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The consensus among angry white males on the Internet is an ideology known as libertarianism. As a teenage boy, I dabbled in this subculture for a bit, but luckily, I grew a little more wise as the years went by. Libertarianism is essentially an ideology for alienated middle age white men with full time jobs, who have bought into the promises delivered by the industrial machine, but feel as if they're missing out on the rewards. In reality they do receive the rewards, but because the rewards are spiritually non-fulfilling, they mistakenly believe they don't receive the rewards at all.
What I support, rather than a small government that stays out of people's lives, is a strong government that actively pursues negative population growth, negative economic growth and the spiritual ennoblement of the population. I have relatively positive feelings towards the model of government that characterized North-Western Europe in the late 40's and 50's. It might not have been perfect and our lives might not have been perfect back then, but the cause is not so much government as it is our human inability to be content when we find ourselves in an unnatural environment.
What is referred to as the European populist right, is caught in a position where they find themselves stuck between two contradictory ideologies. On the one hand, their own voting demographic consists of working class people who have been alienated by the new modern left, who have abandoned working class white families to pursue a social justice agenda. They realize that this population does not want to have the various government programs they depend upon eliminated. On the other hand, they feel an affiliation with angry white males from the United states, men who have swallowed an ideology that represents the interest of their plutocratic elite. These men effectively parrot the story their boss tells them and read books like Atlas Shrugged that are meant for their boss. They complain about Marxism, without having any real clear idea what it entails.
To point out why I dislike libertarianism, I want to start out with the "democrats are the real racists" trope. This is a bit like a group of popular girls in high school who let an unpopular girl sit with them at their table but talk shit about her behind her back. The "democrats are the real racists" trope makes minorities believe that you somehow wish to represent their interest, whereas in reality, you don't. Multicultural societies don't function, one reason being the fact that those who earn an income find themselves reluctant to contribute to programs that are meant to benefit the whole society. People prefer helping out those who are similar to them. I would much rather be completely honest and state that I wish to live in an ethnically homogeneous society, because this ensures that there remains a state or organic solidarity between people, rather than having an American type society where people have nothing in common and spend their days working hard in an effort to buy expensive trinkets that demonstrate that they're not "losers".
What black Americans benefit from is to have a government that represents their interest and is composed for a significant portion of people who understand black culture. A black man understand better than a white man how black people would respond to a particular change in government policy. This also ensures that black people feel as if they work towards a common goal, rather than being 21st century cotton pickers in a system designed to serve white people. Whether or not the police are racist is besides the point: A society where people believe the police does not represent their interest as a community is a society that's going to fail. Trump can't say this, nor can most conservatives, which means that they end up packaging egalitarian ideas in an angry white male cover.
This is just one reason I dislike libertarianism. There are many more. Another issue I have with libertarianism is that libertarians seem to believe that I somehow benefit from having a choice on many subjects. To have the government make decisions for me is seen as "nannying". I like having the government take decisions for me. I don't gain any sense of existential fulfillment out of having to compare different health insurance plans, different telephone contracts or different electricity contracts. I would very much prefer not having people bugging me on the street or on the phone, trying to get me to change from one telephone/health insurance/electricity/internet/television provider to another.
There are things out there that I enjoy doing more than painstakingly trying to figure out how I can save more money. Having one single company that takes care of a particular problem takes away a lot of the busywork out of my life. Our modern society is an accountant's paradise. In the decades after the second world war, the government took care of most of these type of decisions for us. This allows me to avoid having to spend my time making petty choices. In practice it also ends up being more efficient. Today we have a handful of different electricity companies, all of whom need their own customer service department, their own competing marketing departments and their own technicians, even though they all deliver us electricity through the same shared electricity network. When I switch from one contract to another, I don't have someone visit my house to place a new line and get rid of the old one for me. It thus seems pretty straightforward to me that it's ridiculous to have multiple electricity companies.
This doesn't just apply to utility companies however. When I buy food in the supermarket, I like the idea of not having to check whether all the ingredients on there might cause cancer, birth defects or other horrors. I even like being able to visit a restaurant and having some degree of certainty that I won't shit my pants on the way out. Regulation is fantastic. I don't particularly care whether or not your libertarian paradise would allow me to file a class action lawsuit against a potato chips manufacturer when I develop a tumor 20 years from now in my liver because the potato chips I bought happened to be contaminated with a fungus that causes liver cancer. I like having standards that help prevent such pointless deaths. And yes, I even enjoy having a government that takes action against obesity by restricting calories on food. If parents fail to take these decisions for their children, children end up being the victim. When you're 20 years old and stuck in the bloated body of a 40 year old, do you think "good thing the government didn't nanny me with their regulation"? I doubt it.
What's more, I like the idea of my society not being turned into an uninhabitable wasteland thanks to government regulation. I'm not just talking about greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide. A single accident at a pesticide factory can kill thousands, in addition to permanently injuring hundreds of thousands. That's what happened in Bhopal in 1984. An entire city was ruined by a single chemical accident. When Trump said he's going to get rid of regulation, what did he mean with that? Do you know? I don't. The reason there's so much regulation is because modern technology makes it ridiculously easy to cause catastrophes. It's not just in third world countries, it's right here. In the city of Enschede in 2000, a fireworks deposit exploded. This led to 23 deaths. However, near the fireworks deposit was a beer manufacturer with an ammonia deposit that came close to exploding too, as part of a chain reaction that would have asphyxiated everyone in a 400 meter radius, meaning you'd be faced with a couple of hundred deaths.
Regulation is needed, because not every regular Joe Sixpack hoping to buy a McMansion one day can figure out for himself the vast risks his "entrepreneurial instincts" could pose to humanity. You can't figure out for yourself what kind of chemical derivatives your industrial activity might release in a worst case scenario and how many cases of cancer and birth defects this might lead to in the long term. Industrial activity opens up a vast realm of new man-made compounds, the consequences of which for our health we barely manage to comprehend. The risks are dangerous, precisely because they are numerous and interact in ways that are not directly apparent to us. Lack of regulation can make entire towns uninhabitable from underground coal fires, toxic piles of lead dust or persistent pollutants that gather in the soil. There are various towns in the United States that were rendered uninhabitable and native tribes that had entire generations of children brain-damaged, all because of a lack of regulation.
Furthermore, I like having a minimum guaranteed standard of living. Why is that? Because I'm a lazy loser who wants a government handout? Not necessarily. I like the idea that children can play outside with the neighbors without catching tuberculosis from the neighbors because Sally Soccermom could not afford to feed her child enough calories anymore after her husband died. I like the idea that children can swim in the river without catching cholera because Billy Bob got laid off at the auto plant and now decides to shit in the river as he can't afford to pay his sewage bill anymore. I'm happy that nobody has to go so hungry in childhood that he spends the next sixty years of his life six inches shorter than his peers and suffering permanently reduced cognitive skills that prohibit him from ever doing something productive with his existence.
I'm also glad that desperation does not have to drive men towards theft and burglaries, nor women towards prostitution. Having a minimum guaranteed standard of living for people caught in tough times ensures that they are not driven to extreme options. It was quite common in Victorian times, for women in London pregnant out of wedlock to leave their dead newborns on a garbage pile somewhere. These are things I'm glad children don't have to run into when they're playing outside. Similarly, suicide is a catastrophe that has ripple effects on families and communities. It's important that there exists a social safety net that allows people to seek mental help, whether they're dealing with mental illness, drug addiction or other problems. The cost to society is much bigger if people can not treat their problems.
You might think that none of this is necessary if people were just taught to act in a prudent and responsible manner. Well, in reality, you can't prepare yourself for everything. You might have a nest egg for when your boss fires you, but what if your house is burglarized, or burns down? Worse, it's perfectly possible for you to lose your sanity and destroy everything you've built up over the decades. It's quite common for dementia patients in their early stages to become delusional and start spending vast amounts of money on all sorts of ludicrous projects they come up with. There's a prominent case that happened here a few months ago, of a wealthy man in his mid seventies, who decided he was going to enter politics and use his wealth to build facilities for refugees. People didn't think too much of it at first and the newspapers simply reported on these actions, but then it became undeniable later on that he had begun to suffer severe mental illness. He was then institutionalized and died not much later.
I also like having a government that has a strong influence on the direction our culture takes. The reason American culture is so mediocre is because the free market decides what kind of culture is produced. People don't make fully conscious decisions when they purchase a product, so the best way to earn money is by appealing to our lowest common denominator. If people are left completely free to make their own decisions limited only by their finances, they tend make mediocre decisions. We buy beer that we started subconsciously associating with attractive women because we saw a television commercial as we were dozing off in front of a TV. Nobody makes a cost benefit analysis before deciding whether they should go to a strip club or a museum. The government has to guide people along in this regard.
The government should aim to restrict options that are harmful to the overall fabric of society, while encouraging options that are conducive to our individual spiritual development and collective self-respect as a people. For this reason, it's important that libraries, theater, museums and other expressions of human culture are subsidized, while cinemas, casinos, strip clubs, cafes are placed under punitive taxation. A society where people, through access to art and culture come to recognize that they are the modern incarnation of a people who have produced their own unique culture for hundreds if not thousands of years, is a society that will not seek to turn itself into a carbon copy of the United States. I want a society where taking pride in your Irish heritage means reading Yeats, rather than getting drunk on St Patrick's day. The only reason angry white males are so triggered by art subsidies is because they have been emotionally stunted. They grew up in a society that did not allow them to mature as well balanced individuals, but rather, taught them to chase after money to prove their value.
Last but not least, the reason I hate libertarianism is because it is utterly anthropocentric. It fails to recognize that nature is not just a natural resource, but a living community of organisms that provides highly valuable ecological services to all of humanity. The free market pretends that nature has no value until it is transformed by humans. Objectivists, who should all be turned into human fertilizer, even believe that Native Americans had no right to the lands they inhabited, because they did not transform them or claim them as property. In reality, when we destroy nature, we reap temporary wealth that comes at the cost of our long-term standard of living. Those who abuse the land they live upon have no right to it.
When you build a dam to generate electricity, you harm all those downstream, who now receive no sediment and little water. When you chop down a tree to produce wood, you harm the soil that will be swept away, you harm local agriculture that loses a sponge that sucks up excess water and releases it during droughts. When you pump up excessive groundwater, you dry out the peat that has accumulated on the Earth's surface, causing massive wildfires that release greenhouse gasses that change our climate. When you kill otters, you create an explosion of sea urchins that destroy kelp forests and thereby end up ravaging the entire ecosystem, ensuring that fish disappear too.
The examples are endless. The whole living world is interconnected, but libertarians perceive it as passive and static, merely there for us to develop and transform. This is ultimately a form of autism that underlies libertarianism, as autism leads people to be better capable of interacting with passive objects, while struggling to empathize with and understand the behavior of living beings. In the autistic brain, actions stand on their own, they do not have any power simply by virtue of being perceived or signaling a mentality, nor do they trigger a cascade of different reactions. For this reason, libertarianism always leaves us with a very impoverished view of how the whole genuinely works. Its simplicity makes it sound sensible on the surface, but it completely fails to consider how normal human beings operate. Libertarians like to claim that socialism would work for ants, but libertarianism is something that works for robots. The real world benefits from a strong government that enshrines the collective values and aspirations of a community of human beings.

What up, my Missouri peeps. I am Vector Calculus. And I know what's up in this state. I used to be a conservative, until I realized how good the Republican party was at handling crisises (No armor for OUR troops. Katrina response. Picking presidential candidates and their running mates.)
Let's face it, the conservative movement in this country ate a big bowl of stupid for breakfast, and they're now asking for 43rds.
On the state level, it isn't any better.
As our state legislature tries to play out the clock with the time left in this years General Assembly, hundreds of Missourians have no place to work at. There are companies in this state that are hiring, just not locally. It's not just a problem in our state, but nation wide. I don't recall how many times I've punched into Indeed.com for a job at one of those new data centers in St. Louis and explicitly set the email reminders on the websites I was using to only give me companies in the St. Louis area because I really can not afford to move anywhere else, only to get daily e-mail offers for jobs that aren't relevant to the content on my resume, in places like New Jersey and Michigan.
Let me re-iterate that. I cannot afford to move elsewhere and I know of the new data centers that are hiring in St. Louis but they are not interested in hiring people from missouri.
What the hell did they move to our state for? The weather?
Surely our state's Department of Economic Development and the Missouri Division of Vocational Rehabilitation can see what's going on here. Unless of course, they don't have enough money allocated in the state budget to look into it.
DED has tried setting up a job website several times in the past decade. All of them flopped because none of these new Missouri businesses would consider spreading the word about their company. Not with DED, not with private websites like Monster, CareerBuilder, Indeed, or even Craigslist (where in both St. Louis and Kansas City, posting job offers is FREE). Even if they had their own website for job listings, I guess it is just too hard for them to spread the word to local jobseekers as it is with generic jobs like CDL companies and Nurse Staffing Firms. I signed up with Manpower and a couple of other temp agencies, and God forbid they call me up.
But why isn't any of that happening? The truth is, they think they can make more money by creating this stupid ass "China Hub"/"Cargo City" at the cost of the tax payers, even going as far as to attempt to pay for it by making North St. Louis County residents who were hit by a tornado in the Spring of 2011 take a cut in storm relief. It didn't happen, thankfully. Partially because one of the Chinese representatives discovered someone from Taiwan would also be using it. The PRC and the ROC governments aren't exactly simpatico. So you can imaging how that collapsed just because of one company.
Needless to say, this is one of the many "zombie issues" that just won't stay dead at the GA, as it has come back again on the table.
So while our state government waists their time trying to impress the incredibly fickle Chinese government, the DED sees the number of job placement offices get sacked. Let's face it. This site isn't exactly the best place to look for a job considering their are only about 25,000 records in the system. Using Indeed, you could find 100 times that assuming it didn't re-post the same records every day.
Next up on my list of greivances: the Missouri Department of Public Saftey. Home of Missouri State Highway Patrol.
Missouri is one of the few states in this country that is the butt of a lot of meth jokes. And while MSHP is doing it's best to fight off the influx of drugs and meth making operations in this state, our state legislature continues to find ways to trip up our Smokeys. Namely in this legislature, the Highway Patrol found itself in the crosshairs of austerity, accusing the highway patrol of having too much power. To be honest, it wasn't until a tornado hit my granparents neighborhood that I finally saw a MSHP car in about two years. This crazy nonsense that MSHP is incahoots with "the liberal federal government" is preposterous. The ban on drone aircraft in this state doesn't help MSHP use drones to detect ammonia anomalies in rural Missouri where meth cooks could be hiding. It also doesn't help the Missouri Department of Natural Resources monitor landfill emissions or superfund sites in our state with the help of the EPA because "The EPA is an evil conspiracy". (Fun fact: The EPA was established in 1970 by President Richard Milhouse Nixon, a republican. He's also responsible for establishing Amtrak which saved the passenger rail industry. It's a shame it doesn't stop in Springfield, Missouri. Making part of the Missori Pacific Rail Road could have saved a lot of towns along I-44/Route 66 from falling into disrepair and poverty.)
It's funny how our state republicans want to be champions in the "War Against Drugs", when they sabatoge themselves by letting the cartels and the dealers freely pass through this state more easily thanks to their disinvestment in new technologies.
The drone ban also doesn't help the American economy as many of the anti-drone bills are written to prohibit the manufacturing of unmanned aircraft, and thusly the people who want to buy them have to get them from foreign manufacturers. Way to support the state economy, guys.
Meanwhile, several law enforcement agencies in this state, including the State Highway Patrol, have been HACKED in the past decade. Again, disinvestment in technology has made our state more vulerable to identity theif or the public display of confidential information.
Yet, when comparing the recent self-created crisis with the Department of Revenue recording gun ownership information, these more serious problems are treated as secondary issues.
BTW, DOR was also hacked last decade. Some one got a list of personal information files in 2005. Again, treated as if it was no big deal. But hey, when your elected officials pick a private contractor to record license information for the state tax code, and then make it so that you don't do a background check on the company you hired that is doing background checks on folks who own guns and the MANY MORE WHO DON'T OWN GUNS, and then try to blame Governor Nixon for the problem you recreated back when Matt Blunt and Ed Martin didn't think deleting e-mail records was such a big deal, AND THEN want to say that you are doing what you can to protect JUST THE GUN OWNERS instead of EVERYBODY who had their ID sold NOT JUST TO THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT after a recent school massacre but to marketing groups and hacker well before there was a NewTown or a Virginal Tech for that matter, YOU DON'T GIVE A DAMN ABOUT EVERYBODY! Just the few constituents you have, who go to your church, who pay you money, who BUY YOU LUNCH IN EXCHANGE FOR A VOTE!
It's quite funny how the last time I was in Jefferson City I had to brown bag my own lunch while pushing for the public appeal to help folks with head injuries, while two doors down from the conference room I was eating lunch in was the basement cafeteria with a stack of Krispe Kream and Jimmy Johns boxes that some lobbying group gave them. So tell me how our state isn't corrupted by folks who stand to profit well enough to hire their own lobbying firm and give them lunches, breakfasts, baseball tickets, and other kickbacks.
The real reason drones are now banned in this state isn't the invasion of privacy upon everyday people or to just help drug trafficking and ban the EPA. But to allow Corporate Agricultural Farming Operations to dump MILLIONS OF GALLONS of animal excrement, animal entrails, chemical laced farm wastes into streams and rivers. And they will obstruct the more benevolent uses of drones just so that they can continue to break the law, pollute the water downstream, and poison anyone who comes in contact with this water.
Yes, IN CONTACT. The Mallenkrot Corporation did it for years in North St. Louis County by dumping radioactive materials into Coldwater Creek. There are many people in North St. Louis County, especially in Florissant, who have come down with many forms of cancer, lupus, birth defects, even died, because they didn't know the creek had been contaminated. But the Department of Natural Resources can't do a whole lot of to monitor the area or to get the EPA or the US Army Corps of Engineers to transport the remains of these cold war byproducts buried in a local landfill from leaking into the groundwater and eventually the water supply. For some reason, they state doesn't have the money. Especially now that you have Monsanto doing most of the poisoning these days through genetically modified crops and agri-chemicals that damage the environment and make people sick while making a windfall doing it.
But the GA is OK with the Big M giving everyone the Big C so as long as they get paid.
Ditto for Ameren, who thank to building the state's only nuclear power plant (which fortunately has been build on a hill about a mile from the river unlike many of the other nuclear plants upstream on the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers which have been threatened with flooding and possible nuclear contamination of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers). While Union Electric had the forsight to no build something so hazardous so close to our state's most precious natural resource, the folks at Ameren aren't so bright. The Calloway Plant in Fulton provides Jefferson City and much of mid-Missouri with power. Ameren give it to the state for gratis, so as long as they get what they want.
But when Prop C passed in 2007, encouraging the state to pursue more solar and wind alternatives, Ameren, now six years on, has been fighting tooth and nail to gut this voter approved proposal. The Carnahan family has a wind farm in Northwest Missouri. But thanks to our state repugnicans, not of that power is used IN MISSOURI. Meanwhile, Iowa, Nebraska, and even their favorite state Kansas, have returned a profit on wind energy production. But Missouri is prohibited from having that. Which makes it a perfect target for Karl Rove to assault the Carnahans come election time.
Never mind that Missourians WANT renewable energy, and that many more of them aren't as stupid as the Missouri Petroleum Marketers and Convenience Store Association think we are. (Isn't that just great! Everything that is bad for you and the environment, conveniently packaged into one lobbying group: The boycott of both renewable energy and cigarette taxes. It's like Philip Morris and the lady from the American Petroleum Institute ads had a baby and this was their love child.) As if calling oil, natural gas, "clean coal", nuclear power, and the KXL project are "green alternatives". (They are called "alternatives" because you get to pick from the list of power source that THEY provide because they've made a fortune off of it.) But that doesn't stop the disinformation, or the fact that they can will control in the GA.
They also don't seem to be big fans of Mass Transit. Despite the photo-ops of your congressman pumping a bus full of CNG, they're never there to keep the mass transit system funded. Especially not the parts that don't stop at the baseball stadium, or the luxourious TAX PAYER FUNDED football team that let go of their most valuable player.
But hey, the schools aren't doing as well as that casino that promised to help the schools. They want to put a Blues Museum in the city (which I always though Memphis was the birthplace of the Blues), and all the people who need mass transit for other than being a fun way to the baseball game still have to wait 45 minutes for their other bus that if the two buses weren't diverted to the train station, would have only been a 15 minute bus ride rather than a 90 minute road trip.
So hazaa to our general assembly for doing their best to make Missouri more like Kansas, ignoring those in need, for being there at the ribbon cutting and the tax breaks but not at the career fair or unemployment line, for putting their own self interests first, and everybody else second.
I hope you all get KICKED OUT come next election and that NO ONE from your party runs to keep up your circlejerk ceremonies.
"All animals are equal--except some are more equal than others." --from Animal Farm by Geroge Orwell