• American voters would rather shut down the government than raise the debt limit, even though most believe a shutdown would have a dramatic effect on everyday Americans.
• Is it immoral to cut the budget?
• Broke? When someone gives you a check and the bank informs you that there are insufficient funds, who do you get mad at? In your own life, you get mad at the guy who gave you a check that bounced, not at the bank. But, in politics, you get mad at whoever tells you that there is no money. One of the secrets of the growth of the welfare state is that politicians get a lot of mileage out of making promises, without setting aside enough money to fulfill those promises.
• Shutdown can’t come soon enough.
• The WaPo freaks the heck out over it.
• The ‘crime’ of private money.
• What would you do? The upstairs room needs a new floor. It’s going to be laminate. I’ve found exactly the flooring I want for $1.89 per square foot at a tiny family-run business in my town. But. I can drive 90 miles to a chain store and get the same stuff for much less.
• Once upon a time, people actually believed that a president could not constitutionally commit troops abroad without a declaration of war by Congress.
• Unholy alliance: Whatever their differences on domestic and other matters, the neocons and the Obama cult agree on one thing: their mutual disdain for the Constitution. The “progressives” sniff at “constitutional fundamentalism,” and the neocons regard Constitution-citing conservatives such as Paul and Lee as “dogmatists.” They hate the Constitution because it restrains their overweening (if often competing) ambitions, and holds them accountable – not merely every few years, at election time, but all the time.
• The government does not hate you. The government does not like you. It is indifferent. The government is not an entity with feelings, remorse, ethics or conscious. It is a collective of individuals working according to rigid flawed guidelines. Like the Burkeans and unlike left-libertarians I’d say hierarchy is the divine and natural order of things but yes.

Labels: libertarianism, peace