Zeev's Turnips Talk Politics (ZTTP)

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OTOT, but hey it's the weekend, and it's Zeev's own thread . . .

You are definitely correctly in stating that a compass is what's required. IMHO, the political landscape is two dimentional: left vs. right along one axis, and statist vs. liberterian along the other othogonal axis. One can be leftist statist, such as a communist, or a right-wing statist, such as the statist religious right. Right-wing statists do not have to like each other, Ashcroft and UBL do not have to like each other any more than a "good" Roumanian fascist had to like a German fascist who thinks all slavics, including his Roumanian "friends" were subhuman.

"Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely." Even a card carrying liberterian can be seduced by the pheromes of power and early success. When Greenspan was featured on the cover of Time magazine back in 1998, I said, they were setting him up for a tragedy of classic Greek proportions. I reiterated at a Xmas party in late 2000, this crash ain't over (despite a massive January effect in 2001 that I was anticipating) until Greenspan is in disgrace. It's unfortunate; seldomly does a libertarian climb that high in the power structure of this great nation, or any other nation, but the seduction of power proved surmount to anyone's discipline. That's why we need hard term limits.