re: #218 Sharmuta

This isn’t about the left-right dichotomy. This has everything to do with the underlying assumptions people have about the role of government. Right-left doesn’t matter, because people in both camps are confused as to government’s proper role.

Which is why I’m not very optimistic about where things are going now. No one understands that “limited government” is more than a buzz-term or catch phrase. It means more than “I don’t want to pay taxes” or “I want to be able to own machine guns” but no one seems to realize this anymore. In either party. This is why we are in this mess. It is mostly why the Reform Party was a joke, and any such reaction to the political situation right now (like the calls for a ‘3rd Party’ or that Modern Whig group that Ojoe keeps plugging) is doomed to fail. People know the buzz words and have a list of things they think are “good ideas” but no one really knows why these ideas are good or bad.

The past 2 or 3 weeks, I’ve been losing sleep worrying about the mess we are in now and the fact that every path leading forward I can see leads to something intolerable. I don’t have a solution other than to sit here and type rants about it and that’s getting us nowhere fast.