Maybe our definition for consent is different. I am using it as "agree with" or "accept as okay". So I never "consent" to abortion and deficit spending.
Again, people don't consent on an issue-by-issue basis. You can't run a government or a society that way. They consent to the system and who runs it. When those who run it do so against the consent of the governed, the remedy is to oust them.
Hmm. That is where I have trouble. The act of taking by force is immoral. If I don't pay tax, I am put in jail and the money is taken by force. It is analogous to handing over protection money to the mob. I hand it over because the situation gets worse if I don't, not because I agree with
That's the point of my touching example. Taking by force isn't always immoral. Who's doing it, why, and by what authority matters a lot. The government can take life, liberty, and property by force, because part of its job is to enforce the rule of law on lawbreakers. The government can do more than take your property. If you commit certain acts, it can seize you from your home and throw you in the slammer for long periods of time. Is it kidnapping for them to do that? In any other context it would be. For them it's not, because they're enforcing the laws enacted by the public's representatives, and it isn't immoral for them to do it. In fact, it would be immoral for them not to do it.
What I mean is that the US Federal Government is over me no matter what. I don't get to vote for that. I don't get to vote for going back to the Articles of Confederation for example. I get candidate R or D which are 75% the same.
Of course you can go back to the Articles of Confederation. We have an amendment process. You also don't have to live under the American government. There are plenty of countries that would take you.
It is a marginalized third choice but it is an option.
It's an option, and you're free to choose it. It's also not marginalized. Procedurally, there's no reason why Libertarians can't win.
They can't win, because they don't have a viable constituency. Conservatives agree with them the most, but the areas of disagreement are profound. A good example - back in 2004 (when I could still sorta justify going out with a chick in college), a bosomy brunette girl at UT invited me to attend a lecture by a guy from the Ayn Rand Institute. The audience was overwhelmingly conservative. For about the first 30 minutes, he railed against a government that spent too much, taxed too much, and regulated too much. Everybody thought he was great. Then he spent the next 20 minutes basically saying, "Jesus sucks, let's go smoke a bowl, and let's allow crazy Muslims take control of the world's supply of oil." That turned everybody's stomach. And that's the Libertarian conundrum in one anecdote and illustrative of why they don't have a constituency. They're very good on some key issues, but where they're wrong, they aren't just a little off the mark. They're bat-****-friggin-crazy and borderline offensive. But that doesn't mean they're marginalized. It means they have goofy ideas pitched by non-serious people.
I disagree. There is little we can do to change the nature of the bureaucratic state. Wilson started that by design and it has become worse and worse over time. In an absolute sense, someone could come in and remove it all. But that isn't going to happen with an R or D. Maybe a Libertarian would do that, but the chances of them getting elected and following through are slim to none.
I'm not sure that you fully understand how the administrative state gets its authority. It can't just willy-nilly make up rules. When regulatory agencies are created, Congress passes a law that not only creates them but defines the scope, breadth, and limits of their rulemaking authority (the "enabling statute"). Any regulation that doesn't fit within those powers is invalid and will get struck down in court. The reason why I bring that up is to point out that enabling statutes (and therefore agency existence and power) can be amended or repealed by the people we elect. We don't have to tolerate them and therefore don't have to tolerate a runaway executive branch.
(Side note - I think this entire scheme is unconstitutional. To me, legislative and judicial power lie solely with the legislative and judicial branches. Congress doesn't have the legitimate authority to delegate any of that to the executive.)
No civilian chose to print $3 Trillion this year. No civilian is asking for another $900 billion to be printed. In a loose way people want "the government to do something".
That's because that isn't how a republic (even a fairly democratic one) works.
Yeah. Could have. I just don't think the politicians are that aligned with what people want or need. They tell "us" what we should want, and people vote accordingly.
No, they follow our lead. Democrats and Republicans want to win, and they try to form coalitions of different types of people to try to secure control of government. Politicians have run on reforming Social Security. They lost. For example, George W. Bush did it in 2004. The public rejected that by giving Democrats control of Congress is 2006 and putting Obama in the White House two years later.
What if that hadn't happened? Social Security wouldn't be gone, but it would be radically different, infinitely better for the public, and wouldn't be a ticking time bomb.
There is little disagreement on the big things like spending because it is in the government's interest.
Well, it's because the pubic has little disagreement. We want a big entitlement state for the elderly (Social Security and Medicare), health insurance for the working poor so McDonald's and Walmart can pay ****** wages and sell us crappy food and cheap **** from China for low prices (Medicaid and EIC), and a big, strong military (defense budget). We also want low taxes. That takes a massive amount of the budget off the table for serious discussion.
But nobody's rigging that. Bush, Paul Ryan, and Newt Gingrich tried to take on the entitlement state. The public rejected it. Bernie Sanders, Dennis Kucinich, and Ron Paul have run on cutting the defense budget. In fact, before 1994, Bill Clinton was a big Pentagon critic and pushed through pretty substantial cuts (real ones). Then his party got its *** totally kicked in the midterm elections.
So it isn't so much about the government's interest as much as it's about politicians not wanting to lose.
