Politics

Which party is most in line with your beliefs?

Take the World’s Smallest Political Quiz.

It will only take a few seconds, and the results may surprise you!

My results are shown at right, placing me fully in the Libertarian camp:

LIBERTARIANS support maximum liberty in both personal and economic matters. They advocate a much smaller government; one that is limited to protecting individuals from coercion and violence. Libertarians tend to embrace individual responsibility, oppose government bureaucracy and taxes, promote private charity, tolerate diverse lifestyles, support the free market, and defend civil liberties.

The phrase "tolerate diverse lifestyles" may be a little misleading because the word "tolerate" is ambiguous. Tolerance is not approval or acceptance; it is begrudgingly allowing something to be. Clearly the government must tolerate all lifestyles that do not impinge on the equal rights of all others. A lifestyle of larceny is properly outlawed by the government; a lifestyle of bigamy should not be. I may or may not encourage bigamy; bigamy may or may not be a lifestyle approved by God; but the practice of bigamy by freely consenting adults is of no concern to any proper government.

Why? Government cannot be trusted. Many governments in this world find Christianity to be a lifestyle that must be eradicated; the ACLU is attempting to push our (U.S.) government in that direction. Lifestyle ought to be solely the individual’s decision and responsibility; in so far as the lifestyle chosen does not in any way impinge on the equal rights of any other individual.

While on the subject of rights, the one right that ought not be guaranteed by any government is the right to be free from offense (i.e., freedeom from being offended). People are offended by the strangest things: words, deeds, philosophies, religions, lifestyle choices of others. You should be free to openly debate my opinion of you, but you have no right to force me to use certain words in place of other words. It’s just plain silly. You should be able to do as you wish within your Sphere of Rights, but I should also be able to freely tell you what I think of your choices (or of you, for that matter) and attempt to persuade you to act or believe differently, as long as I stay within my Sphere of Rights.

As Thomas Paine said, “He who dares not offend cannot be honest.”

awc 2006-08-17 13:11:32

Intellectual Property "Rights"

Quoting Thomas Jefferson in his 13 August 1813 letter to Isaac McPherson:

It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. … That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.

(The Library of Congress digital scans of the original letter begin here.)

more to come…