That sounds great, but why have leaders at all? Why not trust the population to live on their own?

Humans aren't wired that way, more's the pity.

I agree with you that government is an evil. but it is a necessary evil. Necessary in that if your group doesn't have it and the group over the next hill does, there is an excellent chance the group over the next hill will use their government to make war on your group and you will shortly become part of their group (possibly as a a slave or worse).

You might recall the opening sequence in "2001, A Space Odyssey".

In the most basic ways we haven't changed much since the jawbone of an ass was the latest thing in high tech weaponry.

I might not be making myself clear. The thread that almost reached 1000 comments was one of the posts on Spitzer, prostitution and the issues surrounding the impositon of the criminal sanction on victimless crimes. This is a topic Glenn returns to from time to time, be it drug war, legislating morality, spying on Americans without warrants, etc. Personal and individual liberties are part of the debate about limited and non-intrusive government. That's libertarianism. We all have our particular priorities. Some are here for the media critique. It is of less interest to me since I stopped reading newspapers 20 years ago and don't watch any newscasts on TV.

I guess I wouldn't care if I had to click through so much of it to get to the interesting comments.

Obviously, I meant "I guess I wouldn't care if I didn't have to click through so much of it to get to the interesting comments."

OK, gone for real now.

"I guess I wouldn't care if I had to click through so much of it to get to the interesting comments. That's all." -- DCLaw1

You get an Amen and a 'good luck with that' from this corner.

Everything I know I learned from The Lord of the Rings.. Or was it Star Trek? In my perfect world, leaders would have to be literally drafted, no one who is really suitable and wise enough to be president would possibly want the job, they would have to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to the oval office.

That sounds great, but why have leaders at all? Why not trust the population to live on their own?

I kind of like the idea of a tax return with a checklist of where you want your money spent.

You think the environment is the most important issue? You can earmark your entire tax payment to environmental causes.

World hunger? Your entire tax payment can go to alleviating world hunger..

And so on and so on..

I wonder how many, in such a world, would vote for their entire payment to go to making war?

-- Aycharaych

That also sounds great. But why not let each individual decide where his own money is to be spent? I would give a lot more to help the homeless and downtrodden here in my city. We need to build the world one community at a time and that would be central Florida for me. I was educated here years before Disney made it a tourist destination, and with 'progress' has come the usual tragic human problems.

Perhaps if America left the world alone to exercise a little freedom in their lands and concentrated on its own people we would see a much better world.

Unfortunately, many here and most Americans can not stomach freedom. If a guy smokes a little weed, so what? If things need doing, people can do them without the force, coercion, and brutality of the government forcing a one size fits all society.

Wait, this is a dream --- how about 'live and let live' as a motto for the country? Or, "as you hurt no one, do as you will".

i spend a fair amount of time each year in ontario's "cottage country" on lake huron. they seem to like me (or my family?) just fine.

so far the usa always takes me back...

I don't want to get into that pissing match here but before you can designate any given "pissing match" on the subject as "libertarian/anti-libertarian" you first have to define libertarianism and decide who is and who is not a libertarian.

LWM, I just don't care "who is and who is not a libertarian." By no means do I mean to imply that some subjects are less worthy than others, but this recurrent fixation here over libertarianism looks very narrow and solipsistic to anyone not so fixated. It's also highly annoying and distracting to non-libertarian-related discussion (i.e., everything else), such as when there is a perfectly good topic to discuss, and somehow it inevitably gets yanked back to the endless libertarian death vortex. Also, the personal rivalries are insipid and parochial.

Just don't get me wrong, LWM and Timberman, I'm not trying to impose some kind of standard of worthiness for debate. I'm just trying to articulate what I think a lot of other people are surely thinking - that the Libertarian Wars get old and distracting. I'm sure a lot of people see certain names of commenters, and just scroll right on by, knowing there's nothing new to see.

I guess I wouldn't care if I had to click through so much of it to get to the interesting comments. That's all.

I am definitely aware of the libertarian/anti-libertarian pissing matches, I do what I can to avoid them.

This is unfortunate because it is an oversimplification of the dynamic and this really is the locus of the debate about almost every important issue we discuss here related to individual Liberty and the State and all that entails. Many different factions claim the mantle of libertarianism and as Mike Huben has wryly observed, attempt to: "Spiritually baptize the deceased as libertarians because they cannot protest the anachronism: Locke, Smith, Paine, Jefferson, Spooner, etc."

I don't want to get into that pissing match here but before you can designate any given "pissing match" on the subject as "libertarian/anti-libertarian" you first have to define libertarianism and decide who is and who is not a libertarian. They have been having this debate on the libertarian right and left long before I or Ron Pauliac (a play Howard Deaniac) arrived. I'll just say this: It is a good starting point for a debate about these issues. It is not a viable political party or coherent, cogent and sound ideology any more than Marxism is.

Sinnard asks rhetorically: "Or does the conversation just naturally flow to discussions about how prominant[sic] Libertarians and Paeoconservatives [sic} are bigots/racists/jerks/etc. whenever the L word is brought up around here?"

He willfully chooses to deny the racist, sexist, homophobic and anti-semitic roots of both paleoconservatism and certain factions on the right that claim the libertarian mantle.

This is just the Homophobia of prominent paleoconservative Pat Buchanan:

Homosexuality involves sexual acts most men consider not only immoral, but filthy. The reason public men rarely say aloud what most say privately is they are fearful of being branded "bigots" by an intolerant liberal orthodoxy that holds, against all evidence and experience, that homosexuality is a normal, healthy lifestyle.

-- Pat Buchanan, September 3, 1989

Homosexuality is not a civil right. Its rise almost always is accompanied, as in the Weimar Republic, with a decay of society and a collapse of its basic cinder block, the family.

-- Pat Buchanan, 1977

Gay rights activists seek to substitute, for laws rooted in JudeoChristian morality, laws rooted in the secular humanist belief that all consensual sexual acts are morally equal. That belief is anti-biblical and amoral; to codify it into law is to codify a lie.

-- Pat Buchanan, Wall Street Journal, January 21, 1993

The poor homosexuals -- they have declared war upon nature, and now nature is extracting an awful retribution.

-- Pat Buchanan, discussing AIDS in 1983

With 80,000 dead of AIDS, our promiscuous homosexuals appear literally hell-bent on Satanism and suicide.

-- Pat Buchanan, in his syndicated column, October 17, 1990

AIDS is nature's retribution for violating the laws of nature.

-- Pat Buchanan, during his 1992 presidential campaign

http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/quotes/buchanan.htm

Mona and I have our differences. We also agree on some things. I don't claim to be a "true libertarian" because none of us are sure what it really is. It changes from day to day, depending on situational exigencies.

And since defining terms is an important first principle in any meaningful debate, here is the exposition of the various behaviors known as internet sockpuppetry, and some notable examples.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_sock_puppet

Neither Ron Pauliac or myself have made the cut.