An Apropos Election Year Observation:

"Neither is it any answer to this view of the case to say that the men holding this absolute, irresponsible power, must be men chosen by the people (or portions of them) to hold it. A man is none the less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years. Neither are a people any the less slaves because permitted periodically to choose new masters. What makes them slaves is the fact that they now are, and are always hereafter to be, in the hands of men whose power over them is, and always is to be, absolute and irresponsible."

- Lysander Spooner, "No Treason No. VI. The Constitution Of No Authority" (NT.6.6.7 in the link)

From the International Herald Tribune:

"…But there is also a certain violated moral sense at the spectacle of all that wealth being concentrated in so few hands, the sense that making the acquisition of great wealth the highest achievement is bad for social cohesion and private morality.

Or, to put this another way, the money culture has arranged it so that a starting associate at a big-time law firm in New York makes more money a year than the chief justice of the United States.

And then, of course, there is the spectacle of the captains of finance getting severance packages in the tens of millions of dollars after screwing up so badly that they had to leave their posts.

The statistics on this do not tend to dissipate the irritation of the ordinary well-off in New York who spend hours of their time trying to park their cars on the street, because a spot in a parking garage costs $6,000 or $7,000 a year.

If you are in the 90th percentile in family wage and salary income in the United States, your revenues increased by only 34 percent in the 29 years from 1972 to 2001, according to economists Ian Dew-Becker and Robert Gordon.

But if you're in the 99.9th percentile of family income in the United States, which is pretty high up there, your wage and salary income increased on average 181 percent in those years, Becker and Gordon found. If you are in the 99.99th percentile, it went up 497 percent.

Similarly, two leading researchers on the topic of American income distribution, Thomas Picketty and Emmanuel Saez, found that the total share of national income received by the top 1 percent of the population doubled from 8 percent in 1980 to 16 percent in 2004."

Notice that these trends have continued under both democratic and republican administrations. Don't fool yourself. They are two factions of the same Whig Party which, by mere analytic definition, became two parties. Ideologically and in practice both are about as close as two parties can be -- so much so that against the broad political spectrum, they blend back into the one whence they came.

The Middle East is on the continent of Asia, the Byzantine Rite of Catholicism is considered "The Eastern Church", I get held up at airports more than the average person I know, and the people of my ancestry are continually made out to look like religious fanatics and savages in news media. Yet whenever I get a form where I have to declare my race/ethnicity, I am forced into the box "White". Really? Perhaps it can be said that I am Caucasian, but if we really want to talk about "races" (which are an absurdity in my opinion, especially considering the most the human genome diverges is 0.1%) descended from the Caucasus, then people from the Asian sub-continent of India are also Caucasian. But that doesn't make them White, now, does it? "Hispanics" are Caucasian, but they're not White. Really? Caucasian? Are we still using racial categories based on craniometry? Why don't we all subscribe to Nazism while we're at it. I must admit, though that I have seen Middle East on forms, yet they always lump it in with Europe. Let me ask: if Middle Easterners were really the same people as White Europeans, they couldn't be so easily racially profiled at airports, now could they? And let me tell you: I have been detained, searched, or pulled aside for a second ID check 100% of the time in Ireland, England, and Germany; yet among the brown people countries of Mexico, Greece, and India, I was checked only once in Mexico out of innumerable crossing when I lived on the border. Yet I keep being force to check the box "White." When I walk around New York or Chicago, no one looks twice; but in rural White-ville, USA I get stared at. Do you know what it feels like to continually receive the communication that you are less-than, suspicious, strange, and yet then be forced by the people who take that stance that you must formally identify with them? I think it's one of the worst forms of insult.

Do you not know that there comes a midnight hour when everyone has to throw off his mask? Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked? Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight in order to avoid this? Or are you not terrified by it? I have seen men in real life who so long deceived others that at last their true nature could not reveal itself; I have seen men who played hide and seek so long that at last in madness they disgustingly obtruded upon others their secret thoughts which hitherto they had proudly concealed. Or can you think of anything more frightful than that it might end with your nature being resolved into a multiplicity, that you really might become many, become, like those unhappy demoniacs, a legion, and thus would have lost the inmost and holiest thing of all in a man, the unifying power of personality? Truly, you should not jest with that which is not only serious but dreadful. In every man there is something which to a certain degree prevents him from becoming perfectly transparent to himself; and this may be the case in so high a degree, he may be so inexplicably woven into relationships of life which extend far beyond himself, that he almost cannot reveal himself. But he who cannot reveal himself cannot love, and he who cannot love is the most unhappy man of all.

- Søren Kierkegaard

OK, Ann Coulter, hate speech is not protected, and it is perfectly reasonable for someone to ask you to stop speaking when all that comes out of your mouth is hate. And in case you were wondering, hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment. By the way, just because people are entertained by your attempts at sounding reasonable doesn't mean that you actually construct anything resembling a cogent argument.

From The International Herald Tribune:

The return of Authoritarian Capitalists

By Azar Gat
Tribune Media Services

Thursday, June 14, 2007

Today's global liberal democratic order faces a significant challenge from the rise of nondemocratic great powers - the West's old Cold War rivals, China and Russia, now operating under "authoritarian capitalist" rather than Communist regimes.

The category is not new - authoritarian capitalist great powers played a leading role in the international system up until 1945.

But they have been largely absent since then. The liberal democratic camp defeated its authoritarian, Fascist and Communist rivals alike in all of the three major great-power struggles of the 20th century - the two world wars and the Cold War.

It is tempting to trace this outcome to the special traits and intrinsic advantages of liberal democracy. But the reasons for the liberal democracies' victories were different for each type of adversary.

The Soviet Union failed because its economic systems limited it. But the nondemocratic capitalist great powers, Germany and Japan, were defeated in war fundamentally because they were medium-sized countries with limited resource bases.

Thus contingency, not inherent advantages of liberal democracy, played a decisive role in tipping the balance against the non-democratic capitalist powers and in favor of the democracies.

The most decisive element of contingency was the United States.

Because of its continental size, no less than its democratic-capitalist system, the power of the United States consistently surpassed that of the next two strongest states combined throughout the 20th century, and this decisively tilted the global balance of power in favor of whichever side Washington was on.

So if any factor gave the liberal democracies their edge, it was above all the existence of the United States rather than any inherent advantage. In fact, had it not been for the United States, liberal democracy may well have lost the great struggles of the 20th century.

This is a sobering thought that is often overlooked in studies of the spread of democracy in the 20th century, and it makes the world today appear much more contingent and tenuous than linear theories of development suggest.

This is especially true in light of the recent emergence of nondemocratic powers, above all booming, authoritarian, capitalist China. Russia, too, is retreating from its post-Communist liberalism and assuming an increasingly authoritarian character as its economic clout grows.

Some believe these countries could ultimately become liberal democracies through a combination of internal development, increasing affluence and outside influence.

Alternatively, they may have enough weight to create a new non-democratic but economically advanced Second World. They could establish a powerful authoritarian-capitalist order that allies political elites, industrialists and the military; that is nationalist in orientation; and that participates in the global economy on its own terms, as imperial Germany and imperial Japan did.

By shifting from Communist command economy to capitalism, China and Russia have switched to a far more efficient brand of authoritarianism. Although the rise of these authoritarian capitalist great powers would not necessarily lead to a non-democratic hegemony or war, it might imply that the near-total dominance of liberal democracy since the Soviet Union's collapse will be short-lived and that a universal "democratic peace" is still far off.

Beijing and Moscow and their future followers might well become antagonists of the democratic countries - with all the potential for insecurity and conflict that this entails - while holding considerably more power than any of the democracies' past rivals ever did by virtue of being both large and capitalist.

The most important counterweight remains the United States. For all the criticism leveled against it, the United States and its alliance with Europe stands as the single most important hope for the future of liberal democracy.

As it was during the 20th century, the United States remains the greatest guarantee that liberal democracy will not be thrown on the defensive and relegated to a vulnerable position on the periphery of the international system.

Azar Gat is professor of national security at Tel Aviv University and the author of "War in Human Civilization." A longer version of this article appears in the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs.

Something to be aware of when reading op-ed pieces that are intentional propaganda. This is taken from the Britannica Concise Encyclopedia:

fascism

Philosophy of government that stresses the primacy and glory of the state, unquestioning obedience to its leader, subordination of the individual will to the state's authority, and harsh suppression of dissent. Martial virtues are celebrated, while liberal and democratic values are disparaged. Fascism . . . [is] differed from contemporary communism (as practiced under Joseph Stalin) by its protection of business and landowning elites and its preservation of class systems.


From the Columbia Encyclopedia:

"The growth of democratic ideology and popular participation in politics in the 19th cent. was terrifying to some conservative elements in European society, and fascism grew out of the attempt to counter it by forming mass parties based largely on the middle classes and the petty bourgeoisie, exploiting their fear of political domination by the lower classes. Forerunners of fascism . . . played on people's fears of revolution with its subsequent chaos, anarchy, and general insecurity. They appealed to nationalist sentiments and prejudices, exploited anti-Semitism, and portrayed themselves as champions of law, order, Christian morality, and the sanctity of private property."

Propaganda artists will call liberals the opposite of conservative, when in fact the opposite of liberalism is totalitarianism. And liberal does not mean "any one who's left-of-center." For there are plenty of left-wing totalitarians that disdain liberalism as well. So, if totalitarians can make "liberalism" a bad word, they indirectly convince everyone that totalitarianism is a good idea. These totalitarians will call people who advocate the state "progressives" or "liberals" to make it look like they do not advocate such, when in fact people who advocate a big state can advocate it for conserving culture as well as changing it; there are big-State progressives and no-Sate progressives. There are also liberals who want no-state: libertarians. Here in American, the most prevalent form of this "anti-liberal/pro-totalitarianism" effort hides under the guise of "conservatism." It would not be very appealing for these people to claim to be a totalitarians, so they steal the label "conservative" for themselves because, conveniently, to be conservative OR totalitarian is to not be liberal. So by focusing on "not liberal" they can deceive people that they are merely conservatives. However, although these totalitarians are certainly conservative, they are not the conservatives who wish to abolish the State, these totalitarians are more wholly accurately called fascists - they are totalitarian capitalists who just happen to also want to conserve the status quo. Fascists are just as interested in a big state, but for the purpose of protecting capitalist order and progressing toward greater militarism, and they currently hide in the Republican Party (as only a part of it, admittedly). People who want to abolish the State are also interested in abolishing the organized national military as well. These fascists propaganda artists are conveniently only critical of the State when the State advocates liberalism, but they have no problem justifying a military budget that is multiple times bigger than all of the budgets combined of nations hostile to the United States.

Fascism is alive and well in America, I just wish people would get over their belief that fascism died with the fall of the World War II Axis. It merely went underground and undercover.

Once again the Democratic Party and the AFL-CIO sells out workers. From The New York Times:

"And several months ago, Mrs. Clinton helped broker a secret meeting between a top Wal-Mart executive and former Democratic operative, Leslie Dach, and leaders of the retailer’s longtime adversary at the United Food and Commercial Workers union, according to several people briefed on the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to do so publicly.

The goal of the meeting was to tamp down the rancor between the company and the union, which has set up a group, WakeUpWalMart.com, that has harshly criticized the chain and leaked embarrassing internal documents to the news media, though an accord has not yet been reached."

Wisdom from the past, resurrected from one of the lost of the concentration camps of WWII, comes to knock some sense into us about the beautify of life and the nature of the child:

"As a parent, you say: 'She ought to…I want her to…' And you look for a pattern for your child to follow and you search for a life which you wish for her to have. You ignore the fact that all around you there is nothing but mediocrity and banality. People wander around, bustle, they fuss over small problems, fleeting aspirations, uninspired goals, unfulfilled hopes, perpetual longing. . . . As a parent, you say: "But is the child clever?" If a parent anxiously asks this question right from the start, it will not take long before the parent will be placing demands on the child. Eat up your food, even if you are not hungry and feel nauseated; go to bed, even though you are not tired and will have to wait an hour to fall asleep. Because you have to, and because I want you to be healthy. . . .

Just remember: Mentalities vary, and children can be steady or capricious, compliant or contrary, creative or imitative, witty or earnest, concrete or abstract; the memory can be exceptional or average; some are congenital despots while others have a wide range of inte
How often do parents feel disappointment when children fail to live up to expectations, and how often to parents feel disappointment at every step of their development? Parents can be their harsh judges, rather than their counselors and consolers."

The boy who cried wolf now treats the press like they're the idiots. And my own DNA is patented by someone else: "The gene may exist in your body, but it’s now private property." This country has become The Absurd.

If Benito Mussolini once said that "Fascism should rightly be called corporatism as it is a merger of state and corporate power," then where, technically does that put the GW Bush Administration? Hmmmmm. . . .

What the?!?!?!??!????

http://www.prussianbluestore.com/

These people didn't get the message when their CD's were prevented from being released in Germany?!?? Hellllooooo! The Germans already went through that "White Nationalism" phase and figured out (with the rest of the world) that it was no good. Welcome to the 21st century, Nimrods!

And while we're at it, let's all get something straight: HATE SPEECH IS NOT PROTECTED UNDER THE FIRST AMENDMENT, NOR ANYWHERE ELSE IN THE CONSTITUTION.

The IWW Website is ranked 4th in the world in LabourStart's Labour Website of the Year 2007! It reads:

"The Industrial Workers of the World is a relatively small union with a very long history and an outstanding website (which won this competition 7 years ago). The more than 300 votes it received this year come not only from its members but from many who admire the effort the union is making to become increasingly relevant -- such as the extraordinary effort to organize Starbucks workers. For an example of a powerful open-source content management system being used by a union to promote community and solidarity, you couldn't do better than check out the IWW site."

CONGRATS IWW!

Solidarity Forever

(Tune: John Brown's Body) (by Ralph Chaplin, January 1915 )(9th edition, 1916)

When the Union's inspiration through the workers' blood shall run,
There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun.
Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one?
But the Union makes us strong.

Solidarity forever!
Solidarity forever!
Solidarity forever!
For the Union makes us strong.

Is there aught we hold in common with the greedy parasite
Who would lash us into serfdom and would crush us with his might?
Is there anything left to us but to organize and fight?
For the Union makes us strong.

[chorus]

It is we who plowed the prairies; built the cities where they trade;
Dug the mines and built the workshops; endless miles of railroad laid.
Now we stand outcast and starving, 'midst the wonders we have made;
But the Union makes us strong.

[chorus]

All the world that's owned by idle drones is ours and ours alone.
We have laid the wide foundations; built it skyward stone by stone.
It is ours, not to slave in, but to master and to own,
While the Union makes us strong.

[chorus]

They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn,
But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn.
We can break their haughty power; gain our freedom when we learn
That the Union makes us strong.

[chorus]

In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold;
Greater than the might of armies, magnified a thousand-fold.
We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old.
For the Union makes us strong.

[chorus]

For a much as I've seen the flags at half-staff since Bush got into office, there must be a lot of people dying. Coincidence?

From the Journal Times:

"The U.S. Flag Code prescribes flags at half-staff for 30 days after a president or former president dies. A sitting vice president, current and former chief justices, and the speaker of the House receive 10 days at half-staff upon their deaths.

Former vice presidents, associate justices of the Supreme Court, cabinet members, military chiefs and governors all are honored with half-staff treatment until burial. Members of Congress are honored with half-staff flags on the day of their death and the next day.

The president can order flags flown at half-staff upon the death of major U.S. government figures or foreign dignitaries."

"War Pigs" by Black Sabbath

Generals gathered in their masses
Just like witches at black masses
Evil minds that plot destruction
Sorcerers of deaths construction
In the fields the bodies burning
As the war machine keeps turning
Death and hatred to mankind
Poisoning their brainwashed minds, oh lord yeah!

Politicians hide themselves away
They only started the war
Why should they go out to fight?
They leave that role to the poor

Time will tell on their power minds
Making war just for fun
Treating people just like pawns in chess
Wait till their judgment day comes, yeah!

Now in darkness, world stops turning
As the war machine keeps burning
No more war pigs of the power
Hand of God has struck the hour
Day of judgment, God is calling
On their knees, the war pigs crawling
Begging mercy for their sins
Satan, laughing, spreads his wings
All right now!

Bush's 2007 State of the Union Address: A Socialist Critique
by J. Quinn Brisben 24 JAN 2007

George W. Bush is not an honest person, as he has proved many times and proved again in his most recent State of the Union address. I doubt if many viewers were moved by his closing attempts to associate himself with a Silver Star winner who was wounded when he shielded his buddies in Iraq, the Harlem man who jumped to the subway rails to save a man who had fallen, or the Congolese man able to get citizenship because of his extraordinary basketball skills. I did think he genuinely admired the housewife who sold her totally ineffective Baby Einstein idea to the Disney cartel, but Disney ought to have paid for this commercial plug on a state occasion. Possibly its executives have already contributed to the 2008 Republican campaign. The way in which the television medium has debased the political process in this country is a continuing scandal that ought to be addressed by the president and congress but will not be as long as it is so pathetically easy to bribe politicians with tube time.

Most of us tell white lies in order to ease social interaction, and Bush is no exception. I doubt if he really is pleased to address Nancy Pelosi as "Madame Speaker", nor does he sincerely join in prayers for the recovery of Democratic Senator Tim Johnson, who may be replaced by a Republican governor and throw the Senate up for grabs if he does not recover. I doubt if his congratulations to the new Democratic congress were as hearty as he indicated. The important lies start coming when he assures Congress that all are united in extending this nation's prosperity, which has steadily diminished for the average person in the Bush administrations, in wishing to spend money wisely, which throwing it down the war rat hole does not, and keeping faith with our troops, which Bush never has. He has lied about his reasons for putting them in harm's way and lied about the reasons why they do not have the equipment to defend themselves properly. I am sure he is sincere in wanting the Democratic Congress to work for reactionary Republican purposes as it has in the past.

He intends to balance the budget without raising taxes. Even such a dim bulb as Bush must know that this is impossible. War unbalances the budget, and Bush wants to escalate war. His budget strategy is an obvious continuation of the Reagan strategy to pile up debt until social programs starve and keep using regressive taxes to widen the gap between the very rich and those who produce their wealth. He also says he is opposed to "earmarks" in appropriations bills. Since most of those "earmarks" benefit those who support Republican campaigns and increase the wealth of the energy oligopoly that enriches the Bush family, I think subsidies for the rich will continue to be tucked away in unlit corners of legislation. His past record indicates that when he says he wants to "fix" Medicaid and Medicare and "save" Social Security he really wants to follow the dictates of the late Milton Friedman and destroy these programs.

The No Child Left Behind Act has been a terrible failure except in so far as it has worked to destroy the public school system and demoralize creative teachers, which was possibly its unstated purpose. The present social class and racial segregation in increasing numbers of schools is a paramount danger to what is left of political democracy in this country. Attempts to increase the profits of private companies through charter schools and other "privatizing" devices have been mostly disastrous and are likely to continue to be so. Every organization of working teachers opposes them, and for good reason.

Bush's health care proposals are ridiculous. Every other industrialized nation in the world has a more equitable and effective medical system than ours, and no amount of media propaganda can change that fact. The Bush tax exemption proposals can only increase the deficit and enrich pharmaceutical companies and other parasites while making poor people into stigmatized second-class citizens. Private health insurance accounts are only an invitation for financial sharks to steal.

Bush's immigration proposals are nothing more than a plot to lower the wages of US workers, make those of Mexican and Central American workers lower still, and at the same time pay obeisance to the racist proclivities of much of his core constituency. Any proposal that does not include amnesty keeps immigrant workers without rights and subject to constant employer terrorism. The widening of Interstate 35 through Texas and proposals to extend that and other roads is nothing less than a plot to deny jobs to organized workers and increase the numbers of the unorganized and technically illegal. The slogan "Workers of the world, unite!" is more relevant than ever. US workers should not only fight for their own rights but work to make sure that Mexican workers are in at least partial control of their governments at home.

Bush is a creature of the oil industry and favors no proposal that will not increase its profits, no matter what his misleading rhetoric would seem to indicate. He proposes fuel standards, but not the kind of taxes that would force gas-guzzling SUVs to pay for their true cost to the environment. The government has never invested sufficiently in alternative energy sources like solar and wind power that are likely to make a long-run difference, or even in stopgaps like a clean coal gasification project. Ethanol is currently a fraud designed to enrich a few companies like Archer Daniels Midland and will remain so until further research learns to use biomass more efficiently. One good short range proposal would be to socialize all private energy companies, as the Socialist Party has been proposing since 1976, since they seem to operate naturally under monopoly conditions anyhow.

Bush wants less debate on his judicial nominations. I agree that we should have conservative judges, judges who want to preserve the US Constitution, especially the Congressional war-making power, the limits on the suspension of habeas corpus, and the 1st amendment which guarantees freedom of speech, press, and assembly; the 4th amendment guaranteeing freedom from unlawful searches and seizures, the 5th amendment guaranteeing due process of law, the 6th amendment guaranteeing basic rights in criminal trials, and the 8th amendment prohibiting torture.
Bush's judicial nominees have sometimes rejected these conservative ideas and are thus unfit to serve as American judges. If he wants quicker approval of his judicial choices, he should choose better persons.

The Republican Party's recent electoral defeat was largely due to Bush's repeated disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan and the unpopularity of his planned war on Iran. Yet he waited until halfway through his address to discuss these issues. He continually uses the phrase "war on terrorism", but war can be made only on states and "terrorism" is not a state. "Terrorism", a dangerously partisan usage for a leader who condones the massacre of innocents and the torture of un-indicted detainees, can only be fought with common police methods such as more effective guard patrols and subornation of informers, methods which Bush's inability to distinguish among foreigners and the prejudice his subordinates have against persons familiar with another culture have tended to render ineffective.

He states that Al-Qaeda's days of comfortable sanctuary, easy movement, steady financing, and free-flowing communications are long over. This is a lie, as his failure to capture Osama bin Laden proves beyond a doubt. Al-Qaeda has plenty of sanctuary with the Pakistani intelligence services that are our supposed allies, slaughters American soldiers seemingly at will, grows steadily in numbers with plenty of financing from Saudi families who also support the Bush family, and has no trouble communicating the same way the rest of us with cell phones and computer access communicate. Bush's offensives have only made things worse, and his claims to have forestalled later terrorist attacks are doubtful.

I am glad Bush finally realizes that there are some historical differences between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, and that he has performed the difficult feat of antagonizing both groups simultaneously. He might learn more if he made comparisons between Al-Qaeda and Hezbollah and some of the
Christian and Jewish extreme groups whose favor he courts. His current condemnation of Hezbollah is part of an attempt to lure this country into an attack on Iran, a development that all Americans ought to resist, especially those in Congress interested in restoring their war-making power. Bush does not seem to realize that every invasion and escalation he has ordered so far has increased the chaos, and every attempted use of more US troops in the future is likely to make the situation still worse. Neither the vast majority of Afghans nor the vast majority of Iraqis has any faith in their US-imposed governments. Our bullying of those governments is not likely to improve things.

As usual, Bush fails to mention the root cause of his dilemma. The attempt of the companies that Bush and Cheney represent to gain hegemony over the planet's energy resources is simply not going to work. If we go back to square one and include all the industrialized and industrializing powers in on the action for the twilight of fossil fuels, we might be able to create an international force capable of keeping order until an equitable distribution of the spoils with justice for all the locals can be worked out. In any case the continued presence of our troops can only make things worse, curtailing our domestic liberty as well as that of the people of the Middle East. What is good for Halliburton and Exxon Mobil is not good for the country.

I am glad that Bush wants to cooperate with China and Russia in bringing North Korea under control. I am even gladder that he did not choose to mention Chavez in Venezuela or the ailing Castro in Cuba as threats to our liberty that must immediately be attacked by missiles. I am glad that he wants a democratic state for Palestinians despite his distaste for the leaders they have elected. I am glad that he finally realizes that the problem of H.I.V./AIDS in Africa cannot be solved by abstinence education or enriching big pharma. I am glad he finally realizes that the World Bank cannot collect all the debts it is owed even with the help of the Marines and the CIA. Finally, I am glad that Bush no longer looks quite like Alfred E. Neumann. He is worried. Our best strategy is to keep him worried.

---

Quinn Brisben was the SPUSA candidate for vice-president in 1976 and for president in 1992.

OK, so it's not perfect. The point is merely that the political spectrum is more complicated than Left and Right and that Liberals are not radical leftists. As a matter of fact, they are on the moderate economic right and the moderate social left. Liberals are merely more economically reserved libertarians.

The war in Iraq is costing $200 billion per annum, and the economy has not crashed into the ground. According to the New York Times, for less money per year we could:

Provide universal health care for all uninsured Americans: $100B/year
Provide universal preschool for all 3- and 4-year olds: $35B/yr
Provide all the security recommendations of the 9/11 Commission: $10B/yr
Provide the Annual budget for cancer research: $6B/yr
Provide immunizations for the *world's* children against measles, whooping cough, tetanus, tuberculosis, polio and diphtheria: $0.6B/yr.

But $200B/yr for Iraq? It's amazing how no one's talking about how such a cost would cave the American economy. Yes, yes, pharmaceutical companies *might* loose some profits if we provide universal health care, but as far as I'm concerned . . . well, let's just put it this way: arguing that the profits of someone who has enough wealth to invest in pharmaceutical companies is somehow more important than the health of someone who doesn't have enough wealth for care is utterly immoral.