Jonathon Delacour writes about politics and the development of his philosophy.#

As I see it, universal health care and pharmaceutical benefits, anti-monopoly and consumer protection laws, environmental safeguards, public transportation, communications and cross-media regulation, and publicly-funded broadcasting are all viable and beneficial tradeoffsthat balance the interests of individual, corporation, and government.

Experience shows me that, while free and open markets offer the most effective way of improving living standards, corporations can rarely be trusted to place (for example) the well-being of the environment ahead of the interests of their shareholders. Equally, individuals can not always be trusted to act in the best interests of themselves and their families. The Happy Tutor put it well:

What 95% of the people may tell the pollster is that they love God and want to be happy with him in Heaven, rather than burning in hell with Satan for all eternity. But with their earthly wallet and mortal attention what they buy is violence, perversity, fleshly pleasure, vanity, pride, pain, and death—all that Satan sponsors.

And until we inhabit a Utopia in which nations consistently place the interests of others above their own, I'll continue to believe that the high moral ground is a poor vantage point from which to conduct foreign policy.

Oh man, do I disagree with this. So individuals can't be trusted, well then we shouldn't make those wonderful governments out of them because they are corrupt. If we don't trust people then we can't trust anything that is made up of people.

Most of those "solutions" (universal health care, anti-monopoly and consumer protection laws, etc) are all fixing problems that are created by the government and the lack of protection of property laws. The government is the only one who can create monopolies that monopolize by law (patents, copyrights, government contracts, etc.) If people's property was truly protected then a company would have to negotiate with me to pollute my piece of sky or river. etc.

I write about this a bit. Particularly check out stuff from Faré.

I feel I should note that it seems many people who support such policies are saying, "We cannot fix that part of the system, but we can alleviate that damage." I respect this and slightly support it as an interim step, but I feel that the goal of the current age is to restore Liberty in America (for Americans) and elsewhere (for everyone else.)

 

This quote is great...

I'll finish as I started, with a quote from Tony Kushner:

I have said this before, and I'll say it again: Anyone that the Democrats run against Bush, even the appalling Joe Lieberman, should be a candidate around whom every progressive person in the United States who cares about the country's future and the future of the world rallies. Money should be thrown at that candidate. And if Ralph Nader runs—if the Green Party makes the terrible mistake of running a presidential candidate—don't give him your vote. Listen, here's the thing about politics: It's not an expression of your moral purity and your ethics and your probity and your fond dreams of some utopian future. Progressive people constantly fail to get this.

I find it very intriguing when people are encourage to not consider their ethics, morals, or vision of the future when voting for politicians. What are they about then? Try to find a candidate who will leave you alone while oppressing everyone else?