User profile: zerstuckelung

"nobody in this country is left to die on the emergency room floor because they don't have health insurance."

http://articles.latimes.com/2007/jun/02/...

"Ruptured bowel led to death in ER lobby

A 43-year-old woman who writhed in pain for 45 minutes on the emergency room lobby floor of Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital died of a perforated bowel, the Los Angeles County coroner's office said late Friday."

This is getting tedious, folks.

"I wonder what constitutes a big government to you?"

Oh, let's say gov't expenditures at <10% of GDP.

"It seems you define it by suggest[sic] that it is over when a tyrant says it is."

If by "tyrant" you mean a century of policy by a range of democratically constituted governments operating with the consent of their respective citizenry, yes.

"Better yet, how can the anarchist, minarchist, conservative, liberal, statist, socialist, and marxist all have their ideal societies realized without resorting to violence against their neighbor?"

This is a red herring because the state, any state, is violence incarnate. Do we really need to go back to Hobbes? Or should we stop at 1848?

By any practical measure, the debate is settled, for there has not been an industrial state with anything remotely approaching small government for a century or more.

To be sure, people like us may bat the ball back and forth, but some also maintain that Marx's Revenge is just around the corner, a position equally divorced from reality.

PRG:"But how do we fairly and non-violently settle this very large disagreement?"

I would argue, sir, that it has been settled in the industrialized nations for more than a century!

You may rightly rail against the blunt instrument of state violence (although one wonders how many tax evaders--not deniers, mind you--have had their door kicked in by IRS SWAT teams in the middle of the night), but surely even you cannot deny that the lion's share of the wealth generated since 1790 has come as a result of public investments in transportation, sanitation & health, and education--including the state-supported institutions at which you were educated.

I should clarify: the ideas of which I speak belong to those who seek to establish some libertarian utopia free of 'collectivist' redistribution--and in so doing explicitly deny any responsibility to provide for their fellow citizens unfortunate enough to have been born in poverty. The idea that those who perform society's backbreaking scutwork should be left to their own devices is a morally repugnant nineteenth-century anachronism that does not merit serious consideration.

(What's more, they've the temerity to cite the bank bailouts as evidence of government malfeasance, as if it wasn't the result of allowing the banks the 'freedom' to innovate!)