What is really depressing, is that of all the people on this board, you are probably among the most intelligent and perceptive.

If I can't crack the paradigm with you, I don't know how it's ever going to be cracked.

The entire foundation of the free market is the idea that the individual is a primary, that he has the right to the product of his own efforts, and that force is not a valid method for people to deal with each other.

Once it has been not only accepted, but considered moral, for the needs of one person to give them the right to fulfill their needs by forcing another person to do it, there is no real endpoint except an environment where predation is the norm.

As for the people with the most loot minding being looted the most, I'm sorry they're annoyed. The people with the least loot are the ones who truly suffer when the people they have trusted with their funds give two levels of advice, bad for the ones with less loot, and good for the ones with more. With no one watching out for the little guy because we want small government (read: less oversight), that is precisely what is going on.

Do you honestly think that larger government is the answer for corruption? Do you want to sit down and think about that for a while?

Listen to yourself:

Just once, just once I'd like to see one of our august radcon mouthpieces deliberately divest him- or herself of all their stuff and live like (and, maybe more importantly, among) the people who they deride as lazy, or stupid.

The idea that I do not recognize the right of someone to live at my unchosen expense does not translate into a value judgment of that person. This is just the kind of foolishness you should be above. If anything, it is the Left in this country that is firmly convinced of the inferiority of entire classes or races, convinced that there is no hope for them to advance themselves without the patronage of better and wiser people than themselves.

They could not divest themselves of their educations, an advantage they would retain, but I would like to see them live on the income available to people in the low-paying dead-end jobs which are supposed to pull them up the economic ladder, buy their good clothes at K-Mart, if they were lucky, pay rent on a third-floor walk-up with no air conditioning, and take the bus everywhere. I doubt they'd last a month.

This is just plain insulting. You think I live in a mansion? I spent years living in an efficiency apartment, and that was a step up from the rooming houses and other places where I lived before that. I worked my way through college, and spent years paying back the loans. I didn't have a car until I was out of college. I didn't have a new car unI worked for companies, and I built companies. Some worked. Some didn't. I've had good patches and some very bad patches.

If I ended up on the street, I dare say I'd do a hell of a lot better than you would. I've done field work, shit work, and scut work. I've worked at the post office, at one of those non-union student positions where you do the same work for a hell of a lot less money. I was a temp worker for years. There have been long months when credit cards paid all the bills, and I had to crawl out of the hole when I got a job.

You have no goddamn right to judge me by your infantile stereotypes of conservatives.

I fucking earned my way to where I am now, and to listen to people tell me that I should not only consider myself fodder for whoever believes they need my wealth and property more than I do, but that I am a low-life bastard for resenting it, or saying that there are workable alternatives, pisses me off no end.

I hope to God you all live long enough to live in a nation where there is nothing to be had, no medicine, no food, no shelter, save by the gracious benevolence of your lords in Washington. I know there are more than a few people in Washington looking forward to it.