Right, whatever happened to your philosophical acumen? Never be content to rest at the most proximate cause. Now, lets do this slowly, why did they extend loans to those who couldn’t pay them? Because your beloved free market has allowed them to do so i.e. because of deregulation. It is a weakness of the free, deregulated, market that this can happen.
I’ve got no major axe to grind with capitalism. I agree with Kurt Vonnegut: capitalism is what the people with all the money decide to do today. Sometimes the people with all the money are smart. Sometimes the people with all the money are stupid. I think its the governments role to stop them being too stupid. Hence, regulation.
this is where the rubber meets the road. free people spend their money however the hell they want. period. it is not the government’s responsibility to make sure you wipe your ass after you shit.
Imp, my point, which you don’t seem to be able to get through your party-dominated skull, is that we do not live in a political world where we choose between true-blue (is blue associated with conservatism in the US?) conservatism and true-red socialism. Few western countries field candidates with recognisably socialist policies - my point was that our British Labour is NOT a socialist party,
did I say it was? no. I called the obamamessiah a socialist because he thinks he and some government bureaucrats can run your life/spend your money better than you can.
and it is silly to call it so, but if you want to do so then lets see what a ‘socialist party’ has produced: all sorts of wonderful growth for the last 10 years,
thank thatcher for the privatization of british business, that is the reason for growth… privatization NOT socialization
which is now falling apart because the world economy is falling apart. Obama, similarly, is not a socialist.
the fuck he isn’t. he wants government control of your money and your freedom to do business - that is socialist
Everyone is an economic neo-liberal now.
Can you actually articulate in what sense Obama is a proper socialist?
“proper” socialist? he wants government control of your economy. I don’t know if he pretends to be regal and “proper” while he fucks americans out of their freedom, but that’s what he does.
Socialists don’t just believe in regulation of the free market. Socialists don’t just believe in restricting off-shore drilling of oil. Socialists believe in wealth-redistribution on a grand scale (is Obama even pledging to raise taxes on the rich?)
yes. he is promising to raise taxes on everyone, especially the “RICH”. that is the whole democRAT party of socialist tyranny platform. tax the rich and make them as miserable as your poor and struggling ass…
, socialists believe in completely free health care (and I mean completely),
there is no free lunch and the obamamessiah is promising to destroy the american health care system by making it “free”. tell me, when the obamamessiah fucks the american medical system, where will canadians go when they need care?
socialists believe that people should have equality in actuality, as opposed to the modern ideal of ‘equality of opportunity’.
equality in actuality? equal misery for everyone… right… steal from him cause he has more. that kind of greed gets you killed.
Imp - you probably won’t answer this one. This is something I will never, ever, understand. You claim to love economic freedom. You don’t want tyranny. Yet you vote for a party that is frighteningly socially authoritarian.
socially authoritarian? how? you can still do whatever the hell you can afford to do in america.
Why does only economic freedom (and the freedom to own your gun) matter to you?
from that all else follows.
Don’t other freedoms matter too?
how do you get them? freedom of the press? you have to be rich to buy a press.
As someone with sympathies for old-fashioned liberalism (laissez-faire economics and social permissiveness it makes no sense to me.
if you have the means, you can do. you are free to earn and keep and grow the means, but NOT if government hamstrings you with taxes and regulation, and you are free to lose them as well. mandated loss (taxes) is not acceptable.
“Britain is socialist”
- to such idiotic comments I can only respond with “you have absolutely no grasp of the meaning of the word in that sentence”.