Lest we offend friends of police officers, public school teachers, firefighters, social workers, or an astronaut. Since we put a man on the moon, government is great. And since founding daddy’s of the country decided government should be “good government” and not a hated government, we must like the government.
Will their pathetic fellow-traveling never end?
“If you reflect only scorn for government, it’s hard to get anyone who hasn’t already drunk the Kool-Aid to take your opinions on the topic seriously.”
Why do they even bother writing if they consider Libertarianism Jim Jones-esque? What garbage. It isn’t a matter of being correct, to them; morally or otherwise. But a matter of drinking kool-aid.
Their list of government “wins” is even funnier. It’s like the lamest argument-from-affect of all time. The “moon landing”? Seriously? Welfare reforms?
Reason’s agnosticism on government is quite funny. And easy to see why the state’s barn door is wide open to seize any power it wishes. Not only because of their abstract of small government constitutionalism (I’m picturing an article next week telling us that John Adams, in his infinite wisdom predicted space shuttles), but also their fear of offending the mainstream’s sensibility.
Now, now we don’t want to piss on anyones parade do we?
Some of the “Libertarian” mediums out there just rattle my cage. Especially, when the person you are arguing with starts citing them as “Libertarian”.
Most of those mediums are just “Libertarian” ideas (if you would call them that) repackaged as “Beltway Compatible” which is basically the equivalent of saying “Nothing serious here, move along ladies and gentleman”.
This reminds me of how I feel when I argue to remove or reduce the size of government in an area, and having demonstrated the benefits of the free market, to hear the retort; Ah, but that’s just not realistic, it can’t happen.
No doubt, people who say such things never for one moment think about how “realistic” or sustainable the schemes they support are. Reason seems pretty lame based on your post, do they receive government aid?
The comments on that page already did all the work, and I think they’ll think twice next time before putting something like this out.
“I love how the first two things that allegedly went well are the broken window fallacy in action. Let’s bomb the crap out of people and have the US citizens pay to rebuild everything. I guess in 20 years, Reason will point to our adventures in the Middle East as a model of efficiency. This entire article was the biggest bunch of tripe I have seen in a while.”
This may not be correct, but if you click on the names of the authors, you see that both of them haven’t contributed anything to Reason for over 13 years!
Why do they even bother writing if they consider Libertarianism Jim Jones-esque?
and is drinking kool-aid another term for being lied to by govt who steals money anyway?
what type of -esque do they consider a former head of the cia turned president being fooled by a republican pr firm into repeatedly mentioning babies pulled from incuabators that neve happened and getting an imposter in from if a congressional hearing…she could have been a terrorist.
Actually, no rat. As you can see in the video that is linked in that article, from Dec 10th a month ago: those guys wrote a book with the same premise. ‘If government can put a man on the moon, it should be able to do other stuff as well’. Pretty giant fail by Reason and Nick Gillespie to not undermine that reasoning and even promoting them. It’s something I expect from Jon Stewart/Colbert but not from Reason.