The reason you are so overworked should be readilly apparent. It is precisely your little throw aways that make discourse with you exhausting and frustrating. Keeping to the point just isn't easy. I am learing a lot from you, for example:

>"The leftist creed ....".

I didn't realize those included in the class of leftist, which I interpret to mean the population that doesn't agree with Ayn Rand, have a creed. I was under the impression that only right wing conservatives are privy to the revealed word. The religious conformity of "dittoism" seems the more creedy to me.

>The only legitimate government function you have mentioned in this pork festival is "public safety."

Here we go babe. Listen carefully. The development of Infrastructure has been a major part of the development of industrial nations and especially the modern post-industrial nation. To spread and accelereate economic developments transportation, communications, electrification has to be built ahead of the market. Capitalistic infrastructure can only be built behind, or slightly ahead of the market. Historically, private money built America's railroads east of the Mississippi where the markets already existed; public money was required to build them west of the Mississippi where markets were to be built.

Publicly financed high-speed passenger rail systems are presently in every major industrial couontry except the US and Canada. The line between Osaka and Tokyo is highly profitable. No such trains have been built, or will be built entirely with private money in the US.
The economic risks are too great, the length of time until payoffs too long, and without the right of eminent domain, the land cannot be acquired for right-of-way. Face the realities of this time--not a century ago, where your economics are rooted. The Chunnel fiasco on the English side is a great example of this.

For a short list, the REA was necessary to bring electricity to rural america. TVA formed the engine that grew the south. Eli Whitney's invention of interchangeable parts was government financed by the War Department in 1801. The National Road in 1815. The Boston Post Road. The Erie Canal. Free land under the Homestead Act was required to attract the "private" investment you so praise. Land grant colleges formed the basis for our national university system. Interstate highways, use of the postal system to provide subsidy to early airlines, public air ports, atomic energy, space exploration, the world's electronic highway-a 1969 DOD effort, etc. ad infinitum.

>"The hard facts are that if you look at almost ANY commodity that is cheap, and generally available to everyone regardless of wealth, it will be something that is provided by the private sector."

Simply not true. Biotechnology, as example, has the possiblity to change the world and the nature of man-kind itself. Fifty years of massive government investments were required before the first results started to appear. Private industrial laboratories focus on projects that are expected to pay off in seven years or less. The only private labs that took a long term perspective were Bell Labs and the IBM labs that were quasi-monopolies. The minutre AT&T(under government force) and IBM (under market force) were deregulated they cut long-term research out of their budgets.

>"The free market always works. This is not a fantasy, this is observable facts. Where governments use force to prevent it from working, you begin to have problems."

This standing the truth on its head. The free market has NEVER worked and our brief experience in approaching it in the 1890's was a disaster. Even Republican pres. Teddy Roosevelt saw the need to step in and break the trusts. We do not have a free market now, didn't have on yesterday, and won't have one tomorrow. We have a mixed economy and we have to work to keep this balance. When we approach a theoretical state of corporatism, then we risk getting out of this balance. Enron's Lay donating $100,000. to Dubya's inauguration jumps this balance.

>"Oh, come on. Again, my resentment about having a gun barrel jammed into my chest and my wallet emptied is repainted as "stinginess." Does anyone even buy this gag anymore? "

Ah so, grasshopper! " We are like a big fish that has been pulled from the water and is flopping wildly to find its way back in. In such a condition the fish never asks where the next flip or flop will bring it. It senses only that its present position is intolerable and that something else must be tried." Daedalus (spring '93)