Which is why we need a better-than trad Libertarian third party.

And fuck Objectivism in Ayn Rand’s corpse-holes.

I guess agency capture would be similar to regulatory capture, as one example where governments start handing out tax credits to big corporations to move into their state or city. This happens all the time and is another big problem, it is another example of Fortune 500 elitism and favoritism by the govt.

There is a definite problem with companies getting too big, and the govt. re-enforcing this dynamic. This is a hard problem to solve, because it’s so industry specific and then we have to rely on the faulty government to regulate the breakup. This did work well on MA-BELL in the 80’s. Although there aren’t that many monopolies anymore (a few tech companies which might be impossible to split up), there are way too many oligopolies which are all tied into the govt, especially in the financial industry (Visa, Amex, MC, Fannie Mae, and on and on…)…

I agree that a sort of corporate elitism has developed where the government (federal, state, & local), and is catering and favoring to specific large corporations thereby ruining the free market.

We could start by burning the tax code and writing a new one…

We need to arrive at a formula in which a country’s wealth is not strictly measured by GDP, which is a wholly inaccurate indicator of a nation’s true economic and civil well-being. Then there’s the capitalist gravedigger phenomenon. The shareholder profit model ALWAYS leads to the same result: marketplace consolidation and a non-diversity in stock, from agra to media to the financial apparatus. Therefore, when one part of the system fails, the whole thing goes kaplooey. This is bad when we’re talking about media, worse when we’re talking about finance, and potentially devastating when we’re talking about food production. A lack of cross-system heterogeneity will be our downfall, of this I am certain.

I’m not talking about growing government — I’m talking about creating structures by which government can fulfill its basic duties to the populace: a guarantee of expression and the right to pursue happiness. Corporatism affects my personal safety and well-being, and limits my choices in a marketplace. That’s not freedom.

Agency capture is a huge problem in government, and the only way to solve it is to put some serious fucking brakes on the private sector’s influence on the regulatory apparatus, and impose some strict ethics rules on policymakers. You should not be able to go straight into the private sector from a regulatory agency and vice-versa. Campaigns should not be allowed to take ANY kind of corporate donation. And yes, there should be tort reform.

I am not a socialist, I’m a neo-libertarian.

The problem I take with this argument on this page is it does the same thing. I am neither a fan of Obama nor Bush, but ALL politicians are going to waste exuberrant amounts of money and improperly allocate funds, repub or democrat. It’s the nature of getting elected, pleasing lobbyists, and even more than that it is human nature.

What bothers me is that people seem to take one side (Democrat or Republican), and then just act like one or the other side is actually doing MOST things correctly. This is almost never the case, their is corruption everywhere in both government and private corporations, because there are so many people in this world driven purely by power and money, and that is human nature, and you can’t vote human nature out of the equation.

The second issue I take with people on the Internet making specific arguments about budget and monetary issues, is they are just spewing what they’ve heard under the grapevine. None of us here are experts on govt. budgeting (the budget is hugely complex and completely innacurate even by the supposed “experts” with their PHD’s in economics, and masters in accounting and finance.) To go off and start summing up some govt. budget that actually contains millions of items by presenting X and X spending facts, is like me taking Exxon’s accounting records and presenting it to you in a 20-line item page, and then telling you this is why X and X happened. That is ridiculous, it is so much more complicated then that unfortunately.

The only way to really view the spending and waste is to look at it from a macro-perspective, not from a specific issue and not by what people claim the deficit is or is not (the claims are 10 trillion all the way up to 50 trillion, or the idealogues like Beck claim it is 100+ trillion).

Certainly health care needs fixed, but having the govt. uproot the entire system at once is like walking into Microsoft and re-designing their entire procedures of how they’ve done everything in the past 25 years, and then expect to get an increase in productivity. The opposite will occur.

There needs to be performance driven analysis after specific changes are implemented in a tactical type sense. This is better than uprooting the whole system at once and then trying to figure out if it worked or not. This entire healthcare thing is a giant experiment with all the facts being too complex for any one person or even one group to understand. It would be like taking a giant piece of software (Windows for instance), and then completely re-designing it, and then expecting it to work without a major bug that will actually prevent the entire system from booting. Problem is there will be major bugs and it won’t boot when you do that until you first test it

You sound like a socialist idealogue (no offense), but you should just look at things on an individual basis from a purely “cold and calculating” perspective. Money and resources are not based on emotion and life is not fair. The socialist dream of everyone having something cannot come true, because there will always be people trying to step on the other guy. That is my biggest problem with the entire socialist concept, it assumes that almost ALL humans are at heart a good and willing to share and live without so the next guy can have more. Even if there were a way to forumulate such a world, it cannot happen because centralizing power will always result in a bad apple ruining it for everyone else (just like what has happened with the banks and wall street). Socialism is in itself a contradictory argument, because it wants to centralize power so the govt. can decide who to give the money to, but then you just complained the article about how the govt. did not give money to the right people or right causes. That will ALWAYS happen, no-one can agree to what the right causes are and never will, that is why it is better to just keep the govt. smaller in the first place, otherwise it’s like having 5000 people on one board of directors at a company, and trying to get them all to agree to the same thing. It won’t happen, instead some over-powering force will have to just on someone in order to get anything done, hence the way it works … The only other choice would be perhaps a dictatorship, but then there is the bad apple problem again.