Mover Mike

A follow up on my comment in the previous post,

President Clinton lied to us when he said, "The era of big government is over!" President Bush talks a good game, but the growth in the size of government has not slowed on his watch!

FMNN has an editorial STILL NEITHER LEFT NOR RIGHT by Richard Ebeling, President of Fee.org.

We live in a time when virtually all political parties and candidates stand for the same fundamental ideological idea: state interventionism and compulsory redistribution. This also applies to the mainstream media. Even many who say they adhere to a “pro-market” view of things in fact turn out to be only more “moderate” advocates of government regulations and welfare-state programs.

We are told that there are leftists and rightists and that to be a moderate is a plausible answer. And this is a joke.

The golden-mean theory cannot properly be applied indiscriminately. For instance, it is sound enough when deciding between no food at all on the one hand or gluttony on the other hand. But it is patently unsound when deciding between stealing nothing or stealing $1,000. The golden mean would commend stealing $500. Thus, the golden mean has no more soundness when applied to communism and fascism (two names for the same thing) than it does to two amounts in theft.

That leaves us with statists and non-statists or libertarians, not on the right, but above, as in "the cream rises to the top". Bottom line, we need a third party, an alternative to the statists.

The classical liberal, or libertarian, considers the highest political good to be the freedom of the individual. The function of government in a free society is to secure everyone from the predatory conduct of others. The purpose of the law and the police is to see that everyone is protected in his life, liberty, and property. The cornerstone of the ethical society is that human relationships should be based on consent and mutual agreement. The free market is the natural arena of liberty, in which all associations are the result of free choice and no man may be forced into being a tool for another person’s purpose.

It has taken me a long time to get to this point and countless times I have been frustrated by the rights' statism: Nixon imposing wage and price controls and ending the last vestige of the gold standard; Reagan's deficits; George Bush 1 going back on his pledge of: "Read my lips, no new taxes!"; and George Bush 2 reappointing Greenspan, the biggest inflationist ever, and not one veto of a spending program resulting in the biggest deficits in history.

Am I the "isolationist" that George Bush castigated in his SOTU? Yes, I am because I remember what it was like and I am disappointed that we have strayed so far from the ideal that was penned over two hundred years ago.

State of the Union Bush Mover Mike