Couldn't agree more. Tweedledum and tweedledummer - and almost all are corrupt.

Okay, here goes:

The Democrats in Congress are fucking weak, so there's very little apologizing for them. I'm especially pissed off at them for acquiescing to such ridiculous laws as the bankruptcy reform law.

It's a bit trite to reduce everything to class struggle, but I'm going to do it anyway. I think Neal's division between Reps and Dems is too simplistic (I'm sure he'd agree, but what can he do in 250 words?).

Modern-day Republicans stand for the preservation of current power structures. In the Northeast they're about protecting the wealth of the obscenely rich and in the South they're about preserving the values of Christian fundamentalists. They do this by disproportionately taxing the lower and middle class while paying for a war that's been one huge windfall after another for the wealthy, while the President's oil buddies sell oil at record-high prices.

Modern-day Democrats are about making sure the current class divides aren't etched in stone. This has less to do with taking money away from the wealthy and more to do with making sure the lower classes have access to some of the country's wealth. I'm sure the estate tax is particularly irksome to Neal, but it's not as though rich people are being taxed out of being rich people, and I think it's a good thing to ensure that people have to work to maintain their wealth - otherwise, after two or three generations of unchecked inheritance you have an aristocracy. And you can't have democratic freedoms with an aristocracy running around.

(I know it's cheap to invoke yourself as an example of what you're saying. I hate when people drag themselves into it and then get personally offended when you continue to argue with them. So let me just say that if y'all want to argue with me I won't take it as a personal attack - I'm putting myself in front of this train:)

In five years I'll be making the kind of money that is constantly "under attack" by the class warriors. I'm sure I'm going to get more protective of it because I've worked hard to get here, and I think wealth differentiations are a good thing in moderation. But I never could have gotten here without public scholarships, publicly-subsidized loans, and hella good public schools. As a result of society investing in me, I'll be much more valuable to society over my lifetime in sheer economic numbers alone. So will most of the readers of this blog, I imagine. So I'm very defensive of what people sneeringly refer to as "the welfare state." (I don't view that as a pejorative term, btw.)

Also, up until coming up here, I've never encountered the "obscenely wealthy" before. I have, and it vindicates so much of my political ideology. I'll tell more specific stories later, but I go to school with twenty-five year olds who are getting rich off the war because they were born into obscene wealth. Many of these kids have never held a job, other than interning at their dad's office buildings. For the most part I don't begrudge these kids their wealth except inasmuch as they want to gripe about having earned it. Maybe they've worked hard - but they haven't worked several million times harder than the people who struggle to feed their families.

you sum it up quite nicely. democrats = personal liberty, republicans = economic liberty. or at least that's how it's MEANT to be. not that it is anymore. and if you want BOTH? go libertarian ;)

(as an aside, you seem to understand this perfectly well, but there's a well known quiz which illustrates your point exactly. find it here:
http://www.self-gov.org/quiz.html
cheers)

Mind you - it must be remembered that there IS such a thing as the lesser of two evils.

Ah but the lesser of two evils is still evil, no?

As someone noted above, go libertarian, which is what I do, incidentally.

Libertarianism is too naive. People think of new and creative ways to screw each other over all the time. Market economics can't solve fraud, power concentration, prejudice, etc. If you let people run amok with "freedom" then they'll start to encroach on each other's freedom in ways much worse than the government does. Someone's going to regulate - you may as well have a transparent, democratic, changeable government do the regulating.

Libertarianism is too naive. People think of new and creative ways to screw each other over all the time. Market economics can't solve fraud, power concentration, prejudice, etc. If you let people run amok with "freedom" then they'll start to encroach on each other's freedom in ways much worse than the government does. Someone's going to regulate - you may as well have a transparent, democratic, changeable government do the regulating.

I would say just the opposite (of course). Many (most?) democrats naively believe that the government can solve most of society's problems. I agree with your second statement about people being innovative in their ability to screw each other over. One of the greatest of these innovations is to screw people over through the government. Such screwery is even worse than Joe Schmoe stealing from his neighbor directly because as screwery goes, it's immensely more difficult to observe, fight and stop.

Market economics do solve fraud (arbitration, settlements, etc), power concentration (goods are transferable: power doesn't stay stagnate forever - well, except for in the government), prejudice (lost sales from prejudice result in less competitive businesses), etc. For every regulation to correct market failures (real failures due to high transfer costs or negative/positive externalities), the market adjusts to the regulation (usually effected by taxes and subsidies) to create new problems that often outweigh the old ones.

Regarding your last point, I would argue that a transparent, democratic, and changeable government cannot exist. Transparency requires zero transaction costs and the eradication of information asymmetries (both are inter-related). Such is impossibile except in some theoretical model.

Power is best decentralized. How better to decentralize it than to put it in the hands of individuals? The result is imperfect, but better than the alternative. That would be this Libertarian's argument.

Yes, people use the government as a tool to screw each other over. The Republicans (at least as long as Bush is around) is especially bad at this by funneling billions of dollars in no-bid contracts to businesses like Halliburton, in which they own stock. The difference is that presumably, we can vote the SOB out of office and stop Halliburton from siphoning the taxpayers' money into its own coffers. Now if we can only get the fundamentalists to stop voting for Bush (see above).

Neal's argument that regulations inevitably lead to worse problems is specious at best. Countries without regulation - where the "market" controls - invariably have a larger rich-poor gap, worse pollution in their cities (affecting drinking water and food), and less upward mobility amongst its economic classes. Compare India, Argentina and Brazil with the U.S., France and Scandinavia (the last group of countries being socialist). Things in the U.S. are better for people in general now (indeed they hit their peak in the 1990's) than they were at the turn of the 20th Century. Once industrialization matured in the U.S., libertarian federalism allowed the Robber Barons to take control of the country. Let me know if I need to re-paint that picture. But in the 1990's, regulations ensured that people could maintain a basic standard of living that is the envy of every non-socialist European country in the world. We have the New Deal and the Great Society to thank for that.

I agree that regulations always produce unintended consequences, and sometimes they really are worse than the original problem. But at least the voters - through POLITICAL economy - can make changes, and more often than not those regulations are removed or changed. Democratic (that's the lowercase "d" "democratic") governments are still more transparent and responsive than private corporations.

The alternative is to allow a cabal of corporations form de facto monopolies over the control of resources and capital. And these elites thrive off of economic inefficiency - through overconsumption and overcharging.

Power IS best decentralized. But there is no way to have absolutely decentralized power. The only way to achieve a Pareto efficiency of power decentralization is to vest SOME power in a democratic government - which is answerable to all people, no matter how rich or poor (ignore political fundraising for the timebeing, please) - to ensure that no cabal of rich people can grab power from the people at large.

Democratic government is the instutionalization of the people's will. Once you create an institution it DOES take on a character of its own. But the character of democratic government resembles the people's will much more so than the character of any concentrated group of wealthy people.

You know, that might have sounded like a well-thought out response to Neal, except I say "Republicans is" in the first paragraph. Dumbass.

Goddammit. Why do you have to write such long comments? Where to start...

What's the difference between Republicans using the government to subsidize their big supporters and the Democrats doing the same thing? Is it simply that the Republicans big supporters are often religious and wealthy while the Democrats supporters are often lower-class and black? Please note that I'm stereotyping a bit (This should go without saying). Each party uses the government to aide their supporters. What's more evil, stealing money from the rich to give it to the poor or stealing money from the poor to give it to the rich? Both systems are stealing. Both are equally evil. Both are equally problematic. Why? Because it's a zero-sum game.

You could easily argue that the tax system, as it is, actually increases the gap between the top and bottom of the social ladder in terms of gross wages. Why? Employers can afford to pay the poor less due to the subsidies the poor receive from the government. Comparatively, due to decreasing marginal return, employers have to pay the rich even more to account for their heavy taxation.

The equation balances.

Let's say there is a spectrum of governmental control - socialism and fascism are on one end and laissez-faire economy is on the other. Historically, democratic countries tend to move to socialism. This is a dangerous reality. Why does this happen? It happens because the government structure allows it to. If a group lobbies to subsidize their benefactors $1 billion per year and it costs each American citizen $4.00, what are the chances you or I are going to raise a stink about it? But conversely, how hard is the benefactor going to push to keep their $1 billion annuity? Compound the issue with the bureauracy of government, mix it up real nice-like, and voila, you've got an ever expanding government, a government that slowly becomes more and more socialistic.

The only way to protect citizens is through establishing and protecting rights. I posit that public corporations are a violation of our rights. How can a non-existent entity have rights over any U.S. citizen? How can their liability be limited? This is like writing a blank check to corporations funded by American citizens.

As for the 1990s, I think this explains my point best: the DJIA. A few things; one, public corporations are tricky business and a centralization of power that, in my opinion, is a violation of our rights. Secondly, the New Deal didn't do jack shit for the U.S. economy. Social security is in shambles, is incredibly expensive to maintain for both employers and employees (the latter group only bearing 1/2 of the cost of social security, which makes them even less aware of how burdensome the program is on the economy). Third, the general trend of the DJIA is up, up, up at a fairly steady rate. The 1990's were no great period of prosperity, they were just a continuation of the trend up. And let's not forget the sky falling out in 2000 and the bursting of the tech bubble. If you pull that blip of "irrational exuberance" out of the chart, it's just plain-old steady growth. Assigning credit to regulation is like saying an investment of $100 grows to $110 over the course of time because of the existence of the FDIC. Cum hoc ergo propter hoc.

Libertarianism isn't equivalent to "allow[ing] a cabal of corporations form de facto monopolies over the control of resources and capital." It's actually the push for individual rights over such powers, whether they be public, private or governmental.

That's all I got for now. I'm sure I missed some things, but they'll come out in time.

Communities, by their nature, are the subjugation of certain freedoms, and the contribution of some earnings, for the general benefit and welfare of society in general. Governments are designed to determine how many or how few of our of our freedoms are subjugated for the betterment of society.

Government determents what portions of our earnings go towards welfare, towards defense, in some societies towards offense and growth of the country, and also allocates some money to the betterment of tomorrow with issues like education and research.

Thus it's only natural that the dividing line between political parties would be along these isues. That is the case in every country, thought the levels of freedoms subjugated can vary from one extreme (perhpas communism as it stood in the Soviet Union or some fundamentalist societies) to society (some islands have one or two person governments and complete freedoms, though there are issues wiht lack of education, medical facilities, and resources).

ideally, you want a people who understand the workings of government and actively participate in the decision making process. show me a large country where this works. as the world gets smaller and smaller, our government gets bigger and bigger. in part, this is due to a fear of the ever-increasing "closeness" of the world upon our commonly accepted framework of life. we need a government that insulates us from externalities we do not understand and do not care to understand. thus, a great deal of decision-making power is handed over to those at the top of the political food chain--those that in turn, approximate group interest through one of a variety of self/group decision-making paradigms. at this level of detachment from "the people" it becomes increasingly hard to select a representative choice on behalf of the masses. instead, what happens more often than not, is that those in power simply determine social needs based upon a much smaller parameter of experience--namely, their own. i=the group. representative government. a good thing? a bad thing? seems to me that it will always depend upon the vantage point of the individual, so long as the notion of individual importance surpasses that of the community. in highly communitarian societies, individualist perspectives are less important than those that see the progress and rights of a society in lump sums, rather than in single digits.

my beef with libertarian thought is that it all too often ignores or worse sacrifices the rights of those that have less "value" than others to the system. a protection of personal property, while extremely important, does not in itself guarantee a better society for all of the people. libertarianism seems to provide a logical, beneficial long-term solution for society. however, i'm not sure i'm willing to sacrifice certain personal properties for the sake of the ever-elusive, ever-changing, future good. also, how does it not prize certain individuals far above others? if one person is vested with enormous personal value to a society, then what is there to stop them from infringing upon the much smaller, much less significant, personal values of the masses? the whole theory rests on the notion that people behave rationally, and would never abuse those who would in-turn come back to bite them--but seriously, since when did people think about the consequences of their actions? if they did, we wouldn't need orphanages.

you're right. republicans are ALL about big government. just look at how much the govt has grown under bush. and how much $$$ he's blown.

i HATE that democrats are too chicken to be their own party. they seem to be saying they're for the same ol stuff, just to a lesser level.

oh, we would have gone to iraq, but with a timetable.

oh, we don't like gay marriage, but we don't want an ammendment banning it.

oh, we don't like the NRA, but we do hunt.

they're pussies.

give us a real choice, already.

I'm between classes so I don't have time to respond in detail. But I agree that we need a better choice between Democrats and Republicans. I'm an ardent Democrat ideologically - but everytime Joe Lieberman sucks up to George Bush it makes me sick. It's time for some more vociferous debate out of the Democrats.

The past ten years of Republican political supremacy was made possible by the previous ten years of Republican ideology - they stuck to their guns and hammered their message home, and finally hit a critical mass of popular support. Now they run the place. Democrats have to start thinking more long term about their ideology, instead of trying to squeak by in elections with 50% plus one.

It's funny, I don't remember voting for the puppet-masters. Thank goodness for the green party...*choke*