Blogging Politics

So, I don't usually blog politics, but this is a bit of a freewrite where I'm going to ramble on about my search for apolitical party, which has proven to be a difficult task. I think I might be a Libertarian. Here's why...

I hugely believe in a libertarian viewpoint of the First Amendment right to free speech. I think that the marketplace of ideas will never balance unless we allow all speech, because every idea has merit - for example, a good idea will never be heard if it is the subject of suppression, and a "bad" or incorrect expression will never be thought bad if we can't use our intelligence to counter it (ex. hate speech - we need to know what it is in order to understand why it's wrong, plus there is a lot to be learned from formulating that argument that counters such speech in the first place).

So, should other types of markets work like that? Well, I am very anti-government. I think there's just too much of it - too many lobbyists, too many people who sit in congress getting paid to do absolutely nothing besides get elected and show it. If you, Average Joe, ever wants anything done, you have to go through so much bureaucracy in order to get to that level. In a sense, nothing can ever be done. And then there are different layers of corruption and mismanagement - the bigger the organization is, the easier it is for those kinds of things to get lost in the scuffle.

So, is a libertarian point of view what will help us? First of all, allowing a libertarian ideal offers more incentives for people to work. But so does capitalism. But if we're able to cut out the government, will people really donate to charity because they have more money to throw around? I suppose it deals more with the nature of human beings, and right now it's hard to say. I do know that rich people feel a lot of social pressure to donate to charity, but a lot of rich people didn't get that way by throwing their money around. So it's hard to say.

So maybe we cut the bureaucracy by taking the power away from the federal government and giving it back to the communities? This seems like a good idea - we can cut out a huge number of federal governmental agencies and put the power back into the hands of the states, which seems to cut out a lot of the middle levels - like why are people in rural Ohio paying the same type of federal taxes as people in NYC, where the truth is that the people in Ohio don't see any effects of the so-called bailout whereas New York sees all of them. If I understand correctly, this seems to be a sort of social anarchist point of view (but obviously not absolutist, since true anarchists believe in NO government).

Anyway, I've been thinking about these things a lot lately. I've always been interested in markets and been well aware that the economy would not be good forever, because markets need to regulate themselves and giving all kinds of loans to people who can't afford them is not the way to do it. But this is an example of how people get greedy, which is the main reason I'm shying away from a Libertarian perspective. Anyway, that's that. Have a good night.