"Dick Muhfukkin Bagswing" <laugh@my.nuts.wouldja?> wrote in message
news:bog6fn$hev$1@nn-tk102.ocn.ad.jp...
> Which side of the post are you on?
>
> According to this I am a "centrist".
>
>  theadvocates.org
>
>
>
> Brian
>
>

Military service should be voluntary. (No draft)



 - no, national defense is a public duty. Citizens should participate in a
time of emergency, otherwise we are just hiring mercenaries. I heard the
argument once that democracies marshal the most lethal military forces,since
ordinary citizens are genuinely willing to die for their country. It helps I
suppose that democracies tend to be richer.



 Government should not control radio, TV, the press or the Internet.



    agree, and few democracies do





Repeal regulations on sex for consenting adults.



  agree, and few democracies regulate sexual activity, except for
prostitution.



Drug laws do more harm than good. Repeal them.



  disagree, it would only lead to increase in drug abuse



People should be free to come and go across borders; to live and work where
they choose.



  disagree, it would lead to chaos.





Economic Issues



Businesses and farms should operate without govt. subsidies.



 absolutely agree - few other industries get this amount of subsidies, it
distorts economic incentives, it is unfair to the developing world,  it is
maintained for political reasons (votes in farming states)






People are better off with free trade than with tariffs.



agree.






Minimum wage laws cause unemployment. Repeal them.



maybe. not sure what the economic consequence is - yes, a minimum wage
probably reduces the number of people employed, but it is hard to abide
paying people pennies for labor. maybe it is a tradeoff between subminimal
wage sweatshops and hard-core unemployed welfare lifers.



  End taxes. Pay for services with user fees.




  no. this would mean that the poor would get even fewer services, since
they could not afford them. Taxes are of course a form of income
distribution, but this is Christian ethics in action. We all benefit from
society, and if one is rich it is not simply due to one's own efforts.
Especially if you are a real estate agent. Therefore one has a debt to
society, and this includes helping the poor.





All foreign aid should be privately funded.



  No. foreign aid is an instrument of national defense and it makes up less
than 1% of the national budget. Would be nice to find a way out of perpetual
billion dollar funding of Israel and Egypt though. In a libertarian world,
they would just be left to their own devices, which means they would kill
each other, and god would sort it out. That's kind of the whole problem with
a hard-core libertarian philosophy - people left to their own devices will
let their neighbors starve. I always thought it was the other way around,
but it occurs to me that liberals must believe that people are evil and need
government intervention to prevent them from wreaking their evil on the
powerless, whereas conservatives must believe that people are inherently
good and can be trusted to do the right thing. The liberals are surely right
on this one.



But few people fit the Limbaughesque definitions of liberal, conservative,
libertarians etc. I get tired of hearing of these categories. More
typically, people are liberal or conservative on some issues and different
on others. I would rate myself Reaganesque conservative on economics and
defense but Clintonesque liberal on health care and social issues. I get
tired of the pigeonholing stereotypes about people's political views, as if
people are so single minded and simple that they can be summed up as some
rating in an index of their "conservativeness" or "liberalness". It is more
cheering for the home team than political discussion.



That's the problem with quizzes like this one. But for what it is worth, I
came out:



Centrist



(yeah.... go centrists!!!!)