You're right about Federal Highway funding, which slipped my mind completely. Odd that it should, considering that its prime function seems to be blackmailing states into complying with Federal wishes.

As you might guess, I do not approve of the Federalization of highways.

Your counterargument about electrification wouldn't power a flashlight. There was no rural market until the government stepped in to provide the service. Only after the service was provided did the rural population find new ways to use it that created a worthwhile market for private companies to go after. The government seeded the development.

Short of a parallel-universe machine, there is no way to settle this. I submit that even had Roosevelt done nothing, by the year 2000, most farms would have electricity. Private co-ops, advances in decentralized power generation, and other solutions were possible, but then Roosevelt saw the world through socialist glasses, and honestly believed that unless he did something, farms would be on oil lamps forever.

One could go into the whole TVA and what it has done in the South, to the environment, and why it is still going strong long after the farms were electrified, but that's another whole thread.

And by the way, at the time 90 percent of non-rural people had electricity. Who jump-started that?

...Are we not responsible as a society for providing some level of standards to protect our fellow citizens and ourselves from incompetant and/or dishonest business practices? And don't kid yourself: if those unfortunate people were insured, we who are also insured are all paying for their misfortune, too. Unhappily, money is all we can offer them for their losses, some of which are not replaceable.

I fail to see the constitutional role of the Federal government in insuring my beach house. I'm not talking about scrapping local building codes or ignoring fraud on the part of contractors. It is of course assumed by the left that a businessman will take every opportunity to cheat his customers, and it is only the uncorruptable government that can protect us from them. Wait...run that by me again?

Have you gone to your children's teachers, all of them, and told them to their faces that they are union tools working for a corrupt and inefficient failure of a system financed by money extorted from you personally and you would like nothing better than to put them out of a job?

Teachers aren't the problem, and you know it. The teachers I have worked with here bust their asses doing what they can, often at their own personal expense in money and time. They don't know where the money is going any more than I do, and some will tell you--quietly--that they're not that happy with how things are run at the upper levels either.

The NEA is a union dedicated to the single function of increasing the political and financial power of the NEA. It is largely a buttmonkey of the Democratic Party. I can document this if you like, but if you've seen any of their conventions or positions it pretty much speaks for itself.

The Federal Department of Education, without which we somehow managed to put a man on the Moon and create the greatest technological civilization on the planet, is a waste of space and money.

Now, I think that experiments in education are fine, because it's a very good way to learn about alternative approaches, of which we have too few considering how diverse our population is. I don't think it's OK to dismantle an entire system to finance an experiment, especially when some of the system is functioning well, and other parts are functioning well enough. The very last thing that impresses me is some libertarian clown judging the entire education infrastructure of the United States by the performance of the Rich Man/Poor Man School System found in Oz On The Potomac, to which, I remind you, I am close enough for it to be local news.

Sure, I'm going to use Washington D.C. as an example. The District of Columbia is run exactly according to the dearest principles of the Left in almost every area, including education, employer regulations, social programs, and gun control. Republicans are as rare as hen's teeth in city offices. The results are there for all to see. I use the District of Columbia for comparison in the same way as I used to contrast East and West Germany as the ideal lab experiment. The spectacle of an elite riding on the backs of a miserable working class, and all that. When I was staying there, the big dirty monolithic concrete buildings away from the pretty marble stuff even reminded me of Moscow.

If you think DC sucks, you might want to give some thought as to why.

If I could be God for a year, I would give you your wish not to be your brother's keeper. The United States would go completely private except for the police and the armed forces, and I would make sure that you received the benefit of every breakdown in public service and safety that that implies short of the actual death of you or anyone you love. The poor get left behind one way or another every day, but you don't see it because it doesn't happen much among people you know. Since you don't seem to get that, I would make sure that it was impressed upon you physically. A house just has to fall on some people.

Maybe I'm not naive enough to think one can impose a libertarian society on people overnight. They have to grow into the paradigm, much the same way our current population has grown into the collectivist paradigm (got a problem? Call Washington!) All I am hoping for is for our society to start changing direction away from the collectivist nightmare that has killed so many countries, and toward a society with more freedom and more choices. Hell, I'd be happy if the rush toward socialism was even slowed down a bit. Why not try a few things? Why not try vouchers in some places, or privatize a tiny percentage of our retirement? The absolutely vicious response of the Left to even the tiniest steps away from their agenda says a lot.

But while you're imagining this fantasy thought experiment (what WOULD happen if Washington DC vanished in a puff of purple smoke?) imagine what YOU would do. Would you try and pick up the slack on a local level, or just say to hell with everybody? And what happens when everyone's take home pay suddenly increases by a third or more? What exactly are "public services?" Are they things no one would pay for unless forced? Will everyone immediately try to sell unsafe products? If you were a businessman, would you? How do you really pay for your water and electricity? Does the bill go to Washington? What will medical providers do when suddenly they run their own businesses again? What happens to social services when the objective becomes providing services instead of creating a dependent class of captive voters?

I've studied the principles of freedom for years, and the practical applications as well. It would take books to detail it all. Suffice it to say that a lack of an all-powerful centralized government is not a synonym for chaos, as much as the government would like us to believe this. The objective is not anarchy, it's bringing control of our lives back to the local and individual level where it belongs.