originally was that if we lost pensions and company backed retirement 401k's would force the nation to bail out wall street or everyone would lose their 401k money.  Of course that has just happened.  I am not saying I am a genius I am just saying we were sold something for nothing, greater retirement money from Wall Street than from a regular retirement plan without any good reason why that would work, especially when the largest investing generation which is the baby boomers are all going to be cashing out at the same time which causes yup stocks to get cheaper.  The reason they thought it might apparently was because they would be gambling with our money and if they lost they would be bailed out with our tax dollars, though your lost retirement money will not return only theirs.  So if you think about it those that lost are actually paying for this twice, what they lost plus what they owe in taxes.  I think one of my more amusing statements about 401k's went like this "so if I have to have a 401k or no retirement, and I have to shop at WalMart or not shop, and we all make 10 an hour and no one can afford health insurance how does that make me more free?"  The normal argument against socialism is that it takes away our freedom of choice but we have already lost that to the market as well.  If I have to choose between market "socialism" and government "socialism" I am with the government type as historically it has a better track record and less pain for families and workers.  What is market socialism you ask, well its when the government bails out big business and enacts regulations in their interests and against the consumers and consumer choice yet does not help the citizens that they are supposed to represent.  You know America, also see cannibal capitalism, also see fascism, also see corporatism, also see kleptocracy.

Wages have been stagnate yet inflation has gone up, some of that is due to healthcare costs some just due to a lack of any trickle in the trickle down economy.  In fact I think if you feel a trickle you may want to do the smell test as I am pretty sure they are just pissing on us all.  We are witnessing the building of a new aristocracy built on the cry of liberty when it is anything but.  Reagan used Rand and her philosophy to win the White House, said things like she said but then added to the collective power of corporations and the wealthy while eroding the middle and lower classes standard of living.  It has not stopped eroding and probably will never fully stop.  Obama is not a socialist, he is another center right american president just like every other Democratic president this nation has ever had.  By our standard he is center left but thats because we are quickly becoming the far right of the world, this is why we support fascist and royal governments over democracies unless we own them.  That is of course the entire point of the World Bank, we give them money and then we tell them what laws they can make to the great benefit of America's corporations, not the people the Corporations.  See Reagan ended the habit of the people getting a cut when he broke the unions back in the early 80's and rang the bell for the end of the New Deal much like Nixon did when he deregulated trucking which now costs the states to regulate and police what used to be the unions job.  All of that mythic prosperity is real though it is just moving with greater vigor from the bottom to the top and staying there but since we have more money that means inflation which is why prices keep going up.  Actually they have been going up since 2000 as the dollar began to slide, we just did not notice because we sent all of the manufacturing to cheaper and cheaper locales but still kept paying the same for it, now those prices are going up no matter where the work is done and yet we still need replacements for those jobs that were lost.

I am a Socialist Libertarian though, I believe in Social Liberty first(as economic liberty means nothing to the poor and I am one of them) because no state or government has a right to tell me how to live my life and I think it is in the public's best interest to create a humane social safety net in the knowledge that sooner or later it may be them that need a hand to get back up(often called anarchism which is a more anti-authoritarian version of libertarianism basically).  This creates an educated and secure workforce that in turn innovates more and competes more securely in the global marketplace.  I believe, if available, in the full libertarian tool kit its just not an option to vote for, a party of true libertarianism does not even exist in this country, Ron Paul is considered to extreme by the Libertarian party.  If I can't have Libertarianism than I am a Socialist as that is the best way to ensure that the poor get fed and are not ground into the dirt which is what we have done over the last 10 years, "jobs americans won't do" do not exist just jobs that americans won't do unless paid enough which is the essence of the market supposedly.  Now with HB1 Visa's we are importing skilled labor though we have people that are unemployed with the education and skills needed but they do not want to work for 30k when last year they made 100k, but how would you feel if your bills stayed the same you had no family to help you and now they want to cut your pay by 70%?

I as well am annoyed by entitlement, I hate that the wealthy think they are entitled to tax loopholes and entitled to reap huge profits investing in the insurance industry that's sole purpose anymore seems to be to bankrupt my friends and family and then when they get sick cut their coverage.  I hate that they feel entitled to pay those that work for them so little and treat them so badly, I hate that they feel entitled to whine and bitch like its the end of the world when a tax hike comes but look at me to say "stop bitchin and work harder" when there are no jobs due to their classes investment mistakes or when my taxes go up.  I am sick to death of their feeling of entitlement when it comes to sending our friends and family in the military over seas to fight wars that more than anything are great profit generators for the benefit of the same class that uses think tanks and foundations to twist the publics views and perception via soft propaganda all while being protected financially by mountains of tax loopholes and again it is paid for by our tax dollars.  Take a look at what foundations and think tanks have a seat at the table as well, The Heritage Foundation(tied to Cheney Republican Think Tank) and the other most common one is CATO which is a libertarian think tank.  Often CATO and Heritage are put into a debate to have both sides but notice that it is conservative debating libertarian with no actual left wing voice around, liberal media my ass.  Of course what is meant by "liberal" media is that they are socially liberal, which they make very obvious but we are supposed to be able to discuss and debate other things than social issues and of course they have been used as nothing but a distraction.  If you want to see left wing news check out Democracy Now with Amy Goodman, that's center left news.

I do think people are entitled to be treated equally, and that they have an equal right to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness but that is impossible without libertarianism to throw off the leash of slavery that they use to make money off of or socialism to constantly re-level the playing field for those barely keeping up.  Think how much the rich pay to keep the poor as poor as possible.  Sure you can say that they just want to pay less in taxes but if they just wanted to pay less they could give away their money and suddenly they pay the same as everyone else.  They can't though, its a big game of king of the hill and we are losing because we think they are on some of our sides and their not.

So knowing all of this back story I choose to blend two opposing political view points to describe not so much a new political concept as much as my view of the choices available instead of the rhetoric spouted.  Keep in mind that Carter was going to legalize pot and Reagan was going to dissolve the Federal Reserve, either they lie or they can't do everything they think they can, either way Socialism on one side or the other is a reality in this country I just happen to think if we said it more honestly and openly we may get better programs as when we lie about things we tend to hide them and sunlight is the only solvent to heal all wounds.  I will post some ideas later about ideas for a humane libertarian world which we mostly have the technology to implement now but until then I would suggest checing out the Venus Project as it is pretty interesting.