I never said anything about defunding the police. I said there are alternative ways to fund the police without taxation, and that in fact police departments use those alternative funding methods and could expand them. People who favor defunding the police generally don't talk about paying less taxes, they talk about shifting the funds currently going to police to other services. If you think I sound like the defund the police people, you are not listening to me, to them, or to either. I don't really care if one fire crew brawls with another one. Also I find a libertarian citing volunteer firefighters as an odd argument. That's counting on free labor and the charity of others.[/quote] Libertarians have no issue with volunteering. In fact, libertarianism is all about voluntary participation. There have been people killed by meteors, but it doesn't happen often and it isn't something you need to worry about, just like plane crashes. Regardless, as I said, you can still have air traffic control without tax based funding, you just include an ATC fee in ticket sales. Those are incredibly minor issues. Look at the number of people killed in traffic collisions, and compare that to the number of people killed when a car hits the building they are in. Every road should be a toll road. That is exactly what I said. If every road is a toll road, it doesn't lead to inefficiencies and difficulties because this isn't 1997 where you have to physically pay at a toll booth. You just have a license plate reader charge the registered owner of the car. Who said that? No one? The Navy and air force can maintain their own facilities, but they don't need to maintain commercial ports. And no, actual maintence is not regulation. Requiring maintenance is regulation, but doing the maintenance is not, it is maintenance. To regulate is to control or supervise by means of rules and regulations. The referees regulate a basketball game. The players play the game. The arena provides the court and the hoops and the clocks. The ref doesn't maintain the clock or the hoop or the court, they just enforce the rules. A libertarian society would have less homelessness for two reasons. First, there would be far more building of multifamily housing, because there would not be restrictive zoning and there would be less regulation of building (especially environmental hurdles). Second, there would not be government payouts to the homeless that allow them to easily maintain their vagrant lifestyle. Small businesses could band together to have the homeless moved along, could chose to pay to have them moved along, or could move them along themselves. Regardless, because of the prior point, there should be far fewer vagrants milling around to deal with anyway.
The Robber Baron years were pretty much Libertarian rule and it was awful. Child labor, unsafe working conditions, monopolies, unsafe housing, predatory practices, and discrimination galore. We don't need that again.
13 hours of searching and they only found six documents. So it's a big fat nothing burger Justice Department finds 6 more classified documents in search of Biden’s home https://nypost.com/2023/01/21/justi...lassified-documents-in-search-of-bidens-home/ excerpt: Federal investigators found more classified materials during a search of President Biden’s Delaware home — with some dating back to his years in the Senate, Biden’s lawyer announced Saturday. Bob Bauer, Biden’s newly acquired personal lawyer, said the Justice Department took six documents marked classified and some of Biden’s notes during a Friday search that lasted 13 hours. more
Biden is letting them walk all over him. He allowed the feds to search every corner of his house and go through his entire 30 year career of boxes and tapes. They spent 13 HOURS combing through every detail. They would NEVER have gotten a warrant to search his entire house esp for that long. doj had tons of witness on trump yet they only got permission to search one room and one part of maralargo. Biden literally let them search every corner of his house while he's the president. If you think for a damn second trump or even Bush would've allowed the fbi to volunteer search every corner of your life for 13 hours youre effin insane.
Biden is a clown who can barely remember where he is. His VP is even worse. If we trot out Biden and Trump again it's a complete embarrassment
Investigators Seize More Classified Documents From Biden’s Home A team from the Justice Department conducted a 13-hour search of the president’s Wilmington residence on Friday. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/21/us/politics/biden-documents.html
Biden admin quietly admits canceling Keystone XL Pipeline cost thousands of jobs, billions of dollars President Biden's decision to revoke pipeline's permits hurt 'working families,' Montana senator says https://www.foxnews.com/politics/bi...housands-jobs-billions-dollars?intcmp=tw_pols excerpt: The Biden administration published a congressionally mandated report highlighting the positive economic benefits the Keystone XL Pipeline would have had if President Biden didn't revoke its federal permits. The report, which the Department of Energy (DOE) completed in late December without any public announcement, says the Keystone XL project would have created between 16,149 and 59,000 jobs and would have had a positive economic impact of between $3.4-9.6 billion, citing various studies. A previous report from the federal government published in 2014 determined 3,900 direct jobs and 21,050 total jobs would be created during construction which was expected to take two years. But immediately after taking office in January 2021, Biden canceled the pipeline's permits, effectively shutting the project down. "The Biden administration finally owned up to what we have known all along — killing the Keystone XL Pipeline cost good-paying jobs, hurt Montana’s economy and was the first step in the Biden administration’s war on oil and gas production in the United States," Sen. Steve Daines. R-Mont., said Thursday in a statement. "Unfortunately, the administration continues to pursue energy production anywhere but the United States." more at the link
https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/01/the-real-reason-biden-deserves-grief-over-car-a-lago/ The Real Reason Biden Deserves Grief over Car-a-Lago By WILFRED REILLY January 22, 2023 6:30 AM It has more to do with Trump’s treatment than with Biden’s actions. I’ll open with a statement that will probably piss off my mostly conservative audience: The Joe Biden classified-documents scandal is mostly a nothing-burger. But so was the Donald Trump classified-documents “scandal.” The massive media double standards that we observed during coverage of the two situations, however, aren’t a nothing-burger at all; they’re a real problem that we should call out and mock whenever possible, and that affect how fairly we can treat poor old Uncle Joe. As we heard endlessly for weeks a month or two back, dastardly former president Donald Trump committed the potential felony of taking classified docs home from his former office and workstation, the White House. The national reaction to Orange Man’s possession of the wrong yellow folders bordered on “Red Wedding.” The FBI raided Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home/hotel and seized the papers in question. Media speculation approached hysteria, with some outlets noting that Trump might have mishandled material bearing on global nuclear security. At least one million-follower Twitter account began publicly referring to the former POTUS as a “nuclear spy.” And then, as I once said in a fine book titled Hate Crime Hoax, it happened. First, Trump turned out to have no real nefarious purpose in mind with regard to his papers, which were kept in a locked vault and which he seemed to see as personal souvenirs at most. Then, in an even more ironic turn of the wheel, current president Joseph Robinette Biden was revealed to also have highly classified documents scattered . . . all over the place. A stash of the papers was found at the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Biden Center in Washington; documents were discovered on what appears to be two different occasions in the primary Biden home; and a box containing at least some classified paperwork was found literally in the ex-veep’s muscle-car garage. In some very real ways, the Biden documents matter was “worse” than the Trump documents matter: A vice president has far less ability to declassify high-level documents than a U.S. president (although he does have some), documents were found in many more distinct locations, at least some documents were located in unsecured areas accessed by sketchy individuals such as Hunter Biden, and so forth. But here’s the thing: Neither case, looked at objectively, was probably a giant deal. Biden should be investigated to at least the extent Trump was, but no breathing person seriously believes that either man is an Emirati agent. And, after Big Jim Comey basically made possession of classified information an active-intent crime — at least for Special Humans — during the Great Hillary Clinton Email Wars of 2016, there is a 0.000 percent chance either will ever be prosecuted for his indiscretions. Speaking frankly, and as a cynic, I would suspect that a rather high percentage of elite former D.C. residents still have a sheaf or two of papers that they shouldn’t, after ordering that the contents of “every closet in my old office in the Dirksen Building” just “be shipped up to the new place in the Poconos.” What is annoying about all of this is something so obvious and prevalent that I probably won’t ever write about it for NR again: the absurd level of partisan left-wing slant in non-Fox national media. In contrast to the “nuclear spy Donald Trump” tone of coverage of the last “scandal,” major headlines dealing with this one tend to be more along the lines of “Biden’s Classified Documents Scandal Isn’t as Bad as Trump’s,” and “MSNBC Legal Analyst Explains Why It’s Ok That Biden Took Classified Documents but Not Trump.” More broadly, at some level, everyone knows that the exact equivalent of the Hunter Biden laptop crisis would have been the biggest story in the world if Donald Trump Jr. had been filming himself weighing ounces of pure crack and having sex with young prostitutes before closing seven-figure deals with sketchy foreign businessmen. Even the admittedly deplorable January 6 riot would be a historical footnote if conservatives or libertarians — versus “mostly peaceful protesters” — had been responsible for a previous year of urban riots that killed perhaps 30 people, caused $2,000,000,000 in damage, briefly established a city-state, and burnt down an active-duty police station. As I recently noted for Tablet, there is a scientific explanation for the patterns of coverage that we see in these stories. In the 1993 book The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model, political scientists Jeff Segal and Harold Spaeth argue that — for all their yammer about “originalism” and “moral reading” and “the inevitable complexity of leadership” — roughly 80 percent of the decisions of High Court justices can be predicted by one simple measure of ideology, and there is no reason to assume this is not also true for other individual decision-makers. In American national media, liberals outnumber conservatives five to one, and the resulting trends in those stories that receive significant focus are almost exactly as one would expect. In fact, a quick glib-but-real rule of thumb is that any Democratic scandal might well receive five times as much coverage if it involved pachyderms or conservatives. In this context, it may actually be fair — and it sure is fun — to hammer Joe Biden about “Car-a-Lago.” But this is not because the octogenarian pol actually is a foreign agent. It is because Trump clearly was not, either, and the Solons of our press need to be prodded to — in every leftist’s favorite phrase — “do better.” WILFRED REILLY is an associate professor of political science at Kentucky State University and the author of Taboo: 10 Facts You Can’t Talk About.
This person has a fundamental misunderstanding of the issue. Starting in the 2nd paragraph. Trump is not in trouble for having the documents. He is in trouble for the willful retention of them. NARA and the DOJ had been trying to get back the documents for over 18 months. Trump returned 40 boxes, but there were more. He returned some .ore saying that was all of the. He was issued a subpoena and his attorneys lied stating all the documents were returned. Then and only then was a warrant obtained and ever more documents were discovered. Had Trump returned all the documents in the beginning He would be in no legal jeopardy. So the whole "he is in trouble for taking the documents" is false red meat thrown out to stoke his base. Had HE not told everyone the FBI had executed a search warrant there is a better than 75% chance Trump would not be in legal jeopardy. He brought this on himself. He painted the DOJ into a corner. He forced them to obtain a warrant. He forced them to open a criminal investigation by screaming about the execution of the warrant. The DOJ ALWAYS tries to protect the OFFICE of the President. They didn't want this ****. They didn't want our country to look like a ****ing laughingstock to the rest of the world. They wanted to to this silently They wanted to get the documents and have it all go away. Trump didn't let that happen.
That.... That isn't anything. That was the argument all along. "more jobs". We already knew that. There was an additional claim that hasn't been proven: "it would have reduced gas prices". Like no ****, a construction project creates jobs.
I didn't say you were defunding the police (although your proposal would lead to defunding given that likely many would try to get by not paying for LE and hopings end up OK like we see with people who don't pay for insurance). Your attitude is that the LE don't really do much helping people diretly so we don't need government to pay for them. That is what I meant you sound like those who are for "Defund the POlice" Voluntary participation without compensation? So Libertarianism is then about depending on the kindness of others rather than working for your good? That seems odd. Also you should care about fire crews not acting professionally and acting like street thugs defending turf rather than fighting fires. Such things did happen in the 19th C America. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smit...refighters-fought-fires-each-other-180960391/ And why don't plane crashes happen a lot? It's because there is a lot of regulation on air travel. If you look at the early days of air travel there were a lot of flights. This is a major flaw in thinking. You often look at ends without considering how did we get to those ends. Also why meteors are very rare it doesn't mean it's something as a country or a civilization we shoudl ignore them. A few years a meteor exploded over a Russian city that caused a lot of damage. If it happened on a large city it could've been devastating. As such there are efforts to address potential meteor strikes. And again why are these rare? Might it be because government regulation on traffic, auto safety and building codes has made such things rarer and more likely someone would survive or did this just happen by coincidence? And I've been CA. It was CA government that set up those type of readers. No one did so you're making my point that mail is moved by commercial arteries. It's moved very well by commercial arteries. In other words by post roads built by the government as the Constitution says the Federal government can. The referees can also demand that physical standards of the playing surface and building are maintained. In other words the can mandate proper maintenance. As an architect when I do code compliance part of that is determing what physical facilities are needed to meet the code. We tried these things back 100 years ago. We had tenements where people lived in squalid conditions but we also had far more people homeless when people couldn't afford their rents and there was no assistence or other measures. Consider what the homeless situation was in the 1920's and 1930's compared to now. That is one of the problems with Libertarianism. For most of our history we did it. We had greater wealth inequality, less safer roads and food, and much more homeless. And again when we had a government much like what you're describing there were much more vagrants. You might want to read The Grapes of Wrath, or listen to some old Blue Grass to get a sense of how much vagrancy and being a Tramp was a part of the culture. Besides that as noted not all businesses can or will consider to move homeless along. Also if you're saying businesses can band together why can't they band together to vote in elected leaders who will prioritize homeless? If enouigh businesses and other private entities band together you get to a government.
It's as if the guy you are replying to doesn't even understand the basic concept of a "social contract". Everything he advocates for will shoot himself in the foot.
@StupidMoniker Do you understand the basic concept of giving up an ability to do certain things because you don't want those certain things happening to you by other people?
As you know I am crticial of the Left and Marxist thought but the Libertarian view point is as Utopian and unrealistic as true Communism. The idea of moving most of our social services to the private sector is far more radical than anything Bernie Sanders, AOC etc... has proposed. The idea that removing most government supports and regulation on things like housing will reduce homeless is incredibly aspirational. It's also empiracally unsupported given what we see both in our own history and in other countries that do those things. There was a reason that things like the FHA was created and it wasn't just because of some Leftie desire to control people. It was because during the Depression there were so many homeless that the electorate demanded something be done.
https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertarian-police-department L.P.D.: Libertarian Police Department I was shooting heroin and reading “The Fountainhead” in the front seat of my privately owned police cruiser when a call came in. I put a quarter in the radio to activate it. It was the chief. “Bad news, detective. We got a situation.” “What? Is the mayor trying to ban trans fats again?” “Worse. Somebody just stole four hundred and forty-seven million dollars’ worth of bitcoins.” The heroin needle practically fell out of my arm. “What kind of monster would do something like that? Bitcoins are the ultimate currency: virtual, anonymous, stateless. They represent true economic freedom, not subject to arbitrary manipulation by any government. Do we have any leads?” “Not yet. But mark my words: we’re going to figure out who did this and we’re going to take them down … provided someone pays us a fair market rate to do so.” “Easy, chief,” I said. “Any rate the market offers is, by definition, fair.” He laughed. “That’s why you’re the best I got, Lisowski. Now you get out there and find those bitcoins.” “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m on it.” I put a quarter in the siren. Ten minutes later, I was on the scene. It was a normal office building, strangled on all sides by public sidewalks. I hopped over them and went inside. “Home Depot™ Presents the Police!®” I said, flashing my badge and my gun and a small picture of Ron Paul. “Nobody move unless you want to!” They didn’t. “Now, which one of you punks is going to pay me to investigate this crime?” No one spoke up. “Come on,” I said. “Don’t you all understand that the protection of private property is the foundation of all personal liberty?” It didn’t seem like they did. “Seriously, guys. Without a strong economic motivator, I’m just going to stand here and not solve this case. Cash is fine, but I prefer being paid in gold bullion or autographed Penn Jillette posters.” Nothing. These people were stonewalling me. It almost seemed like they didn’t care that a fortune in computer money invented to buy drugs was missing. I figured I could wait them out. I lit several cigarettes indoors. A pregnant lady coughed, and I told her that secondhand smoke is a myth. Just then, a man in glasses made a break for it. “Subway™ Eat Fresh and Freeze, Scumbag!®” I yelled. Too late. He was already out the front door. I went after him. “Stop right there!” I yelled as I ran. He was faster than me because I always try to avoid stepping on public sidewalks. Our country needs a private-sidewalk voucher system, but, thanks to the incestuous interplay between our corrupt federal government and the public-sidewalk lobby, it will never happen. I was losing him. “Listen, I’ll pay you to stop!” I yelled. “What would you consider an appropriate price point for stopping? I’ll offer you a thirteenth of an ounce of gold and a gently worn ‘Bob Barr ‘08’ extra-large long-sleeved men’s T-shirt!” He turned. In his hand was a revolver that the Constitution said he had every right to own. He fired at me and missed. I pulled my own gun, put a quarter in it, and fired back. The bullet lodged in a U.S.P.S. mailbox less than a foot from his head. I shot the mailbox again, on purpose. “All right, all right!” the man yelled, throwing down his weapon. “I give up, cop! I confess: I took the bitcoins.” “Why’d you do it?” I asked, as I slapped a pair of Oikos™ Greek Yogurt Presents Handcuffs® on the guy. “Because I was afraid.” “Afraid?” “Afraid of an economic future free from the pernicious meddling of central bankers,” he said. “I’m a central banker.” I wanted to coldcock the guy. Years ago, a central banker killed my partner. Instead, I shook my head. “Let this be a message to all your central-banker friends out on the street,” I said. “No matter how many bitcoins you steal, you’ll never take away the dream of an open society based on the principles of personal and economic freedom.” He nodded, because he knew I was right. Then he swiped his credit card to pay me for arresting him. Tom O’Donnell’s children’s novel, “Space Rocks!” is out now.
