Political Taxonomy
L. Neil Smith at The Libertarian Enterprise - good rant on socialism, in its myriad despicable names and forms. [tle]
Individualism is a pretty straightforward proposition, although it's a choice that hasn't been particularly popular over the last ten thousand years or so. It's the choice that's closest to the truth, as far as physics and biology go. Not to reiterate the idea's greatest advocate unduly, individualism holds that the individual is the only real component of any given group--that, in a moral sense, there is no such thing as a group, but only an aggregation of individuals--and that no individual is under any obligation to recognize the existence of any group or to inconvenience himself in any way for its sake.
...
One of the most important things to understand is that two major branches of socialism have been developed over the past couple of centuries. One of them, "left-wing socialism" in the terms employed by libertarian philosopher and lecturer Robert LeFevre, we are all too familiar with, prepared to recognize, and, increasingly, ready to defeat. It is the socialism of Barack Obama and his admirers and followers.
What's much more difficult, for Americans at least, to identify is the "right-wing socialism" of a George W. Bush. "Progressives" (like "liberal", simply another euphemism for socialist) won't acknowledge it because they find their fraternal-twin relationship with it embarrassing. Conservatives stick their fingers in their ears and chant "I can't hear you!" over and over again, hoping that you'll go away.
But look: no matter what it calls itself, any regime that takes what belongs to you--your rights, your property, your life--in order to achieve some goal that you didn't choose and may not approve of, is sacrificing you for whatever it represents to be something bigger and more important than you are. And that, by definition, is socialism.
Well, yas.
Well, yas.
From time to time one finds people purporting to claim the label of "conservative" for themselves and their beliefs, who wish to ask questions like, "what would a conservative welfare state look like?"
Such people are known for the contempt in which they hold libertarians, and anyone else one millimeter further to the right than themselves, and want everyone to know how much they hate and despise those crazy, crazy people who want to go by the actual words of the Constitution and think that perhaps the State is not, after all, a vast do-gooder machine whose sole justifying purpose is to extort money at gunpoint from the productive and shovel it down the bottomless throats of a vast and growing throng of useless eaters, whom they think can surely be enticed to vote Republican if only the Republicans would get off their high horse and start giving them more free stuff to compete with the Democrats. Pas d'ennemis a Droit, Pas d'amis a Gauche, and for God's sake don't rock the boat.
Some people, of course, think that this is wrong-headed and nonproductive. Some people, of course, think that the term "conservative welfare state" is a hideous and obscene oxymoron. Some people don't care about rocking the goddamn boat and want to sink it, if that is what is required to take our country back.
These are just observations, of course, for entertainment purposes only. Not responsible for lost or stolen objects. Keep hands inside the vehicle at all times. REG US PAT OFFICE. Notary sojac.
Edit comment