They're not going to win on factual debates. So they resort to the only tools in the toolbox.
Elizabeth Warren on a Roll!
- Thread starter piezoe
- Start date
They're not going to win on factual debates. So they resort to the only tools in the toolbox.
Please read Thomas Hobbes. He is one of the important figures in the development of liberal political philosophy. His books, written in the 17th Century are still readily available, but here is a good place to start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hobbes
The Left has the black, hispanic, queer, single-mom, parasite vote. They don't need anything else. Every election since 2008 has and will be a referendum on government handouts. Everything else together doesn't add up to that.
Which, of course, is why America as we've known it... is DOOMED!
The term libertarianism originally referred to a philosophical belief in free will but later became associated with anti-statesocialism andEnlightenment-influenced[9][10]political movements critical of institutional authority believed to serve forms of social domination and injustice. While it has generally retained its earlier political usage as a synonym for either social or individualist anarchism through much of the world, in the United States it has since come to describe pro-capitalist economic liberalism more so than radical, anti-capitalistegalitarianism. In the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, libertarianism is defined as the moral view that agents initially fully own themselves and have certain moral powers to acquire property rights in external things.[11] As individualist opponents of social liberalism embraced the label and distanced themselves from the word liberal, American writers, political parties and think tanks adopted the word libertarian to describe advocacy of capitalist free market economics and a night-watchman state.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism
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The Koch Bros.......see bolded part above. The new libertarianism has become more about corporate tyranny and social savagery. Leave businesses alone and let the poor starve.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism
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The Koch Bros.......see bolded part above. The new libertarianism has become more about corporate tyranny and social savagery. Leave businesses alone and let the poor starve.
Private property rights and a gov't which did not redistribute income is the way the US was set up and led to it becoming the most prosperous and powerful country in the world.
Now that we've decided to enable the gov't to point guns at one set of people and take their money away and give it to another set of people, the country has entered the 'decline of the roman empire' stage and the left will at all costs attempt to deny any causality.
The only people who think that protection of private property is 'individual anarchism' are the propagandists who speak for the people leading us to oblivion.
Now that we've decided to enable the gov't to point guns at one set of people and take their money away and give it to another set of people, the country has entered the 'decline of the roman empire' stage and the left will at all costs attempt to deny any causality.
The only people who think that protection of private property is 'individual anarchism' are the propagandists who speak for the people leading us to oblivion.
Curiously, 100% of my knowledge of the political philosophy of those who are calling themselves "libertarians" on ET comes from ET, and not the media. I am a classical liberal and libertarian, and my philosophy has much more to do with that of Thomas Hobbes than it does with any of these folks who today are calling themselves "libertarians". I suppose you can call yourself anything you like however.
If you read Hobbes, you'll have a much better understanding of what I'm referring to. Classical liberals, and by extension libertarians, are not anti-government. They believe government is good, but not just any government. They are careful to distinguish what they consider good government from bad. They are not Democrats but they would find the U.S. Democrat party somewhat closer to their beliefs then the modern version of the Republican party, which has strayed very far indeed from its conservative roots. The conservative roots of the Republican party, incidentally, were much better aligned with classical libertarianism.
If you consider carefully those on this ET board who call themselves libertarians, you can't help notice that many on them are anti government. This is about as far from classical liberalism as one can get. Their radical philosophy is also, by the way, missing key elements of classical conservative political thinking in the manner of Russel Kirk.
I excerpted the following re Kirk's view of libertarians, with a rejoinder from the classical libertarian T.R. Machan, from the good Wiki summary of Kirk's philosophy. (which please see here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Kirk) But please bear in mind, as you read this dialog, that in its time neither the modern Republican party nor the radicals now calling themselves "libertarians" had yet emerged.
"In a polemic essay, Kirk (quoting T. S. Eliot) called libertarians "chirping sectaries," adding that they and conservatives have nothing in common (despite his early correspondence with the libertarian Isabel Paterson). He called the libertarian movement "an ideological clique forever splitting into sects still smaller and odder, but rarely conjugating." He said a line of division exists between believers in "some sort of transcendent moral order" and "utilitarians admitting no transcendent sanctions for conduct." He included libertarians in the latter category.[13] Kirk, therefore, questioned the "fusionism" between libertarians and traditional conservatives that marked much of post-World War II conservatism in the United States.[14]
Kirk's view of "classical liberals" is positive though; he agrees with them on "ordered liberty" as they make "common cause with regular conservatives against the menace of democratic despotism and economic collectivism."[15]
Tibor R. Machan defended libertarianism in response to Kirk's original Heritage Lecture. Machan argued that the right of individual sovereignty is perhaps most worthy of conserving from the American political heritage, and that when conservatives themselves talk about preserving some tradition, they cannot at the same time claim a disrespectful distrust of the individual human mind, of rationalism itself."
I'm going to go out on a bit of a limb here and say that those folks today from the tea party group and most others allied with them are, in general, rather poorly educated, have never read either Hobbes or Kirk, and really haven't a clue when they refer to themselves as "libertarians". It's pathetic.
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You're missing the same thing you good government, NPR liberal idealists always miss. They don't give a hoot about preventing the next financial crisis. And by "they" I mean Warren and the dems, as well as the republicans. If anything the republicans are more concerned about a repeat, because the public tends to hold them responsible.
Warren and her crowd want control. Control means more leverage to extort campaign funding from banks. A simple rule doing away with a big product like CDS's doesn't advance that goal at all.
What I suggested would in fact do away with CDSs, as they are now structured. But it wouldn't necessarily do away with either bond insurance, or even transferable bond insurance, that could conceivably be traded separately from its underlying bond. I'm failing to see how this would increase the chance of another crisis. I am thinking it would lessen the chance, particularly if the issuers were regulated to assure adequate reserves or reinsurance. That's why it seems like a good idea to me. I seems to me the logical and best way to achieve this would be to regulate these bond insurance policies, which is what CDSs effectively are, by bringing them under the Commerce Department oversight. That would be a side benefit of doing away with McCarran Ferguson. Nothing other than repealing it is needed. Insurance will them default to regulation under commerce. The Supreme court has already decided that issue (1945).
I'm not seeing how such changes affect one way or the other the extortion of campaign funds from big banks. You might well be right about Warren, but how would you or I know that that is what she wants?
I'm not seeing how such changes affect one way or the other the extortion of campaign funds from big banks. You might well be right about Warren, but how would you or I know that that is what she wants?
Your idea is basic common sense. So why didn't Obama and a democrat Senate push it?
Why isn't Warren pushing it?
Why isn't Warren pushing it?
I am only guessing, but surely it must have had something to do with pressure from the big insurance companies. It was the insurance companies that pushed for McCarran Ferguson in the first place. They did not want to be under Dept of Commerce regulation. You may or may not know that insurance companies, because they are regulated State to State, don't have to disclose certain financial details they otherwise would have to disclose. The main thing is that having them regulated piecemeal makes coordinating the ACA insurance smorgasbords a nightmare and limits competition. I'm certainly not a fan of the ACA the way it was passed, but if we are going to be stuck with it, i want it to work as efficiently as possible. I suppose the insurance companies wouldn't have gone along with the ACA at all if there was talk of trying to get McCarran repealed. And it's looking to me like The Obama Administration had to structure the ACA as a giveaway to the major Health insurers to get them on board. I hope I'm wrong about that, but at this point I don't think I am. Some government we have!
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