Californica cap-and-trade a big success...

That's a myth created by the people who stole the word 'liberal'. Faux 'liberals' are all for 'change' when not in power but dogmatic 'conservatives' once in. Just try to 'change' anything in the 'Welfare State'.

You mean like maybe something 'radical' such as perhaps READING fracking 'healthcare' bills before voting them into law?

'Conservatism' defined as 'resistance to change' is another self serving myth created by the left who stole, and destroyed, 'liberal'.

Fascism was a 'new idea' too so it must be good, eh?

Okay. Lets start simple. What does "Liberty" mean? As in, the inalienable right to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

Like a solar panel business being given large sums of extorted public funds because the 'liberals in charge' have decided who they will favor and who they will persecute.

There is no such thing as the "collective." It is a euphemism for government and suborning individual liberty to it.

The 'limits' of liberty were establish in the beginning. One's liberty is limited if it infringes upon another's liberty. I.E. My right to Life, Liberty, and Property, as expressed by John Locke, does not extend to taking your Life, Liberty, or Property because you have the same rights as I.

Utter nonsense.

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flipper
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rent

What right-wingers understand by "thinking". Serious thinkers are aiming to discover the truth, which happens to be unique - if the question has been sufficiently well-posed to admit of a correct answer

Perhaps. But the word now means what people now agree it means, rather than what it meant back when all educated people could read and write Latin.

And can be taught without providing expensive laboratory space,or any exposure to the experimental method of testing a point of view against an objectively determined reality.

You do have to ask questions that admit of a testable answer.

Unless the governed happen to be black-skinned. Jefferson owned slaves, and fathered a child on one of them.

In practice, the US government hasn't been too enthusiastic about securing those rights for anybody who doesn't look very like the founding tax evaders.

Once elected, the legislature can do all sorts of silly things, as Senator Joe McCarthy demonstrated not all that long ago. "Moral authority" is essentially authority claimed by people who want to act immorally, often from what they see as the highest motives.

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Bil Sloman, Sydney
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Bill Sloman

Did you have a particular "Welfare State" in mind? The U.K.'s social system was described that way from time to time, but it was - and still is - continually being adjusted.

The Germans don't use the phrase, but do seem to have adequate social supports in place. I've not lived there, so I don't know how frequently it changes. The Dutch equivalent was always being fine- tuned while I was living there - the generous and prolonged unemployment benefit which looked after me after their daft ideas about temporary jobs made me unemployed remains generous, but is now less prolonged.

Or perhaps digging their heels in when legislation gets to be impractically complex?

Nonsense. Conservatism is how reactionaries describe their struggle to hang onto unfair deals that suit them better than the rest of society.

Nothing new about it. The "fasces" that Mussolini made emblematic were ancient Roman symbols of authority. Fascism is just one more form of oligarchy, distinguished from most by the fact that the members of the oligarchy are a self-selected group of thugs, without pride of descent or hope of posterity.

Absence of constraints. Since society can only work if everybody refrains from getting in each other's way the only people who can be at complete liberty have to live entirely outside society.

Fine words with very little content.

That didn't work out well. Now lets talk about the much larger sums of taxpayers money that the US governments spends on the development of baroque weapons systems, most of which never work, usually referred to as "corporate welfare".

It's a little more complicated than Locke liked to think. And - like all the other Moderate Enlightenment philosophers - he was too willing to accept established abuses simply because they had worked, after a fashion, for some time. The current US political system gets too much benefit from the same kind of cautious thinking.

On the contrary. The inadequate defenses of liberty enshrined in the present - defective - US constitution mean that the US exhibits gross inequality in income distribution, to a degree that threatens it's continuing economic well-being.

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With a Gini index of 40.8% the US sits neatly between ex-communist Russia at 40.1% and communist China at 42.5%. Better organised countries have Gini indexes running down from about 35% (Australia isn't great at 35.1%) through Germany at 28.3% to Denmark Sweden and Norway at about 25%.

Will Hutton's "The world we're in", published back in 2003

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made the point that better social security and more equal income distributions make for a more flexible and productive work force, and argued that the advanced industrial countries of Western Europe were consequently more productive than the US or the UK. This message didn't go down well in the US and

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only offers the book from independent book shops.

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Jim Thompson would probably have reported Will Hutton to the FBI as dangerously anti-American if he had ever read the book, which is extremely unlikely, granting Jim's ubiquitous ignorance.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
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Bill Sloman

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