When a Republican thinks he's smarter than the rest of his party, he calls himself a New Age Libertarian. Don't you just love it when the same people who were all but "Forbdden" to even mention Ron Paul's Name during the last Republican Primary love his big mouthed Kid?

Chris Christie is upset because libertarians want to cut food stamps and agricultural subsidies

Christie's new state motto: Live unfree or die.

I'm glad to see that at least one Republican sees through libertarianism. Here are just four quick reasons I can't be a libertarian.

1) While libertarians are especially sensitive to the way governments can subvert liberty, they do not seem to appreciate the many ways in which social practices, wealth distribution, and ownership of the means of production can also subvert liberty.

2) Libertarians talk as if liberty is the social circumstance in which people are able to act on their choices with minimal interference from the government. They seldom speak to the way that social conditions shape our choices and limit (or enable) possibilities for action. (What are the chances that a girl growing up in Lexington, KY in 1800 could ever dream of becoming a physician? What are the chances that a black man born in Chicago in 1900 could think of becoming President of the United States?)

3) Libertarians de-emphasize the roles that social circumstances play in defining our self-understandings. (We do not choose our mother tongues. We do not choose the families of our births. We do not choose the economic systems of our native lands. We do not choose our fundamental energy levels. And we do not choose the social pathologies that infect the communities in which we grow up.)

4) Libertarians discount the ways in which individuals gain some measure of power over the forces shaping their lives (e.g., environmental threats, risks of injury and illness, levels of social violence, access to effective education, economic necessities, and the like) through collective action.

No libertarians have addressed all your mistaken assumptions at length. You are just, literally, ignorant.

Please enlighten me then, Mr. Majors. I was a libertarian in college and graduate school, but I could not sustain my libertarian commitments once I undertook a serious effort at critiquing Marxism, socialism, communitarianism, and liberal egalitarianism. Setting out to expose the fallacies in each of these political theories, I discovered that each of them seemed to be more sensitive to the actual historical circumstances of human communities than did libertarianism. Each of them seemed to me to offer a more profound and more useful explication of human freedom than did libertarianism. Each of them seemed to place a greater value on scholarship and research into the actual evolution and development of social practices, institutions, and economic systems than did libertarianism.

There are, of course, many libertarians who are serious scholars and researchers. But their research usually strikes me as a search for evidence in support of dogma. The dogma itself is seldom called into question. But when it is, remarkable things happen: The libertarian stops being a libertarian. Witness the case of Robert Nozick (the most intelligent and informed libertarian I ever encountered):

http://www.slate.com/articl...

A comic once said that libertarians are republicans who want to have sex and use illegal drugs.

Marvelous!

Hell, were almost ALL libertarians... in an ideal fantasy world...

Rofl. As opposed to your world where you owe 16 trillion, your dollar will collapse whenever China decides to stop using them for savings, your President drones kids to death and lies to the voters, and you round up poor black kids and sell them to educrat cartels in failing, segregated schools, in exchange for donations that fund your candidates.

BORING. Just a quick sample of you posting history tells me not to even bother reading this one... Just another one-trick pony parroting blind-partisan gibberish--albeit blind-partisan gibberish of a slightly higher grade... But still...

NEXT

If Christi and Paul get into a fur ball I expect Paul will go down in flames. That being said, I don't think most of Congress is attacking the NSA spying as much as investigating and debating it. Clearly the judicial and legislative oversight responsibilities have failed. The wisdom of contracting national security out to beltway consultants is another big problem. And the rules about how long to retain the data, who has access, and using it for any other purpose besides combating Al Quida need to be fixed too.

As a "lefty" who abhors the extremism of the libertarians, their foreign policy stance is one place I can find some common ground with them.

I don't agree with their isolationist policy, but I agree with it more than our particular brand of interventionism, 9 out of 10 times.

Ignorance is so very tiresome. Non-interventionism is not isolationism. I'm sure libertarians for more free trade, cultural exchange, and travel and immigration than you do.

Definitely no on culture and travel.

Absolutely on "free trade" with slave populations.

More of a mixed bag on immigration. I generally am sympathetic to the idea that the place on the globe between imaginary lines where a person, and their parents, happen to be born should be downplayed as much as is reasonable.

If you wouldn't have gone after Saddam in 1991, then you were wrong.

Guess who's not going to be the gop nominee for POTUS in 2016?

You seriously think he won't put on his flip-flops like the last two nominees did?

Ah but the majority of Americans aren't as stupid as the right wingers.

Maybe, but that majority doesn't include the posters here.

Libertarians imagine a utopia, where government no longer causes any problems, because it is small and has been stripped down to it's essential functions. But that will never come to pass, no matter how many people turn into libertarians. Because even the libertarians in a million years couldn't agree what the essential functions of government ought to be.

Your government centric society is going to collapse. It's not sustainable.

It's also kinda short-sighted. Government is not the source of all problems, and crushing it into powder will just produce a power vacuum. My worry is that that vacuum will be rapidly filled by pretty much anyone who can afford to do so -- corporate entities, foreign players, you name it. And us ordinary plebs will be shafted yet again.

Your government exists largely to protect established corporations from new competitors. Even Marxist historians like Kolko demonstrated that decades ago. That's why you Leftover cannon fodder will always be PINOs - progressives in name only.

Corporations are the source of our problems. We've invaded other countries for them, enslaved people in those countries, contaminated their air, water and land.

Time to put controls on corporations.

What is defined by continuing to beat your head into the wall and getting the same results? You've been expanding your State for a century and poverty and inequality and the power of established corporations has increased. I guess maybe if you kids got to give Obama a third term it will finally work huh?

Do they actually lobotomized you peeps in public school with knitting needles or do they just adulterate the food?

Chris Christie has to run in 2016, simply for the entertainment value alone.

Did you mean waddle?

Damn, Christie channels George W. Bush pretty hard in that article. Is that really the politically adept tact to take in this day and age? What's equally interesting, is that establishment Democrats are likely lined up right behind him on this topic.

"Be afraid, be very afraid"

Of Rand Paul? You bet. But neither he nor Christie will ever be President. :)

Unless they tamper with the ballots and voters.

No, be very afraid of "terrorism" - did you read the article?

Christie's not afraid of Paul except in political terms, he's trying to keep you afraid of a threat that is almost so small it cannot be quantified. You are still more likely to die falling out of the shower or being struck by lightning.

Where is my Lightning Security Agency? I reckon their budget should be in the $80B range per year.

Ben Franklin invented the Lightning Rod and gave it to the world for free. We don't need an LSA.

Then why are lightning strikes twice as likely to kill me than a terrorist?

Have you offended Zeus?

LOL, he seems to be a long suffering anti-human who only feels the need to strike with deadly force occasionally. But still more occasionally than our extremist Muslim friends.

Ummm . . . let's see . . . perhaps it's because there are hundreds of thousands of lightning strikes here every year and can occur anywhere with no warning?

Dude, seriously, I have to ask - how old are you? You're coming across as barely past adolescence.

I'm trying to examine the fact that we spend untold billions protecting ourselves from something that is of a barely perceptible level of danger to us physically, but has meant the washing away of our most basic fundamental rights and liberties, and the extremely negligent waste of valuable dollars.

And it still can't stop terrorism, as evidenced by Boston, and countless other instances.

It's really clear the trillions spent by the federal government never protected us. The oceans did. They spent trillions and forgot to put anti aircraft weapons on the Pentagon.

Dude. Seriously. You're not examining, you're whining. Do we spend too much on security? Sure. We spend too much on a lot of things, mostly because people who have clues have learned how to work the system. If and when you can come up with a way around that, you'll be up for a Nobel prize. Until then, either you learn the rules of the game, and in knowing them can exert influence on them (assuming you have also learned how to advance within the rules) or you can stand around outside griping and carrying on.

The NSA is legally collecting metadata which does not belong to you, it belongs to your telco and ISP. They're not watching you. You're not important enough to watch. However, get chummy on the phone or on-line with someone they ARE interested in, and they'll look at you. If you're a threat, they'll let the right people know, and THEY will keep an eye on you. If you're not, then they pay you no further attention.

It's like a cop manning a speed trap - he's not watching YOU. He's watching for someone speeding. Or do you think that all the video cameras everywhere are tracking your every move? That the camera at your local 7-11 violates your privacy? That the red light cameras are following you around?

Honestly, you really don't have any idea of how the world works, do you?

You assume that these programs do only what Obama etc say they do. Since he lies about everything why would you not assume the opposite. And no one is allowed to know about, discuss or debate the details. No one can see what the FISA court is doing.

You realize that with three-hop analysis, you are immediately looking at the records of 40 million people, correct? Seems reasonable.

That's bullshit, but assume it's true. They run it through the Eye of Sauron. Which takes about ten seconds. They run through and see what numbers the person they're looking into (with a proper warrant) has been in contact.

OK, and then what? They looked, and unless you've been chatting with someone on their watch list, you don't even register as a dust mote on their screen. What civil rights have been violated? How have your liberties been infringed? And if you have, the DHS can legitimately ask why. If it turns out that the terrorist they're looking at is calling you on a regular basis because you're the local pizza delivery joint, big deal. But you just MIGHT turn out to be up to something. And it's their job to find out.

I seriously doubt this. I had the Secret Service come to my home a few years ago because of a joke I made in a FaceBook note making allusions to the French Revolution. The Secret Service officer let me know he knew to which political candidates I donated money and what email addresses I used to create a profile on a gay dating website etc etc. And I was not talking to anyone in the Middle East, anyone who was a terrorist, anyone who had been arrested, etc.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/w...

http://www.theatlanticwire....

Congratulations, you've discovered signals intelligence and traffic analysis. Other than the fact that technology makes it much faster, this has been going on since Truman, yet somehow we seem to have managed to survive.

Seriously, this knowledge has been freely available to anyone who ever bothered looking. I've been aware of this since the early '80s, and am not worried about it in the least.

We shouldn't be afraid of anything. We should be prepared for anything.

You don't know who the hell you're arguing with here, so small wonder you keep missing the mark. :D

Indeed, where again is my LSA? They can operate in secret, for all I care. As long as I never get struck by lightning.

The more we "argue" the more I wonder about your self-delusions. You have a mighty cloak of arrogance that must seem pretty impenetrable from where you're sitting. All I see is huff and puff.

Dude, seriously, the only delusions I'm seeing here are yours.

Yes, but then again you're poorly informed and seriously jingoistic, and you have a pretty big anti-me bent going. You're going to find what you want to see, you do it with every piece of news that gets posted to this site, why would I expect anything different from your comment reading ability?

I think I'm getting tired of someone utterly clueless spouting vapid paranoia. I have yet to see you take any position beyond 'everybody sucks so we shouldn't support them and the political system sucks so we should just tear it all down and life is just too awful for words'. Have you considered getting a life?