Republicans: Do nothing, tear everything down. Democrats: Do something, gov can be a force for good

Yep. Rampant crimes and murders every single day. That's the very definition of "works pretty well".......

 

Yes it is.

 

Of the United States. You're comparing a country to a small state....

 

Portugal's leaders responded by pivoting away from the U.S. drug war model, which prioritized narcotics seizures, arrests and lengthy prison sentences for drug offenders.

Instead, Portugal focused scarce public dollars on health care, drug treatment, job training and housing. The system, integrated into the country's taxpayer-funded national health care system, is free and relatively easy to navigate.

And no, it's not "free". Someone, somewhere is paying for it, namely the taxpayers. I am NOT having my taxes go towards funding YOUR drug problem.

 

The facts don't change, though...

Latest data show overdoses continue to skyrocket in Oregon

https://www.opb.org/article/2024/01/28/data-show-overdoses-deaths-rising-in-oregon/

The objective of decriminalizing drugs was to have fewer OD's.

But instead...

Oregon decriminalized drugs in 2020. Now officials are declaring a fentanyl state of emergency

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/oregon...officials-are-declaring-a-fentanyl-emergency/

 

Trump supporters are cutting off the heads of their family members too...
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/pa-man-arrested-decapitating-father-youtube-video-rcna136509

 

So, you think a one-off (which has nothing to do with religion, by the way) equates to the millions of people killed by Muslims and their beliefs?

 

Yes I am.

 

Now this one, on the other hand, was religiously motivated.

Woman beheaded at Oklahoma workplace, police say - CBS News

 

So it can work, you just don't want it to.

 

And the fact is. Researchers say it’s too soon to determine whether the law has contributed to the state’s deadly overdose surge

 

If you want to give random people your hard-earned money for drugs, go right ahead. No one is stopping you. Be the change you want to see...

 

Fact 1: Drugs are decriminalized.

Fact 2: OD's go through the roof.

Fact 3: Decriminalization failed.

Decriminalization caused the spike, or not: Completely irrelevant.

 

Fact: Researchers say it’s too soon to determine whether the law has contributed to the state’s deadly overdose surge

 

oh no, it's more than a "one-off." MAGA political violence is a cancer.

https://www.kentucky.com/news/nation-world/national/article268513477.html

 

yeah, don't get me started on the Christian mothers that slay their children

https://www.wionews.com/world/dooms...ntenced-to-life-for-killing-her-2-kids-621200

Religion is mental abuse.

 

Ok, so which part of this Leviathan do you want to amputate? The EPA? I know damn well that the founders were just fine dumping raw sewage into rivers, lakes and oceans. Sounds like a great way to stop the Leviathan from keeping you from doing the same as the founders, just ditch all pollution laws and enforcement. How about the FDA? Let's just let drug companies do whatever they wanted, after all snake oil salesmen roamed old Viriginny in little wagons way back in 1790. How about the Armed Forces? Keep only the Navy because that is the only standing army the founders wanted, that's why they put in the 2nd amendment. Keep the Navy, chuck everything else out so we can be like Murica in 1790. We could go on and on but I made my point.

 

EPA .. every state has their own,, FDA it has become mostly useless, prone to influences from pharma and congress, Dept of Education... the federal dept has made schools worse and every state has one. The other military forces are all volunteer and a standing army is a necessary evil. The IRS was supposed to be temporary when it was founded, and there are many more Federal agencies that are worse than useful.. they are detrimental

And the unelected agencies make a lot of rules that are just fascism.... I went to grab some stuff at a warehouse and they couldn't load it because their "certified" forklift operator wasn't there... I ran those things many times.. no training whatsoever.. a good rule is: don't allow a moron to run things like that.

 

Every state has their own EPA? And somehow that is better? You guys crack me up. Let's say Minnesota dumps raw sewage into the Miss at the border because their EPA says its fine, in your fantasy how does it ever get fixed? Or how about Texans kill every single crane that flies into the Lubbock area, poor Kansans will never see them again...Libertarian fantasies are always so funny in a strange adolescent way.

 

As I recall, your argument was Republican vs. Democrat, which is why the cartoon I modified was limited to illustrating and contrasting the difference between today’s Republican Party, which is dominated by social conservatives, and today’s Democratic Party, which is dominated by collectivist-statists.

My argument, which is much more than that, will address the ideological and philosophical differences between the Left and the Right so that you will understand the people on the Right that you either don’t comprehend or deliberately misrepresented in the OP.

Let’s begin with a little History, shall we?

The United States was founded on the principles of Individualism - America is the direct lineal product of Western Man’s long struggle for individual freedom that goes back to dawn of recorded history with the Ancient Hellenes and Romans, the promulgation of Draco’s Code (621 BC) and the Twelve Tables (449 BC), and the reforms of Solon (594 BC) and Cleisthenes (508-7 BC). Building on the long, slow progress in this struggle, the Founders and Framers drew upon the existing laws and rights doctrines that had been developed in England and the West over the centuries to establish our Lockean social contract that asserted the inherent and unalienable rights of the individual and instituted a consensual government that was tasked with the responsibility of securing our natural rights (this is famously expressed in the Preamble of the Declaration of Independence). To fulfill this task, the Founders enacted a Constitution that set up a limited form of government that enumerated its powers and affirmed the rights of the individual in our Bill of Rights. At the time, Alexander Hamilton and others pointed out that the Constitution did not provide the government with a general grant of authority - it restricted the powers of government so that the American people could enjoy the blessings of Liberty. In this respect, our Constitution is consistent with the great English rights documents that preceded it - the English Bill of Rights of 1689, the Petition of Right of 1628 and the Great Charter of Freedoms (Magna Carta Libertatum) of 1215, to name a few. All of these documents restricted the power of government and asserted the rights of free Englishmen - the rights the American Colonists sought to defend in the 1760s and 70s against an acquisitive Parliament and Crown that had exceeded their authority and ultimately their legitimacy. This is our tradition, and it is an Individualist, not a Collectivist one, and the Founders were fully aware of the difference:

The utopian schemes of leveling and a community of goods, are as visionary and impractical as those which vest all property in the crown. These ideas are arbitrary, despotic, and, in our government unconstitutional.
— Samuel Adams

As Adams’ statement attests, the Founders and Framers consciously rejected the utopian collectivist programs of the proto-communists in England (Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers) and France (Étienne-Gabriel Morelly, Gabriel Bonnot de Mably and later François-Noel Babeuf and the Society of Equals). They were not what we refer to today as socialists and communists (aka “progressives”). In fact, they were the furthest thing from socialists - one might describe their philosophy and views as a mixture of Libertarianism and Conservatism, or in historic terms, a mixture of the views expressed by the libertarian Levellers (John Lilburne, Richard Overton, William Walwyn, et al - not the Diggers) and the conservative (in today’s sense of the word) “radical” Whigs (John Locke, Algernon Sydney, et al). None of these men (and women) were collectivists in any sense of the word, much less the Big Government Collectivists we find in the Democratic Party today.

Now that we’ve taken our brief tour through History and the laws, rights doctrines and Individualist principles this country was founded on, we see that it is not the Right/Republicans that is tearing things down, it is the Left/Democrats, and we need look no further than the words of one of the Left’s leading Nihilists to see that:



In other words, Obama and the Left were “five days away from fundamentally tearing down/destroying the United States of America” as we know it, along with the principles it was founded on - Individualism, Classical Liberalism, limited, fiscally responsible government bound by the rule of written law - and the Left’s destructive program continues today. The Right, for the most part, whether it be conservatives or libertarians, seeks to preserve the principles our Republic was founded on, while the Left seeks to destroy and replace them with its own collectivist principles, which are essentially the principles embraced and promoted by the radical Left revolutionaries in France and their successors around the world.

So let’s review your claims:

Republicans (and RW): (1) Do nothing, (2) tear everything down, (3)government is bad.

(1) Republicans obviously have their own agenda, so the “Do nothing” claim is patently absurd. The notion that the Republican agenda must match or conform to the Democrat agenda to qualify as “doing something” is preposterous (and whiney).

(2) As was just noted, it is the Left/Democrats who are trying to tear down the principles the United States was founded on. As for reducing the power, size, scope and expense of government, that would be consistent with the goal of re-establishing the principles of limited, fiscally responsible government that Democrats have been tearing down for over a century now.

(3) The principle of limited, fiscally responsible government does not equal “government is bad”. Limited, fiscally responsible government is necessary to secure the rights of the people and execute tasks such as national defense, enforcing the rule of law, etc.. Bad government is government that violates the rights of the individual, the Constitution, the rule of law and the principles of limited, fiscally responsible government, I.e., a government that is excessively large, intrusive and expensive, etc.. like the one we have now and the Democrats keep expanding.

Note: Republicans have been guilty of pushing some policies that can be (and are, imo) considered “bad government”, as described above. They have also accommodated Democrats in passing measures that qualify as bad/irresponsible government, so Republicans have played a role in helping the country reach the deplorable state of affairs that we find it in today.

As for Democrats, they have been tearing down and violating the principles of limited, fiscally responsible government and have pushed policies that qualify as bad government. The creation and maintenance of a massive welfare state has become the DP’s raison d'être and thus it has resisted reasonable, responsible and necessary reforms to these programs that are driving the $34 trillion national debt and $213 trillion in unfunded liabilities. To make matters worse, Democrats continue their efforts to enlarge the size, scope and expense of government even though this is entirely unsustainable. Last year, payment on just the interest on the national debt surpassed the $1 trillion/year mark, which was just short of 1/4 of the federal government’s revenues in 2023. As the country hurtles towards bankruptcy, individual federal programs are going insolvent, but that’s just the financial side of this problem. There’s also the human side that has had an even more destructive impact on our society. While Democrats were enacting the War on Poverty and Great Society programs of the 1960s, they were warned about the consequences of their actions by one of their own members, and unfortunately his warning was not heeded and it has now become a ubiquitous feature of American life, primarily in our failing cities:

From the wild Irish slums of the 19th century Eastern seaboard, to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history; a community that allows a large number of men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future — that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder — most particularly the furious, unrestrained lashing out at the whole social structure — that is not only to be expected; it is very near to inevitable…
—Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. 1965

As Moynihan predicted, this has become the source of many of our society’s ills - the marginalization of fathers, broken homes, gang related crime, gun violence, etc. - and these problems are a result of the Democratic Party’s encouragement of dependency on government which disincentivizes individual freedom, independence, responsibility, initiative and success. This is probably the most insidious and destructive of the bad government policies that Democrats have been pushing for the past 60 years, if not longer. Instead of encouraging people to be successful individuals, Democrats are encouraging them to become failures, and as we become a nation of mediocrities, our nation is doomed to become a mediocrity itself. Of course, these disastrous policies don’t include the Democratic Party’s ongoing and unrelenting authoritarian campaigns to control every aspect of our lives, from our food to our healthcare to our energy use, not to mention its totalitarian efforts to force people to think and speak in a manner that conforms to its own ideology and agenda.

Complain as you might, the Founders and most particularly the so-called Anti-Federalists amongst them, warned us about the perils of Big Government - the government we have now which Democrats and their constituents can’t get enough of (for their own self-aggrandizement, of course). Naturally, the Left will resist the efforts to reign in the Federal Leviathan because an all-powerful centralized government possesses the coercive force and means required to acquire the wealth, power and control the Left seeks. Today’s Democrats are the furthest thing from the Libertarians who want power decentralized as much as is reasonably possible and placed back into the hands of individual citizens so that they can control their own lives.

THAT is the fundamental philosophical difference between the Left and the Right, the alien Collectivist ideology that has invaded our Republic and the Individualism that was born here and handed down to us by the Founders and Framers. To a certain extent, those differences are what divides Republicans and Democrats and their contrasting views of what role government should play in our lives, not the partisan LW propaganda you posted in the OP.

 

The right:I got mine screw everyone else.

The left:I get by with a little help from my friends.

 

It was a pretty hyperbolic and nonsensical point that ignores the fact that your precious Federal Leviathan is too large, too expensive and too intrusive to sustain at its current levels, much less the ones Leftists want to keep raising it to because they can't get enough of it. At what point is $34 trillion in debt too much for Big Government fanboys you, or the $123 trillion in unfunded liabilities or the $1 trillion/year we are now having to spend to service just the interest on that debt?

Never mind that. Government is the answer to all our problems, government needs to be all things to all people, government needs to do what people can and should do for themselves! We all need to be dependent on our feudal overlords in Washington like a bunch of Medieval serfs.

There's never enough government, never too much to spend! We're still living in the post-WWII Golden Age with virtually no competition in the world economy, either from the industrialized nations that are still lying in ruins or the second and third world nations who haven't developed their economies yet - we're awash in cash and we can spend it with no restraint whatsoever. There will be no consequences, and if there are, what do we care? We'll just do the "responsible" thing and hand the kids in Gen Y and Z the tab. HAHAHAHA Screw them - We're gonna party like it's 1955!!!



No, it's not 1790 and I never suggested it was, and the eternal children on the Left who are suffering from Peter Pan Syndrome had better grow up and wake up because it ain't 1960, either.

 

The Left: Yours is mine. Screw you.

You need to work on some new material...

 

I didn't read past here. The essential difference is that (except for politicians) republicans want less government and democrats want more. I have no idea what you said after this. I didn't have the patience to read it.

 

Nope, sorry. I notice you didn't dispute the characterization of the right.