It’s like people who say ‘I’m not racist, but…’. They have often already lost people on that one phrase.

You seem to enjoy making huge generalisations… I would probably describe myself as liberal, however I am not a fan of too much control from government, however on the flip-side I can see that we need some form of government.

I can see the positives of capitalism, however it is the worlds relatively recent obsession with extreme-capitalism that is making people less caring and more greedy. America likes to think of itself as a Christian nation, however they are the most selfish nation on earth. And please note that giving money to charity is often down to ego or wanting to get in to heaven which is a form of selfishness. The real caring people actually DO the charity work themselves. It is zero hassle to throw a charity some money in order to boost one’s ego, however to really do charity is to actually put time in and not money.

To go back to the industrial revolution is a stretch. Why not go back to the agriculatural era? How about slavery? Times change. It’s not because of government that we were able to get rid of child labor. It was because productivity increased to the point where children weren’t needed to work anymore. Why do you think there is child labor in other countries? Do you think they just hate children? It’s because they have increased their productivity to the point where the parents can produce enough for the entire family.

Well biz had it’s chance during the industrial revolution, and we saw children crushed under carpet presses in order to keep the line moving.

People are scum all over, and we have to keep a balance. Too much gov, bad…too much corp..equally bad.

Also, gun control isn’t a wedge issue. It’s one of our human rights, and it’s the only line of defense between freedom and slavery. You can hand over your wedge issue if you’d like, but I don’t trust the government or the moneyed interest enough to hand over privately held arms. Also, don’t know what you mean about equal rights being a wedge issue. Equal rights is what the country was founded on. The problem now is we dont’ have equal rights. We have group rights, and you only have rights if your group has power or enough money to buy rights.

You want to get rid of the influence of corporate interests, you have to get rid of government or at least make it small enough that it does nothing but a few things like …. well I can’t think of anything that’s worth them doing. They pretty much suck at all of it.

The mainstream media was supposed to be the referee in this – keeping politicians on both sides honest and calling them out where applicable, but that seems to have ended for the most part. Now most of those outlets are basically shills for the liberal agenda and progressivism that’s destroying this country.

Blogs seem to have picked up the slack, except that even they seem to many times be hypocritical – they’ll call out 1 side of the aisle but not the other when reps do dumb things.

Corporate interests will only be removed from politics when politics is removed from business. As long as Congress dictates who wins and loses in business, there will be corporate lobbyists trying to make sure the gun of government is pointed at someone else and not them.

So long as people keep focusing on distraction/wedge issues like gun control and equal rights we will never be able to remove the influence corporate interests exert on our country and the entire world.

That’s what people don’t get. Everyone talks about the moral decay of society and how families have grown apart. I barely even know my neighbors. What they don’t get is this has happened more and more as government has grown.

I’ve been meaning to write a post on this, but I call it the Tragedy of Commons on the human level. I’m sure you’ve heard of Tragedy of Commons, which is how everyone assumes someone else is taking care of things when it comes to public lands, so they don’t clean up. Of course the environmentalist love this argument, but the problem is you don’t have it when the land is owned privately. Anyway, I think you have this same effect with the poor. Basically, the poor become a publicly owned group, and everyone assumes someones else is already taken care of it, so they just ignore it.