{"id":731,"date":"2002-06-11T03:36:20","date_gmt":"2002-06-11T10:36:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mossback.org\/archives\/2002\/06\/top-fifteen-strawmen\/"},"modified":"2002-06-11T03:36:20","modified_gmt":"2002-06-11T10:36:20","slug":"top-fifteen-strawmen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/2002\/06\/11\/top-fifteen-strawmen\/","title":{"rendered":"Top fifteen strawmen"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\t— Eric S. Raymond demonstrates a finely nuanced political sensibility in this post<\/a> ostensibly listing liberal and conservative values. About 15 of his twenty issues are strawmen, such as the claims that conservatives are creationists and liberals communists.

So here are my Top Ten Reasons for not being a Libertarian:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. America isn’t France: we don’t do runoffs.\n
  2. You can’t privatize everything: nuclear power, in particular, needs to be run by government or not at all.\n
  3. The Free Market doesn’t give a damn about the environment.\n
  4. The social safety net is a moral imperative, so we have to make it work as well as we can.\n
  5. Most often, the truths of politics lie in the middle and not at the extremes.\n
  6. The only force big enough to control big business is big government.\n
  7. Freedom has to be balanced against justice, or the strong will exploit the weak.\n
  8. Some truths are self-evident: two-parent families are the best means for raising children that will ever be devised.\n
  9. Harry Browne is a libertarian.\n
  10. Libertarians are juvenile.\n<\/ol>\n


    \nNo strawmen, only the facts. Now a much more interesting list would be the Top Ten Reasons Why I’m not a Moderate, since that’s the dominant political point of view in this country as in all developed nations. Reason number one: Moderates are wishy-washy and have no moral compass.\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    — Eric S. Raymond demonstrates a finely nuanced political sensibility in this post ostensibly listing liberal and conservative values. About 15 of his twenty issues are strawmen, such as the claims that conservatives are creationists and liberals communists.So here are my Top Ten Reasons for not being a Libertarian: America isn’t France: we don’t do … Continue reading “Top fifteen strawmen”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-731","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbifyw-bN","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=731"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}