September 05, 2008 - Posts
I am a libertarian free market amateur economist, which will become clear either now, or within future blogs. I call myself an amateur in the sense that I have not yet attained a Bachelors, Masters or PhD in economics, although I am in pursuit of all three. One thing that bothers me about politics in general, is the use of the term government to mean the federal government, and only the federal government. Many people view the federal government as the end-all, be-all for any problems they may have. Any reason that they feel theyve been shorted, or any excuse they can think up for needing money they direct to the federal government. When our Founding Fathers created the democracy which we have chipped away at, they intended the Federal government to be a last resort or sorts. The national government was not intended to carry a heavy caseload, but had a specific set of duties. These duties ideally included the minting of money and the oversight of troops, things that otherwise individual states would have had a hard time coordinating. They set up this government with the knowledge that every state and municipality had their own government to govern their people. I believe that the ultimate intent set forth by these men was to have a small federal government that helped the states with the things that would be hard to organize, with larger state governments to take care of their people. Larger state governments would serve quite a few purposes.
1) Namely, large state governments would help keep the federal government from getting to large and creating the problems that have plagued all other countries. A number of larger state governments could act as a buffer between the people and their federal ruler, and would protect them from the problems that ultimately befall all Federal governments.
2.) If the states were allowed to have a larger government while the Federal version was small, the states could be more efficient. The state could therefore census all of its people, and use the things they know about their state to better serve their people.
3.) Much the same as the last point, if states were the preferred form, any program that the people wanted would be much closer to them. My point being, if most residents of a state wanted Welfare, that state could enact legislation to make it a reality for those people. If I did not want to live in a state with welfare it would be much easier and more viable for me to move to a different state than it would ever be to move to a different country.
Ultimately the government libertarians dream of would allow for a more efficient system, better set up to serve the people, and keeping egos in check as long as allowing for a checks and balances of every government on their own power. It saddens me that socialism has creeped into our government, inflating not only taxes and spending, but the egos of the people in charge who get to spend our money. Hopefully this system starts to revert and we can see our government run and appreciated the way any government should....with a sense of pleasure and a watchful eye by the citizens who it is meant to serve.
One thing that is often
misinterpreted is that certain institutions get their prestige because
of what they produce. Although this has at times in the past been true,
it is not to be automatically assumed at this point in American
history. Many of the United States best known universities are not
prestigious on current accomplishments alone. They possibly are
accomplished on the past doings of professors or students, but
currently fail to meet up to the expectations that are put on the top
schools in our country. A problem is that instead of continuing to move
our though forward and advance ideas that have been the foundation of
intellectual thought, educated people continue to build on fallacies
from the past, or create new ideas, sufficing small amounts of evidence
to prove their point and disprove past points.
Current intellectual thought is not precisely that. In many of these
institutions, knowledge is not necessarily rewarded. Professors from
the get-go teach students that they don't know things, in order to
create a student body who believes that they do not know things, as
opposed to teaching this student body what they need to know in order
to form opinions and create knowledgeable ideas of their own. I make
this statement based on the fact that many students in todays colleges
don't come out knowing or needing to know what it is they study, which
allows professors to in turn substitute rhetoric and personal beliefs
in place of actual learning. From the beginning of postsecondary
education, students are taught to believe whatever it may be that their
professors are saying. This allows the professors to suffice propaganda
for proper knowledge. Professors in turn use this extremely modifiable
minds to meet their own ends. An example of this is Barack Obama. Mr.
Obama is none the wiser for what he was taught at elitist schools.
Listening to him speak belies the fact that he even went to one of
these institutions, because of his seeming lack of knowledge about
relevant thought and political ideas. The idea that tire inflation and
tuneups will allow for as much oil to be saved as would be gotten from
drilling is an idiotic hope that is unfounded, unintelligent and
otherwise worthless. If, perhaps, 300 million Americans were driving
around on flat tires with untuned engines, then that idea might work
out. This, however, is not true as many Americans do the simple things
that they can to make their cars run more efficiently and correctly. If
institutions taught what knowledge driven thought consisted of, civic
leaders would not be leading us into the same cruxes that have plagued
our society since the beginning of the 20th Century.
The beacon of American thought is learning and knowledge, yet somehow
the people in the places that matter most have let that go, in hopes of
passing their own agendas. Allowances for personal error are seldom
made in American politics and society as it is seen as a weakness. As
Americans are taught to be more accepting of others, those preaching
that have done the opposite with their own. When a politician changes
his or her opinion because they have realized the err of their ways,
they are seen as a “flip flopper”, and not as someone who upon closer
examination has decided to fix where they have wronged. I do not see
the progress in politics or society that once set America apart from
the rest of the world. Even the one institution that we perfected and
allowed to function under our watch has started to come under fire from
the elitist people who have become the bane of it in the first place. I
am of course talking about capitalism, which if left to its own devices
will function better than any known, and possible unknown, economic
system. Adam Smith frequently spoke of an invisible hand that guided
the economy to perfection or at least proper function. This invisible
hand allowed for consumers and producers to decide where and what their
desired price would be. An invisible hand was not government
intervention, nor was it pressure from unrelated or uninvolved parties.
This would be a visible hand, and would be synonymous with a communist
or socialist economy.
Now is a more important time than the time of Adam Smith, as we not
only have to stick up for our economy, but also our way of life and our
rights as politicians and the educational elite allow more people to be
a part of their plan to take over the American way of thinking. The
American way of thinking is for individuals to have their own opinions,
not for a elite group to tell people how to think, and if there is one
thing to hold onto, that is it.
A constant problem in the
developed world has been the relation of races with each other. People
are destined to judge each other for one reason or another, and the
laziest/easiest way to do so has always been to judge based on how
others look. Judging based on color allows for prejudices that are
often unfounded and unintelligent, and which just perpetuate a cycle of
ignorance and regression. Prejudice is not a quality that is a positive
in any human being, much less when it does not allow for common sense
or relevance.
America
is a country that was founded with race relations on the back burners,
and is a country which had much to overcome in that department. Many
claim that America still has many strides to make to conquer the
problem, but not all citizens of a country can be forced to think a
certain way. The greatest thing about our country is that individuals
are allowed to think whatever they want. This being the greatest thing,
it has also been one of the most divisive. No issue has ever sparked as
much debate, hatred and suffering as race. Were it not for race
differences between slaves and masters, the states rights issues of the
South would not have been as heated as they were, and certainly would
not have sparked a national war. This is not to say that the South
would not have had a complaint for states rights, it is to say that it
would not have come about the same way as it did.
Many a problem has plagued the USA since the time of the Civil War, and
many obstacles have been overcome in pursuit of a better country. When
our founding fathers created the perfect country, they gave us the
foundation for a great country, and I will vote that we have created
that great country where people can be themselves. A problem that
consistently arises in my own mind continues to be race relations. The
races were supposedly integrated in the middle 20th Century,
yet I can not find that to be true. "There is a presidential candidate
running for the Democrat Party", is not a phrase I have heard very much in the past year. Barack Obama is not a presidential candidate running
for office with the ideas he has to make out country better. Obama is
the first black candidate. Barack Obama is a black man, and all that
seems to matter to many is that fact. African American. Native
American. Irish American. Indian American. None of these should be an
identification with which we use to distinguish ourselves from our
neighbors. This is not to say that people should not identify with their past or their heritage, because that is the furthest from the point. I believe that our country will function much more correctly if we allow everyone to be an American, whatever our heritage or past, and move on towards making America a better country. This can not be accomplished by continuing to strive for segregation based on where we came from, for benefits or otherwise. Progress is moving forward, and socialism is a failure from the past.
When our
country was founded it was compared to a melting pot, in which
individual ingredients only give a hint of their real flavor. Allowing
people to be separated based on their differences allows for the very
segregation that we have fought to abolish. We are Americans, and that
is all that should matter. If some of these Americans have personality
aspects that they wish to acknowledge, that is a great thing, but these
should not be what we use to define ourselves. If Americans are allowed
to be classified into thousands of categories, they cease to be
Americans, but instead continue to take the minority status that
creates problems and belies the melting pot of all humans in our
country.. Separating by race, creed, religion, sex, etc. is something
that has gotten some countries in the greatest of trouble and is a crux
that we have fought since the founding of our very country.