Her most famous and prestigious follower said yesterday in sworn testimony before Congress:

“I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms,” Mr. Greenspan said.

Referring to his free-market ideology, Mr. Greenspan added: “I have found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I have been very distressed by that fact.” Mr. Waxman pressed the former Fed chair to clarify his words. “In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working,” Mr. Waxman said.

“Absolutely, precisely,” Mr. Greenspan replied. “You know, that’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.”

Near the end of the four-hour grilling, which he shared with John Snow, the former Treasury secretary, and Christopher Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Greenspan suffered a final indignity. The man dubbed "the Maestro" for orchestrating fiscal policy during 18 years as Fed chief found himself likened to one of the great goats of baseball. "I feel like I'm looking out there at three Bill Buckners," said Rep. John Yarmuth, D-Ky., referring to the Boston Red Sox first baseman who botched an easy grounder in the 1986 World Series. "All of you let the ball go through your legs."

This is a rant!  I watched with complete disbelief last night and this morning the news that over one hundred thousand people disobeyed mandatory evacuation orders from Hurricaine Ike and chose to hunker down in their homes instead of filling up their gas tanks with $5 a gallon petrol and empty their wallets out with expensive hotel and motel costs safely inland.  And then these coastal scofflaws actually expect the rest of us to then rescue them from "certain death" by drowning?  They made their poor decision!  Let them go under three times and then die with it!  By what right, say, do workers at McDonald's and dish-washers and Social Security retirees not put a little aside each month as a fund to help them evacuate when killer hurricaines come knocking (as they do sometimes every year)?  Yet these Texas moochers actually expect me (& other good people like me in, say, Colorado) to pay out of our own pockets for their rescue when they chose--mind-you: CHOSE!--to stay behind?  Just like the good Christian Lieutenant Governor of Texas said a few minutes ago on the Weather Channel: we live in a Free Country, which means workers at McDonald's, dish-washers and Social Security retirees, et al, are completely free to die if they can't afford to live!

And this is as it should be in this Great Land of Ours, doncha think?

So I've been pondering what it means to be a Libertarian.   I think Rand was a capitalist more than a libertarian.  She thought the free market would solve everything.  So what is the number one priority for a Libertarian?

Is it the right to own and protect property?  - Intellectual property, physical property? 

Is it the right to follow the dictates of your conscience? - where do you draw the line?  Would polygamy or prostitution be considered a libertarian issue?

What if the two conflicted? In the 1800's who's side would a libertarian be on?  The slave owner or the slave?

With the above two concepts I see rebuttals in them.  1) property (as stated in the land post) is subjective.  Can one really own land?  As a libertarian do I need to support others choice to live how they want?  What if I think it affects society negatively?  Does that make me have a 'socialist' agenda if I care about the society as opposed to the individual?

These thoughts are swimming in my head.  I'd love to read what some of you think about the definition of libertarianism.

I was just reading that two major medical associations are trying to help their oncologists be able to discuss treatment costs with patients.  For the first time ever, cost is being evaluated in cancer treatments along with effectiveness.  Some socialized medical proponents are up in arms because they feel when you bring the patient's treatment expense into the picture, poor people won't get or pick the best treatment. 

Co-pays are a huge portion of expense in cancer treatments, both with Medicare, Medicaid and private Insurance.  As a patient, would I like to know how much such and such treatment is going to be versus another?  For me, I think I would want to know and it may affect my decision - just what the socialized crowd is against.   If X treatment was 45% effective and cost $3K a month in copays and Y treatment was 40% effective and cost $1K a month, I'd pick Y.  (and No, I don't think 'society - aka people's taxes' should have to pay the difference in the drugs for me.) It is my right to know expense and perhaps if everyone did, X would have to lower it's cost to even have any business at all.  I don't agree that we as a society should shoulder the burden of saving every life no matter the cost.  Cost / Benefit analysis is the basis of important decisions.  Some say that if Oncologists bring up expenses with welfare patients - then they will have conflicting duties (to minimize expenses for society vs. best possible care for patient).  Well, that may be so, but doesn't the patient deserve to know?

So maybe people wouldn't pick the 'best' drug out there if they knew the cost - I believe that market competition would kick in and at some point the 'best' drug out there will become cheaper both for society and the individual.  I'm tired of people trying to 'protect' others from all the facts and knowledge.  I welcome bringing cost into treatment discussions.  Let the people decide and the markets will follow.  Just because one pharmaceutical says their drug is $200 a pill, doesn't mean it will stay that high if no one buys it. One last thought... if money suddenly had a place at the table in discussing options, perhaps overlooked and cheap alternatives can be brought out.  My dad was mentioning that some type of Tea has the same benefits as an expense heart medicine but because it is 'unpatentable' no one brings it up to patients.

This was originally posted on my blog on June 8, 2008.

In the last week or so, it has become clear to me that the basic understanding quite a few people have of libertarianism is that of greed and selfishness. This surprises me because I thought most people had us figured for proponents of legalized marijuana and prostitution.

In truth, there are as many factions to libertarianism as there are people who identify as such. Get ten libertarians in a room and you’ll get 11 opinions that span not only a spectrum across an idealogy, but span the spectra of idealogies.

There is one thing that unites us, however, and that is the belief in choice. Sometimes, as in the case of abortion, whose choice is up for debate, but in the end, libertarians want to be able to choose how they live their lives without having their homes raided by overzealous religious bigots in the form of Child Protective Services, without having their businesses regulated to such an extent that they are hamstrung, without having their earnings stolen straight out of their paychecks.

In Abraham 4:1, a plan was presented and a son of God said, “Behold, here am I, send me, I will be thy son, and I will redeem all mankind, that one soul shall not be lost, and surely I will do it; wherefore give me thine honor.” Then Christ offered his plan and the glory to the Father. The Father goes on to tell Abraham in verse 3, “Wherefore, because that Satan rebelled against me, and sought to destroy the agency of man, which I, the Lord God, had given him, and also, that I should give unto him mine own power; by the power of mine Only Begotten, I caused that he should be cast down.”

This concept is our gospel. It’s the fulcrum of what we as Latter-day Saints believe and why. Without this, we’d be just another protestant religion albeit with some seriously weird kinks.

I made the point over at Feminist Mormon Housewives that compulsory taxation for the purpose of giving it to other individuals in our society was antithesis to the gospel, the gospel of agency, which is to say, the ability to choose between good and evil. In return, it was brought to my attention that the actual point was not that Lucifer had proposed this plan, but that he wanted the glory. Yet God makes it very clear that Satan’s greater sin was that he “sought to destroy the agency of man.”

Our Creator’s goal is to bring all of us home again…with caveat: That we actually learn something.

And there’s the sticky wicket. One cannot learn the principle of anything by compulsion. One doesn’t learn generosity by having money taken from his paycheck arbitrarily and given to someone else, no matter how much the someone else needs it. The choice to be generous on our own, to provide for our weakest with that money, has been stripped from us.

Obviously, libertarians wouldn’t have a problem with some measure of taxation because things do need to be paid for: roads, bridges, fire, police, water treatment, a military. Oh, you know, those things that establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. There are better ways to collect those funds than via the IRS, but that’s another six posts. However, I will not deny that they are vital to the successful running of a country and everyone needs to share in that cost.

Of course, I know what most of the first jumping off point of this post will be, because it’s used (either disingenuously or ignorantly) as the first point of dissent in the debate: promoting the general welfare, which has been used to justify enormous charitable Congressional expenditures since the New Deal. So let’s get that out of the way right now.

James Madison put this succinctly enough in the third session of Congress in 1794, when an expedition of French refugees had arrived from the Haitian Revolution, and Congress sought $15,000 for their aid. This is the quote from the annals:

“Mr. Madison wished to relieve the sufferers, but was afraid of establishing a dangerous precedent, which might hereafter be perverted to the countenance of purposes very different from those of charity. He acknowledged, for his own part, that he could not undertake to lay his finger on that article in the Federal Constitution which granted a right of Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.”

Furthermore, Mr. Madison said, “The government of the United States is a definite government, confined to specified objects. It is not like the state governments, whose powers are more general. Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government.” [Italics mine.]

So, yeah, one of the geniuses behind the Constitution didn’t think it was such a good idea.

Whew. Now, with that addressed, I’ll conclude my original point:

If we believe in a gospel of agency, then having our earnings taken from us to be given to someone else is denial of agency. Thus, the redistribution of wealth via compulsory taxation is, by definition of our gospel, evil.