The Libertarians have landed

Well at least one has. But I'm sure that more will be along shortly.

In a continuation of a discussion that started a few days ago on a couple of different blogs, Teresita says:

This is what I'm for:

1) Peace through superior firepower.

2) 100% access control on both borders.

3) The delegation of most federal powers back to the states in areas such as building infrastructure and funding education. If that means some states like West Virginia take a hit because they were getting more federal largess back than they were paying in, so be it, we're not running a charity here.

4) No more War on Drugs, War on Terror, War on Cancer, War on Poverty, War on Inflation, or War on Puberty. If you really want to do those things wear a button, don't take my money.

5) Public funding of all election campaigns to eliminate the influence of corporate interests in government. Don't cry "free speech" to me, the future of our representative democracy is in the balance.

6) Start closing our overseas bases. Roll up the Empire. We don't have national interests overseas, and we never did. If we want to import oil lets just pay for it like China and Japan and Europe do. If we want to protect our citizens overseas there's INTERPOL.

7) No bank or mortgage bailouts. Let the house of cards fall down so prices and find their true level again in the free market. The American economy will start again, but right now every government intervention distorts pricing and delays that day of reckoning.

8) No 401(k) bailouts. I realize that the geezer lobby is a powerful political force, but if they had all their funds in the stock market they knew the risk going in.

9) Annual tax cuts. You get rid of government waste by squeezing it, year over year.

10) Nukes. Currently the US gets only about 1/5 of our energy from nuke plants. We need to be more like "liberal" France, which is 90% nuke. And it will make the global WarmOngers shut the fuck up.

And you know what, Teresita? We're actually in agreement on most of that stuff, even the bit about stopping the massive influx of other people's money into states like West Virginia. Senator Byrd(D)--WV, portrays himself as Robin Hood, and many of the people in this state consider him a hero due to his practice of holding up every little bit of legislation unless it contains some pork for this state. (I personally call it "extortion" but who listens to me?) However, Byrd is about 900 years old and will not always be with us, and when he's gone, the shoe might just wind up on the other foot, and then we'll see how my welfare-mentality neighbors like paying for stuff that they'll never see or benefit from because it went to people in Texas of Oklahoma. If the people of WV or any other state really want new highways and other nice things, they need to vote on a state level to tax themselves for it. If the money's not there, they just have to learn to do without or do something to draw businesses and high-paying jobs into the state to broaden the tax base.

When I get to be President, there won't be federal agencies like HUD, Education, FEMA or Health and Human Services. The things that they regulate and pay for should always have been left to the states and the voters should have been allowed to decide whether or not they want those services and the attendant bills.

That "War on Drugs" thing though? No way I'll ever concede that or allow this country to do it. The day that America legalizes drugs is the day that I leave. Drugs are a scourge and a cancer on our society, from the cost to treat the victims of those who hurt people while on drugs or trying to get the money to buy drugs, to the cost of treating the users themselves, on up to the damage associated with drug smugglers and dealers and their penchant for violence. This stuff needs to be suppressed and if it means that we lock up every convicted dealer for five years and every smuggler for ten, then I'm good with that. Let's toss 'em all into prisons along the borders and use 'em as labor to build a credible, layered border wall. Yes, a serious wall comprised of fences and cleared zones on each side, and stadium lights at night would be a major project, but if we use enough convict labor, including that of any illegal alien that we catch here, we can do a lot to keep the costs down. But drugs are so damaging to our society that I'll agree with almost any effort to keep them out and dissuade people from selling, transporting or using them. Besides, busting them is so much fun...it really is. It's almost as much fun as catching a convicted felon with a gun.

And I still disagree with your premise that foreign law enforcement is sufficient to protect our citizens abroad and punish those who prey on them. Such entities have proven themselves incapable or unwilling in the past when we've asked them to arrest and detain terrorists who have killed Americans and while I'm always willing to give them a first chance to do what needs to be done in cases where our citizens are victimized, there has to be a point at which time we'll go get the guilty parties ourselves. I'm sure that you remember that great day when Abu Abbas and his terrorist pals who'd hijacked the Achille Lauro cruise ship were intercepted by US Navy jet fighters after the Egyptian government tried to sneak them to freedom. That was a classic justifiable use of our military force being used after another nation failed to do the right thing and it made me and a lot of other Americans feel damned proud. We won't get into the subsequent cowardly actions of the Italian government except to say that they further support my assertion that if we always left justice to others, the world'd be even less safe then it currently is. Now I'm not suggesting that we go around righting all the world's wrongs, but if you attack Americans, you need to know that other Americans will be tracking you down with the goal of either bringing you before a judge or just killing you.

I will grant you that we don't need large military bases around the globe to do this. We have more rapid-deployment potential that we could ever have dreamed of back when we were establishing such bases in our efforts to win the Cold War, and now that the Cold War is over, most of those bases just prop up the local economies in places like Okinawa and the Philippines while the people there hate us. I'm fine with closing those and taking our people and our money back home. as for the oil thing, oil is a commodity and commodities always flow to where the money is. We don't need a global military for that, and once we get serious about nuclear power supplemented by efficient use of natural gas and oil from our own reserves, we won't even need to worry about the possibility that some third-world oil-producing nation might someday decide to go against their own economy interest and not sell to us. However to get to that point, we're going to need to get big government regulators and the eco-freak lobbies off of the backs of the energy producers and let capital and technology work to build a strong, self-sufficient domestic energy industry.