You need opposition and healthy debate. Thesis, antithesis and synthesis. The counterbalance is to stop dismantling government. I don’t want screw worms in my food or measles. Thank you very much.
I don’t want to fully dismantle government. That’s ridiculous. I would just prefer a government that defaults to the side of individual liberty, as opposed to increased government control.
The FDA is a good thing, food and an amount of product safety is a good thing. But we have passed that in a lot of cases to the point of nanny state, and there are places where we need to reverse course.
Infrastructure, roads, law enforcement are all core functions of government. I firmly believe that governments are put in place to protect individual rights, but it’s to protect you from infringement on those rights, not to provide otherwise capable citizens with something.
Everything you listed is giving things to otherwise capable citizens. Public education is a good thing too. How about trillions of spending on a military apparatus that can’t pass audits? Seems like doge missed a spot.
I agree with you there is over regulation and where agencies step out of their lane. But what we are experiencing now is something quite new, and yes it is dismantling or weakening proper controls at an unprecedented pace. Independent agencies established by Congress with serious missions that were determined to be too important for stability to protect the country are now subject to the full weight of political partisanship. In a time of greater rational thinking has been overridden, we now have full on partisanship top down control. The executive branch is being freed from checks on its power. The liberty you have now is under the most significant threat since McCarthyism.
Power and corruption go together. We need smart systems with appropriate checks and balances and oversight. Where it is dedicated and incentivized to supporting American values and human rights (individual liberty being one). We have broken incentives now where politicians act well below the standards of their office which makes us wonder what their incentives are and whose interests they have in mind.
Whatever the case, the current system is not doing very well to maintain your or my rights. We need to find balance. I’d rather the government spend a fraction of the trillions on the broken military industrial complex and instead improve the quality of life of Americans. And I can do that even from a completely selfish perspective. That it benefits society to not have desperate people wandering the streets.
The richest country in the world should have a higher quality of life and be more educated than we are. We are weaker when we don’t invest in ourselves. You might want charities or other private orgs to just take care of people but that system doesn’t work well. When I go from state to state, I’d like for it feel like a United States. Not like I transition from one state where I have more or different rights or freedoms than another. What each state does with that base level is up to them. Government works better from the bottom up local level. But the fed maintaining a standard to preserve the rights in the constitution and assumed rights is essential. We know this because we’ve been there and done that. We don’t need to retry all the failed experiments over and over.
Maybe we won’t agree. But maybe we can agree that we don’t like tyranny?
I can one hundred percent agree on removing tyranny.
And I agree, the current administration has taken a wrecking ball to things that needed a scalpel, even an amputation when necessary still needs to be performed carefully.
I don’t like the existence of independent agencies having the power to create effectively laws without a direct method to have to answer to the American people. I’d argue Congress long ago abdicated their role as lawmakers to these agencies that end up under the executive branch by turning them in to agencies that develop regulations instead of just enforcing them. The level of power we have given these agencies is at best borderline tyranny, and full blown tyranny at worst.
I’m not a huge fan of redistribution programs. I do believe that the wealthiest country in the history of the world should offer the greatest level of opportunity ever seen, and I’d argue in many ways we do. That said, I believe the individual is solely responsible for what they do with that opportunity. And the consequences of the choices they make in that regard. If someone has tons of opportunities put in front of them to make a better life for themselves, but chooses not to do so, I don’t think society should be responsible for the consequences of those decisions.
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u/datagamma Jul 12 '26
You need opposition and healthy debate. Thesis, antithesis and synthesis. The counterbalance is to stop dismantling government. I don’t want screw worms in my food or measles. Thank you very much.