Mr Khan said:
badgenome said:
Mr Khan said:
Granted, anecdotal evidence on my end, but this returns to other ideas from my original topic: any institution the right sees as espousing the wrong kind of fact is inherently a liberal conspiracy: the ivory tower and the "Lame-stream media" being two of them. Once they are dismissed as liberal conspiracies, anything they say can be freely disacknowledged.
The question of "intellectual overreach" is a considerable one, but i sure as hell would rather have someone learned fixing their own mistakes than someone blustering forward on mere "conviction." Smart people can make dumb decisions, but they are better-equipped to fix them. If you want someone who is going to exercise caution and restraint, you're not going to find it on the right as it is (perhaps in the libertarian movement, but i've noticed users around here have a hard time figuring out that the american right doesn't like libertarianism except where it suits them, which is again factual evidence presented by the fact that Ron Paul is currently fourth place to Newt frickin' Gingrich, but this is a rant aside).
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It's not a conspiracy. It's just that there's a preponderance of leftists in those institutions, so those institutions become functionally leftist ones. If a media organization is comprised of 90% liberals, they don't have to conspire in order to present a blinkered view of things. It will just naturally happen. When conservatives outnumber liberals in the general population, but only comprise something like 0.3% of sociologists (while liberals are grossly overrepresented) it doesn't take the fevered mind of a conspiracy theorist to think that the field is going to be heavily biased, and actually, it probably explains why studies on normal, white, middle Americans often read like anthropology reports on some pre-human hominid.
It seems like you're saying that smart people don't exist on the right, and Democrats govern with greater restraint than Republicans. That's pretty hilarious given the eerie similarities between the governance of the quintessential "smart Democrat" Obama and the equally emblematic "reckless cowboy Republican" Bush. Also, as a self-professed radical leftist with fascist tendencies (or whatever), don't you really not want caution and restraint? I mean, when Obama seized control of one-sixth of the U.S. economy you thought it wasn't enough because it wasn't a complete nationalization of health care.
And no shit that Republicans hate libertarians. Both parties buddy up to libertarians when they're out of power only to kick us in the balls when they're in. But the worst of the Republican agenda can't even hold a candle to the worst of the Democratic agenda, both because it's more narrowly focused and because it simply won't fly in today's society. People today wouldn't stand for something like the banning of contraceptives, and even as uncomfortable as many people are with abortion, I don't think they'd like an overturning of Roe vs. Wade much more. Meanwhile, it always seems to be the Democratic precincts that are trying to ban owning a goldfish or throwing footballs or salt. I really don't even think it's debatable who the bigger control freaks - and thus who the bigger enemies of liberty - are.
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In measured doses, more centralization and control does good things for a society, so long as this control does not undermine certain inalienable rights in the process, but the need for vigilence against overreach should not take the form of an entity whose rallying cry is "get yer guvmint hands off my medicare," nor an entity that enshrines avarice and believes in the inherent evil of the public sector. Accountability is important, but we shouldn't give in to the idea that we should restore a variant of anarchy just because it sounds easier than working to hold the government accountable.
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You'd have a point if that was the arguement being made.
However... it isn't, and because of that... you are actually guilty of anti-intellectualism here.
The arguements against it have been pretty clearly detailed in...
1) Will end up costing more. (Which anyone who knows how the CBO guidelines work could of told you that.)
2) Is the federal government compelling the purchase of something.
3) Is on the way to a system that forces uniform healthcare coverage... and in some ways already does.
