A distrust of right-wing politics and economics does not automatically mean an endorsement of Communist dictatorship, and a refusal to immediately implement your brand of exremism does not mean a government is on the slippery slope to the Gulag, either.

There are many countries in the world (in fact, almost all the “Western Liberal Democracies” who you have called “Socialist” at one time or another), who show no signs of sliding into a state of death camps and Bolshevik horror. There are also innumerable examples of murderous right wing dictatorships that you have defended merely because they declared themselves anti-Communist. And of course, there are plenty of butchers throughout history who never heard of Communism or Capitalism. Butchery and economics are indeed related, but not in the way you’ve convinced yourself

Nazis had death camps, but you have conveniently decided they are Communists too, so you have managed to define that flat-earth, fake-moon-landing, Elvis lives contradiction right out of existence.

Tom, you are obsessed with the idea that everyone is out to plunder your goods, so you view the world through a glass, darkly. Every contradiction or questioning, much less outright challenge, of your position is seized upon as evidence of the persuasiveness, ruthlessness and diabolical ubiquity of your enemies, and of their imminent success.

Yes, look at this thread. I started with a post that mildly disagreed with Buck’s theoretical position, although I was somewhat sympathetic to its main suggestion. You had to jump in because it threatened one of your fundamental axioms, the infallibility of the founding fathers, and that said infallibility can be logically demonstrated.

It went downhill from there, because you don’t like your any of your axioms questioned. It is obvious you believe that anyone who questions even one of them is at the very least, mistaken. In mathematics, axioms are optional, they can’t be proven or misproven. They can only be proposed.

Well, I question ALL of your axioms. And I’m not a Communist, or a Socialist, or even opposed to Capitalism (although I don’t worship it as if it were straight from god).

That’s what you find so disturbing about me. It’s not that I’m a True Believer Marxist, hell, you could understand that, you’ve met people like that before, or at least, you’ve
imagined them. No, what really terrifies you is that someone who isn’t a True Believer Marxist doesn’t believer any of your political calculus, who not only rejects it as bad politics, but who views it as an anomalistic pseudoscience, a crackpot religion, a paranoid conspiracy theory, a superstitious folk tale.

And since I don’t feel that way about all Conservatives, some of whom I even agree with on some matters, I’m afraid that it must be your fault.

And yes, employing children as coal miners may not be as evil as sending them to Siberia, but it’s still fucking intolerable. I cannot believe you would actually use that moral non sequitur to make your point.

If we really lived in a society that’s 60% predators, it’d be Mad Max flaming sky time. That tired aphorism says more about the worldview of conservatives than about democracy.

The progression on the “Ten Thousand Commandments” thread was disturbing.

That you could actually post a picture of child mine workers as an implied justification for your position, versus the mountains of skulls, death camp children, and all the rest on the other side, something that had to instantly occur to anyone fielding that argument, shows that you’ve basically self-destructed on this subject.

When I think about it, that may be my fault. Sorry.

You are so paranoid of government power, but you never once recognize the tyranny of wealth.
Money trumps parliaments and kings because it can afford to buy them.

Its lawyers, guns and money that rule the world, not the “rabble”.

Why the Greeks? They had slaves, too.

The reason we need democracy is that the wolves are always in the minority. But they are always hungry and they are never satisfied. And they are the ones that always run in packs and have big teeth.

“To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his
fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose
fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily
the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise
of his industry and the fruits acquired by it”
Thomas Jefferson, letter to Joseph Milligan, April 6, 1816

Noble words, from a man who bought, sold and bred slaves. Its easy to talk about freedom when you own the farm, and everybody on it.

But I guess, to be fair to him, he did occasionally feel terrible about it.

It’s a non-taxpaying majority deciding who’s going to get the money from the Treasury.

It’s a mob deciding that a minority’s property would look a lot better in the mob’s pockets.

Something like 60 percent of the Federal government is now devoted to some form of wealth redistribution. That this should be driven solely by majority rule should be a flashing red siren in the mind of anyone who still has a rational mind left.

This is not “progress.” It is a historical pattern that devolves into societies where “democracy” ceases to be a major issue.

The Constitution was deliberately designed to be difficult to vote around. The process of amendment was designed with that in mind.

“These are things not subject to majority rule,” it says. Most of them involve our rights.

Nobody likes regulation. And no one denies it is often stupid, pointless, outdated, or (yes) insufficient. But it is necessary. It is essential.

Incidentally, it is my understanding Ben Franklin was an enviromentalist.

In 1739, Franklin teamed up with fellow neighbors to petition the Philadelphia Assembly to put a stop to the tanneries waste dumping activities. His key argument was the tanneries were violating “public rights” by causing property devaluation, bad odor and risk of disease within the commercial districts of Philadelphia.

Though the tanneries attempted to counter by citing their personal right to conduct business as they saw fit, Franklin’s “public trust” argument won the cause before the assembly.

http://specenviro.blogspot.com/2008/04/benjamin-franklin-revolutionary-or.html

Even then, private enterprise was constantly attempting to play the “freedom card” so they could pollute with impunity and get their own way at everyone elses expense. “…their personal right to conduct business as they saw fit“. What utter balls these people have.

We no longer live in scattered agricultural settlements on the sparsely populated edge of an empty continent. We are now a global civilization where the “private” actions of companies and countries can have national, even global impacts, and not just environmental ones. Your insistence on 18th century examples is, at best, naive. At worst, it is deliberately misleading.

In the colonies, and after the revolution, the franchise was severely limited, not only were the original inabitants of the land denied the vote, as were the slaves, and women. But men who were not freeholders (own property) were not allowed to vote either. And the vote was further diluted by the system of electors, that ensured many offices were not decided by the vote of the people, but by the 18th century equivalent of smoke-filled rooms, dominated, of course, by the landed gentry and the influential merchants in the towns. I guess that’s a world you’d love to see come back, eh TB?

I say this not as a criticism, those were considered Liberal, even Radical ideas two hundred plus years ago, but I do think we have progressed just a bit since then, don’t you think?

Depend upon it, Sir, it is dangerous to open so fruitful a source of controversy and altercation as would be opened by attempting to alter the qualifications of voters; there will be no end to it. New claims will arise; women will demand the vote; lads from 12 to 21 will think their rights not enough attended to; and every man who has not a farthing, will demand an equal voice with any other, in all acts of state. It tends to confound and destroy all distinctions, and prostrate all ranks to one common level.

John Adams, 1776

Just think, TB. If we followed the ideas of the founders today, I would be eligible to vote, and you wouldn’t. My mortgage is paid off, I actually own my property.

So please don’t lecture me about freedom and tyranny, I’m old and smart enough to have my own ideas about the subject.