No Orphans, just Left and Right all over again

Just more leftist anti-American blathering. Right from the beginning he calls it a chemical weapon which demonstrates that he has no journalistic integrity whatsoever. Why read another word of what he says?

 

The Mail is right wing

 

Well you know, to kodiak Ghengiz Khan was a bit of a socialist so.....

 

There are no right wing papers in the UK.

 

On the contrary, there are several-
http://www.britishpapers.co.uk/tag/right-wing/

 

In the US, those would be centrist or left-leaning as are all the political parties. Nobody is calling for abolishing the income tax or removing all gun laws or doing anything else to shrink government powers in favor of individual liberty. Even the British National Party (which calls itself right wing) pushes an agenda to make the central government stronger and grasp more control of the economy - it's a far left party.

 

Well, he did tax the hell out of everybody and banned assault swords.

 

Maybe they should start teaching American kids politics as it applies in the rest of world then.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/right+wing
http://idontgetpolitics.co.uk/right-left-wing?oo=100075
The DM is very definitely right wing; why do you think there's so much huffing and puffing from playground revolutionaries every time its name gets mentioned? I was very recently thrown out of a history group on Facebook because some pretentious arsewipes took "offence" at my posting links to stories in the Mail; they couldn't criticise the links since they were completely relevant to the group's subject matter, it was the paper they took exception to.
I did what I've done here a few times and asked for a list of "acceptable" papers, and next thing I knew I was not only thrown out of the group but actually blocked from even seeing it.

 

Oh, I understand that in the "rest of the world" people think there's a difference between big government right-wing and big-government left-wing. Here, conservatives traditionally have been the small government party (the right wing), but now we have what has been dubbed the neo-conservative (Bush, McCain, Romney) which would equate to your right wing. Big government, more spending, more taxes - it's exactly the same as the left, but with different (but meaningless) rhetoric spewing out.

To us paleo-conservatives (Tea Party, Libertarian, Constitutionalist - whatever), it's all the same thing. You either want more government and less individual freedoms, or you want less government and more freedom. Left-Right.

 

How do you define "big government" and without income taxes how will the pay for it?

 

We had that back before the Civil War, it didn't work then, and it won't work now.

 

It worked just fine and it still works. There's a reason states like California (with heavy taxes and regulations) are losing jobs. The last thing we need is a federal government killing jobs in all 50 states.

 

Equating left with "big government" and right with "small government" would make the anarchists (you can't get any more small government than that) extreme right which would come as a big surprise to most of them.
IMO the left/right categories are pretty useless nowadays, 99% of politicians are "big government", that they want the money for welfare or for military spending makes little difference in this respect. The problem is that a politician running with a platform that sounds like "I will do nothing" , because that's what true small government is, is not likely to get much support.
Politicians must "do thing" to get support and "doing" means spending money that eventually has to come out of the taxpayer's pockets. Reversing the slow slide towards collapse because government inefficiency will strangle the economy if allowed to grow unchecked is difficult with a constitution that puts strong emphasis on individual rights, nearly impossible with one that doesn't..

The real issue is "how much government do we need to protect individual freedom", and the answer is not a simple one.

 

You can take anything to an absurdity. The founders weren't anarchists. They wrote a constitution with limits on government power and over the last 200 years, politicians (mostly through the commerce clause) have chipped away those prohibitions and created the monster we have now. It will probably take a full collapse before low information voters listen to those Tea Party "crazies" and try to scale back, but it will be too late by then.

 

It worked just fine? Are you daft man?

We fought a Civil War because it didn't work. States rights and all that...Before the Civil War, the amendments to the Constitution usually went along the lines of "the Federal Government shall not", and after the war most amendments read "Congress shall have the power to..."

As to losing jobs, isn't the economy in rather a poor state at the moment. FYI, Nevada lost the most jobs between 2008 & 2012, are they heavily taxed and regulated?

 

Actually, politicians "chipped" away at it by those pesky things called "Amendments."

Perhaps we should listen to those tea party "crazies" and go for a smaller government...
US Navy...Gone...After all we only had some 46 ships back in the late 1800's
US Army...Gone...After all we don't need that big a standing Army
US Air Force...Totally Gone!...No aircraft back then.

Holy Crap! I am starting to think like a true tea party member!

Wait I thought that the tea party was "supposedly" for a strong military. But in truth they want to leave the US defenseless!

Those Communist Bastards! American Taliban!

Just who is the tea party in league with? Enquiring minds want to know?

I don't know about you, but I am not very keen about living a pre-1913 American lifestyle.

 

The 1689 Bill of Rights banned peacetime armies in Britain originally, until we realised in the 18th century that having a standing army was the only way we were ever going to beat the French, and that particular clause was abolished.

 

IMO big government is very good at only one thing, winning wars, it's also rather good at protecting itself and, unfortunately, "mission creep". It is also quite useful for commerce that can be seriously harmed by having to cope with different local legislations and local opportunistic taxation and to prevent local "majorities" from passing extreme legislation. For almost everything else small is usually better. as it makes for better control by the taxpayer and less bureaucratic overheads. From an outsiders point this is what is surprising about the US right wingers, military spending and low taxation are incompatible, not to mention huge black programmes like the NSA's (possibly "black" is technically incorrect but they definitely lack transparency) and individual rights.

 

The Civil War? Really? That's your argument?

Look, the growth of government means we are now borrowing 40 cents for every dollar spent. At the same time we're printing money and devaluing the dollar. This isn't rocket surgery, it's simple arithmetic. It can't last. We have to pare back government spending.

 

I was under the impression that the standing army was not banned outright, only that it now required yearly parliamentary approval/consent.