trouble with meritocracy is that merit is relative

(like "intelligence" as earlier posters mentioned)

who decides what criteria should be applied?

traditionally, the people in power have decided that their particular merits are best

look at the religious movement Calvinism (they thought material wealth was proof of God's favor) and see all the parallels between them and the "libertarian" capitalists who think that if they can acquire something, they deserve it more than the whoever had it before them

if a trader is savvy enough to unload a terrible stock on someone, why should the government step in? they lost the contest, right? well, i agree to some extent, but there's gotta be a line somewhere

how about street crime? shouldn't victims of mugging have been more alert, tough, etc.? let the strong survive, after all.

my solution isn't that the state should determine everything, it's that there should be a balance--this is what wise, rather then merely clever, people have concluded for millenia

Ben Franklin made a ton of money in his lifetime, and deservedly so, but he also demonstrated Adam Smith's concept of Enlightened Self Interest by coming up with free public libraries and declining to patent his Franklin Stove because he would rather live in a civilized society that empowered the greatest number of people than a feudal kingdom where people depended on the powerful because the powerful liked it that way

in his version of "A Rising Tide Floats All Boats" the collective progress of society was tied to his personal self interest and vice versa

so yes, there's definitely merit to some of what Rand had to say, but, 1) there are gaping flaws in her logic and understanding of human sociology and psychology and 2) people do mis-use her work (if you insist LOL) for all manner of totalitarian-style bullshit

you can't really think that America--which used to host all manner of small business owners (even if they didn't have MBAs from fancy schools)--is stronger and more prosperous to now that Wal-Mart has used anti-free trade policies and monopolistic might to crush these people's personal and financial autonomy and convert them to wage-slavery

these days unaccountable global corps are on a quest to patent the DNA of every living thing we know of, including the cures for any number of diseases

in fact, once they get a patent on a certain gene, the breast cancer gene, say, others are forbidden by law from trying to find a cure

sound like a recipe for liberty?

i haven't trusted the NYTimes since Murdoch purchased them and installed the founder of neoconservatism as an op/ed writer.

despite my vociferous support for him during the campaigns, i haven't felt fuzzy about Obama since the dog thing.

[i know it's neither here nor there in the world of geopolitics, but getting an animal from a shelter rather than a breeder is such an obvious choice (even if puppy mills aren't involved), and the excuse given (that it would be too hard to find a dog in a shelter in all of America that met the family's unique needs) was such and obvious lie that i knew i wasn't in camelot anymore.]

since then, i've wavered. much is good, and as i said before, i do support principled compromise...maybe he really is doing the best he can to fight entrenched interests?

i was loathe to be too hard for not leaving iraq too soon--after all, we don't want to abandon the people who've been working with us and leave a failed state in our wake...but it's obviously pretty easy to use this argument to merely "rebrand" the old policy and call it new

and the financial crash--obviously caused by deregulation and the fantasy philosophy that giant corporate monopolies = liberty

but maybe it really was necessary to bail out the banks (to not govern out of spite, you recall, but with an eye to reality), and to spend our way rather than go all Hooverish

the obvious solution, though, to Too Big To Fail is Teddy Roosevelt style trustbusting

and both rhetorical and policy reminders that the rights of corporate "citizens" do not supersede the rights of human citizens

instead we got unchecked bonuses at taxpayer expense and a new super-regulator (the Fed) that is already not accountable to citizens/taxpayers

how does this even remotely make sense?

and yes, we got more torture and the further erosion of civil liberties

finally, cap and trade sounds good in theory(and it's true that it's practically and morally unfeasible to continue consuming and polluting at current rates), but i have an awfully queasy feeling about this one, too; it's not hard to see how this could be just one more way for amoral, a-national corps. to "externalize" cost at taxpayer expense

yikes! thanks for the correction. i see "mr" kristol has since departed, too

[and yes, there's something to be said for editors "merely" avoiding lawsuits, as earlier posters mentioned

but of course the end result is distinctly Orwellian

will Webster's dictionary be the next to cave?]