Replies to post #452977 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[zab]

Your party barely represents one million Americans, and I think you have one representative in Wyoming. But you have been around for over 50 years. That's just sad.

[blackhawks]

OK, did you think it was 'hunky dory' during the Trump Administration?

I'll tell you what IS hunky dory under Biden. New job creation that shames Trump's record, FINALLY an Infrastructure Bill, job creator, instead of repeated infrastructure weeks and a Chips and Science Bill, job creator, that is bringing manufacturing back to America.

Lastly, Biden is not a treasonous, insurrection inciting, orange prick like the guy he beat. Nor has he committed impeachable offenses; orange guy leads 2-0.

[fuagf]

livefree_ordie, So you seem to be saying the basis for your saying people here lie is your claim that people put words in your mouth. That's not lying. It could be being mistaken about you, but it isn't lying. I say seem to be because i wouldn't want to give you more mistaken ammo. And whose fault is it if others here don't see you as standing for what you see yourself standing for? Clue: Don't blame all others.

As for your claim

" I wish American’s serving our Government for us would cut spending but posters here seem to think everything is just hunky dory. " ,

on the evidence that is plainly wrong. You say it because it helps you to feel good about yourself. You say it because you believe it yet it is baseless. You ignore the evidence against it. Posts here critical of American gun laws, inequality, poverty, racism are plentiful. Your statement above is rubbish. Take one current example, SoxFan's reply to you

How about we do this for starters and then get back to me.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=172937519

clearly refutes what you just said above. And you ignore it because you don't have anything to say? Why now something like "Good ideas." I'll tell you why because you are not a Chomsky who describes himself as a Libertarian socialist. You come across as conservative to your bootstraps, even though you see Jimmy Carter as a good man.

Back to your totally baseless opinion - Every single poster here would at some time have posted more than one thing which clearly says they do not believe "everything is just hunky dory." Every single poster here.

Yet, again, you still say it. Like Trump, you make things up.

So to your Libertarian bent - that makes you closer to the GOP than to the Democrats, and that is how you have come across here. You remember this one?

ivefree_ordie, So you are capable of posting something other than a relatively nonsensical fiction-filled rant. Congratulations. Much appreciated. Yes, every decent American must have at least respected Jimmy Carter's integrity.
[...] Building a Conservative Movement
Over the past decade, political historians have examined the individuals, institutions, and networks that conservative activists built during the post-WWII period as an alternative to the dominant political and economic establishment.2 Throughout the Sunbelt and in suburban neighborhoods, businessmen, housewives, evangelicals, anticommunists, and libertarians began to organize in local and national politics. As historian Kim Phillips-Fein writes, it was both a diverse social and political movement, in which a “small group of committed activists and intellectuals ultimately managed to win a mass following and a great deal of influence in the Republican Party” by articulating messages of “anticommunism, a laissez-faire approach to economics, opposition to the civil rights movement and commitment to traditional sexual norms.”3
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=171001679

While looking for one post, some others

[...][ Insert: The Liberal Democrats would be a libertarian outfit to the right of the two main Australian political parties.
"On 18 May 2017, the Liberal Democratic Party formed a 'conservative bloc' with One Nation
and the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party in the Western Australia Legislative Council.[42]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Democratic_Party_(Australia) ]
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=172106245

The changes at CNN look politically motivated. That should concern us all
[...]P - A few years back, John Malone, the largest shareholder in Warner Bros. Discovery, made critical comments about CNN, and cited Fox News as a model the network might wish to follow. In a 2021 “Squawk Box” interview, Malone said:
P - Fox News, in my opinion, has followed an interesting trajectory of trying to have news news, I mean some actual journalism, embedded in a program schedule of all opinions. And I think they’ve been relatively successful with a service like Bret Baier, and Brit Hume before him, that try to distinguish news from opinion. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=171857387]
P - Malone describes himself as a “libertarian” although he travels in rightwing Republican circles. In 2005, he held 32% of the shares of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. He is on the board of directors of the Cato Institute. In 2017, he donated $250,000 to Trump’s inauguration.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=171893121

B402, You have repeatedly been given proof Democrats have done so much more for the middle class and the poor than conservatives. That is unarguable.
[...]Context of '1979-1980: Billionaire Libertarians Defeated in Presidential Campaign, Decide to Influence Politics through Organizations'
Watching The Billionaires' Tea Party .. http://vimeo.com/20622744 .. now.
P - This is a scalable context timeline. It contains events related to the event 1979-1980: Billionaire Libertarians Defeated in Presidential Campaign, Decide to Influence Politics through Organizations. You can narrow or broaden the context of this timeline by adjusting the zoom level. The lower the scale, the more relevant the items on average will be, while the higher the scale, the less relevant the items, on average, will be.
1940 and After: Koch Industries Founder Becomes Influential
Right-Wing Backer, Shapes Political Vision of Sons
[...]
1977-Present: Koch Billionaires Fund Libertarian Think Tank
Cato Institute logo.
[Source: Cato Institute]
[...]
1979-1980: Billionaire Libertarians Defeated in Presidential Campaign, Decide to Influence Politics through Organizations
P - Oil billionaire David Koch runs for vice president on the Libertarian Party ticket.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=170911115

Did you know American libertarians are different than those of similar inclination elsewhere.
You are either up early as i am here mostly now, or you have all nighters as i used to do when i was more .. lolol .. your age. wink
A former Mitt Romney policy expert explains why what most people call 'conservative' in America today should really be called something else: Libertarianism
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=168546170

To save repetition read
livefree_ordie, I give you one article and you come out with this crap:
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=170096214 .... again.

Didn't find the post i was looking for but it was to the essence, if Libertarianism was the way why isn't there a single country in the world with a Libertarian government.

[fuagf]

The question libertarians just can't answer

"I lean more so to the Libertarian Party"

If your approach is so great, why hasn’t any country anywhere in the world ever tried it?

By Michael Lind
Published June 4, 2013 4:17PM (EDT)

https://media.salon.com/2013/06/ron_paul.jpg">https://media.salon.com/2013/06/ron_paul.jpg" />
(AP/Charlie Riedel)

Why are there no libertarian countries? If libertarians are correct in claiming that they understand how best to organize a modern society, how is it that not a single country in the world in the early twenty-first century is organized along libertarian lines?

It’s not as though there were a shortage of countries to experiment with libertarianism. There are 193 sovereign state members of the United Nations—195, if you count the Vatican and Palestine, which have been granted observer status by the world organization. If libertarianism was a good idea, wouldn’t at least one country have tried it? Wouldn’t there be at least one country, out of nearly two hundred, with minimal government, free trade, open borders, decriminalized drugs, no welfare state and no public education system?

When you ask libertarians if they can point to a libertarian country, you are likely to get a baffled look, followed, in a few moments, by something like this reply: While there is no purely libertarian country, there are countries which have pursued policies of which libertarians would approve: Chile, with its experiment in privatized Social Security, for example, and Sweden, a big-government nation which, however, gives a role to vouchers in schooling.

But this isn’t an adequate response. Libertarian theorists have the luxury of mixing and matching policies to create an imaginary utopia. A real country must function simultaneously in different realms—defense and the economy, law enforcement and some kind of system of support for the poor. Being able to point to one truly libertarian country would provide at least some evidence that libertarianism can work in the real world.

Some political philosophies pass this test. For much of the global center-left, the ideal for several generations has been Nordic social democracy—what the late liberal economist Robert Heilbroner described as “a slightly idealized Sweden.” Other political philosophies pass the test, even if their exemplars flunk other tests. Until a few decades ago, supporters of communism in the West could point to the Soviet Union and other Marxist-Leninist dictatorships as examples of “really-existing socialism.” They argued that, while communist regimes fell short in the areas of democracy and civil rights, they proved that socialism can succeed in a large-scale modern industrial society.

While the liberal welfare-state left, with its Scandinavian role models, remains a vital force in world politics, the pro-communist left has been discredited by the failure of the Marxist-Leninist countries it held up as imperfect but genuine models. Libertarians have often proclaimed that the economic failure of Marxism-Leninism discredits not only all forms of socialism but also moderate social-democratic liberalism.

But think about this for a moment. If socialism is discredited by the failure of communist regimes in the real world, why isn’t libertarianism discredited by the absence of any libertarian regimes in the real world? Communism was tried and failed. Libertarianism has never even been tried on the scale of a modern nation-state, even a small one, anywhere in the world.

Lacking any really-existing libertarian countries to which they can point, the free-market right is reduced to ranking countries according to “economic freedom.” Somewhat different lists are provided by the Fraser Institute .. http://www.freetheworld.com/release.html .. in Canada and the Heritage Foundation .. http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking .. in Washington, D.C.

According to their similar global maps of economic freedom, the economically-free countries of the world are by and large the mature, well-established industrial democracies: the U.S. and Canada, the nations of western Europe and Japan. But none of these countries, including the U.S., is anywhere near a libertarian paradise. Indeed, the government share of GDP in these and similar OECD countries is around forty percent—nearly half the economy.

Even worse, the economic-freedom country rankings are biased toward city-states and small countries. For example, in the latest ranking of economic liberty by the Heritage Foundation .. http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking .. , the top five nations are Hong Kong (a city, not a country), Singapore (a city-state), Australia, New Zealand and Switzerland (small-population countries).

With the exception of Switzerland, four out of the top five were small British overseas colonies which played interstitial roles in the larger British empire. Even though they are formally sovereign today, these places remain fragments of larger defense systems and larger markets. They are able to engage in free riding on the provision of public goods, like security and huge consumer populations, by other, bigger states.

Australia and New Zealand depended for protection first on the British empire and now on the United States. Its fabled militias to the contrary, Switzerland might not have maintained its independence for long if Nazi Germany had won World War II.

These countries play specialized roles in much larger regional and global markets, rather as cities or regions do in a large nation-state like the U.S. Hong Kong and Singapore remain essentially entrepots for international trade. Switzerland is an international banking and tax haven. What works for them would not work for a giant nation-state like the U.S. (number 10 on the Heritage list of economic freedom) or even medium-sized countries like Germany (number 19) or Japan (number 24).

And then there is Mauritius.

According to the Heritage Foundation, the U.S. has less economic freedom than Mauritius, another small island country, this one off the southeast coast of Africa. At number 8, Mauritius is two rungs above the U.S., at number 10 in the global index of economic liberty.

The Heritage Foundation is free to define economic freedom however it likes, by its own formula weighting government size, freedom of trade, absence of regulation and so on. What about factors other than economic freedom that shape the quality of life of citizens?

How about education? According to the CIA World Fact book, the U.S. spends more than Mauritius—5.4 percent of GDP in 2009 compared to only 3.7 percent in Mauritius in 2010. For the price of that extra expenditure, which is chiefly public, the U.S. has a literacy rate of 99 percent, compared to only 88.5 percent in economically-freer Mauritius.

Infant mortality? In economically-more-free Mauritius there are about 11 deaths per 1,000 live births—compared to 5.9 in the economically-less-free U.S. Maternal mortality in Mauritius is at 60 deaths per 100,000 live births, compared to 21 in the U.S. Economic liberty comes at a price in human survival, it would seem. Oh, well—at least Mauritius is economically free!

Even to admit such trade-offs—like higher infant mortality, in return for less government—would undermine the claim of libertarians that Americans and other citizens of advanced countries could enjoy the same quality of life, but at less cost, if most government agencies and programs were replaced by markets and for-profit firms. Libertarians seem to have persuaded themselves that there is no significant trade-off between less government and more national insecurity, more crime, more illiteracy and more infant and maternal mortality, among other things.

It’s a seductive vision—enjoying the same quality of life that today’s heavily-governed rich nations enjoy, with lower taxes and less regulation. The vision is so seductive, in fact, that we are forced to return to the question with which we began: if libertarianism is not only appealing but plausible, why hasn’t any country anywhere in the world ever tried it?

By Michael Lind

Michael Lind is the author of more a dozen books of nonfiction, fiction and poetry. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Times, Politico, The Financial Times, The National Interest, Foreign Policy, Salon, and The International Economy. He has taught at Harvard and Johns Hopkins and has been an editor or staff writer for The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New Republic, and The National Interest.

https://www.salon.com/2013/06/04/the_question_libertarians_just_cant_answer/

[fuagf]

livefree_ordie, To be fair to all of us, one more, to have it with the other replies. First your post to SoxFan

So not really sure what you do for your news here but again this board likes the news it agrees with all the time so you have that out there right out the gate. But besides telling us all masks help and now knowing that they have zero affect for these viruses here is some items below you perhaps did not know about. Gain of function research lying to congress and then one month later the NIH affirming that was in fact the case, you must have missed those items hey. Alot out there for you to read if one has the time and from multiple sources so please do not take my word on it these just simply exist in our world as is.
Not sure where you have been over these past years this is all old news except the latest from the CIA payments to folks to change their tune on their decisions over creation of this virus via whistleblower testimony.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=172813735

It oozes with condescension doesn't it. Oh, and misrepresentation and misinformation. It does. And as most always you do.

Then just because i jumped again on your misrepresentation of posters here:

ivefree_ordie, Again your personal comment is a mishmash of error, wrong and ignorance. Firstly, yet again, your misrepresentation of this board:
"So not really sure what you do for your news here but again this board likes the news it agrees with all the time..."
That is, yet again, simply projection on your part. See:
- The Wuhan Lab and the Gain-of-Function Disagreement
May 2021 - https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=164053476
.. in reply to that ..
The repeated claim that Fauci lied to Congress about ‘gain-of-function’ research
March, 2023 - https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=171397386

There is much more accurate informed information in those two articles (and
in other posts around them) than in the agenda-driven content of your post.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=172817679

See one difference. You give opinion/make assertion without virtually ever posting
evidence to support what you say. We provide evidence where it's fair we could.

[BOREALIS]

Your HERO