Ah yes. Libertarians.![]()
The Cato Institute has released their most free/least free states in the US of 2016. The least free include New York, California, New Jersey, Maryland, and Hawaii.
Ah yes. Libertarians.![]()
I was going to say, it is a libertarian think tank- what do you expect?
Sometimes I forget that things like public transit are not universally agreed to be good things for society. There are people who actually believe that since public transit is subsidized, it's therefore "welfare," and therefore wrong.
I find it really hard to take libertarians seriously.
I've said it before and I'll say it a hundred times: if you follow libertarian logic through to its inevitable conclusions, all it results in is The Wild West. Every man for himself, frontier logic. Thousands of years of history, of blood and sacrifice and the most horrific game of trial and error imaginable, point to the fact that the social compact--and by necessity, compromise--is necessary in some form.
I suppose there are some out there who think they would be perfectly happy living on their autonomous homestead and defending it from marauders or whatever else. I think these people are delusional. They romanticize eras of human history whose bywords were terror and despair. I mean, why the fuck else is our culture inundated these days with post-apocalyptic narratives, from The Hunger Games to The Walking Dead, if not to remind us of the barbarism we have tried to climb out of, that we struggle every day not to sink back into?
"See everything as an illusion, and enjoy it even though you are not of it."
~Alanis Morissette, paraphrased
I love you guys.
*edit* One of the reasons Maryland is at the bottom of the list is that we have strong gun control laws here.
I think I hate libertarians more than even fundamentalists or neocons. The idea of kicking people off Medicare and Social Security or defunding public schools sends me into a rage spiral.
And also a general hatred of freedomery. I can hear the goosesteps from outside my home, don't tell me. The People's Republic of Takoma Park. Every time I go to the farmer's market, it's stricter security than Heathrow. Everyone's wearing drab colors and driving Trabants.
Honestly, I wonder what rating they'd give DC.
#NotAllLibertarians
(there is a tiny leftist faction! We shout a lot! We hate our party too!)
Not sure where to put this so -
Senate voted to steal $150 billion dollars from the Social Security Trust Fund
Link to Senator Mike Lee's FB post.
ETA: From last year! Sorry, I don't remember hearing about this before, it's still infuriating.