A Short Political Rant
Posted at TMM, in response to a "conservative".
by Bill St. Clair
I've been paying taxes since 1978, and I'm pretty young compared to some of the graybeards who frequent the board. I didn't get really rebellious until I was about your age, and learned that taxation is theft, unwarranted arrest is kidnapping, and war is the health of the state. But we probably agree in a belief in private property, though I believe in absolute private property, not the kind that you rent from the government for "property tax", the right of the people to keep and bear arms, though I believe that "shall not be infringed" means exactly that, no infringement of any kind, i.e. a responsible 12-year-old girl should be able to walk into any hardware store, lay down cash, and walk out with a full-auto M-16 and 1,000 rounds of ammo, assuming she can carry it, without answering a single question, other than "55 or 62 grain?", showing any identification, or signing a single scrap of paper. Where we likely differ is that I believe that since a person owns his own body, as long as he doesn't directly harm another, he may do anything with his body that he pleases. That includes sex with any consenting adult any way, and purchasing, possessing, and ingesting any food or drug, without a prescription of any kind of permission from anybody.
I've noticed that you talk a lot about "liberals". As someone else said, the one-dimensional liberal-conservative model of the political space doesn't fit many of us here. The two-dimensional space of the Nolan Chart, on which you can place yourself with The World's Smallest Political Quiz (I agree with all ten statements, making me full-on libertarian), puts all of humanity in a two-dimensional diamond. That's better than the liberal-conservative line segment, but still mighty limited. Personally, I think that most of human behavior doesn't even fit in a metric space, i.e. assigning numbers to it makes no sense whatsoever. We're all hyper-dimensional ultra-intelligent highly-chaotic (meaning far from equilibrium, not random) creatures, each unique in all the 'verse.