(11-04-2018, 03:55 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(11-04-2018, 12:16 AM)Galen Wrote: I don't think he is capable of understanding these issues because they lead to conclusions that he does not like. He simply can't believe that governments tend to kill their own citizens. He believes that it can't happen here but the founding fathers had a rather different opinion which is reflected in their own actions and writings. In a very real sense the founding fathers would have agreed with Mao that political power grows out of a barrel of a gun and so they decided the people must be armed to insure that they held ultimate political power.
Pbrower missed rather more than half of the issue and seems to be heading to Eric the Obtuse levels of ignorance. From a strictly numbers point of view the garden variety criminal can't even begin to match the body count that governments routinely rack up. They simply refuse to consider the second and third order effects of policy choices.
I must admit that I really don't understand pbrower's obsession on dogs either.
Anyway, he follows the Jim Crow interpretation as much as you follow the Founding Father's. Understandable, as the Jim Crow interpretation was generally accepted for a century plus. I am biased about anything to do with Jim Crow. One must admit both Jim Crow and the Founding Fathers had political agendas. I just admire the Founding Father's agenda of rights to white males more than the Jim Crow agenda of denying rights to blacks. This is not to say that rights to only white males is not lacking.
The Jim Crow agenda was an unfortunate consequence, one of many, from the compromise of allowing slavery to continue after the American Revolution. I am not a big fan as you might imagine since involuntary servitude is not something libertarians are in favor of. This forms the basis of the libertarian view of taxation as theft.
The Founding Fathers on the whole, Alexander Hamilton is an exception, could be considered in modern terms to be Minarchist Libertarians. Murray Rothbard's Conceived In Libery covers this evolution toward individual liberty from Colonial Times to the early Federalist period. Their agenda was to create a government that was limited in power which was an unheard of idea in the eighteenth century.
Modern liberals and progressives are not and never have been in favor of individual liberty. The battle always has and always be between liberty and tyranny.
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. -- H.L. Mencken
If one rejects laissez faire on account of man's fallibility and moral weakness, one must for the same reason also reject every kind of government action. -- Ludwig von Mises
If one rejects laissez faire on account of man's fallibility and moral weakness, one must for the same reason also reject every kind of government action. -- Ludwig von Mises