"Aren't You a Liberal, Doug?"

1 May, 2006

Turns out I don't have as much of a rant in mind as I thought I did, but I will give some love to the question. It is a question I have been asked when I sometimes spout out something notably non-liberal. Am I liberal? Kind of. I am all for the government giving someone a helping hand and I all for giving more to education. I would pay more taxes (I could easily see even twice what I am paying now, if made worht it) in exchange for a government being able to give people a fair shot.

Of course, our greedy ass government would probably find a way to abuse this. And our lazy ass populace would probably find a way to over use it. And all in all I think it would require our government to get bigger just so that checks and balances would work.

That was my kind of too long of an answer to say "not precisely".

In general, I am small government. And I believe people should have the freedom to make mistakes. I think we should decrease our military to a largely domestic and defensive group. I think we should shrink overexpenditure and make the government more accountable. We should move government back down to a closer-to-local level. The fact that some states are disagreeing with the moral dictates of the federal government is not suprising to me, what does suprise me is the number of people that say "You can't do that!". Because, there is a little thing called the constitution that says that they can.

I am all for the sanctity of humanity, but I somewhat think of this as a meaningless term. Governments cannot make us love one another and any attempts to do so are just failures outright. I am all for equal rights, but I understand that not everyone is and any kind of law punishing them does nothing to fix the situation, it just sets up other imbalances.

I guess this is the final and end word on this. I do not think that the government should enforce moral agendas upon me or my fellow people. I do not think the government should demand which charities I support, nor deign themselves to be parental in the least. I think the government should help to join us together. to provide a common defense, and help to generate economic stability. If the government takes my money to provide education, will they also allow me to decide what counts as education. Why not put more pressure on communities to support themselves? Do we really need a firm brainwashing ideal?

In the end, the answer is generally, not at all.

I am a moderate libertarian.