I Shrugged-John Stossel (file this under"with friends like this.....")

[LibertyEagle]

I've read two of his books and watched him for years. He is a libertarian and is slipping on this one issue. He is a defender of capitalism which means he is not a Nader type.

I've watched him for years too and this isn't the first thing he has "slipped" on. I still like him and all, but he needs some work on principles.

 

[Occam's Banana]

Many libertarians, outraged by how our government spies on us, call me a "traitor" because I'm not very angry. I understand that the National Security Administration tracking patterns in our emails and phone calls could put us on a terrible, privacy-crushing slippery slope.

But we're not there yet.

So - we should just wait until we are lying bruised and broken at the bottom of that "slippery slope" before we start to bitch about it. Got it.

SMGDH.

Thinking about the NSA revelation, I also thought about other things my government does that I really hate. Within a few hours, I had a list of 100 -- it was surprisingly easy. I encourage you to start a list of your own. Here are just a few example of horrible, destructive government:

-- Government (federal and local) now employs 22 million Americans. That's outrageous.

-- Government runs up a $17 trillion deficit and yet continues to throw our money at things like $100 million presidential trips, million-dollar bus stops and pork projects, as well as thousands of programs that don't work.

-- It funds a drug war that causes crime and imprisons millions, disproportionately minorities. That's horrible.

-- It spends your money on corporate welfare. And farm subsidies. And flood insurance that helps higher-income people like me build homes in risky spots.

-- Government keeps American Indians poor by smothering them with socialist central planning. It does this despite the fall of the Soviet Union and the obvious failure of socialism everywhere. That's evil.

-- So are "too big to fail" bank bailouts. And other bailouts.

-- I'm furious that there are now 175,000 pages of federal law. No one understands all the laws, but they keep passing more. How dare they!

Well guess what, Mr. Stossel? None of the things on your list just started out that way!

Every single item on the list of "things John Stossel hates" started out at the top of a "slippery slope."

NSA spying seems less horrible than these other abuses, especially if data mining might prevent terrorism.

I suspect people are outraged by the NSA in part because new threats seem scarier than old, familiar ones. That's a trick government itself exploits all the time: Each new drug, each new health threat, each new dictator is made to sound like the most horrible thing ever.

We should be wary of treating the new danger as if it's the biggest danger.

I don't suggest that we should be passive about data mining and surveillance. But we should not let the latest threat make us passive about the old ones, some of them much more clearly wrong.

God damn you! Are you really such a staggering imbecile? The reason those "old threats" lasted long enough to become "old" threats is becasue people like you (who ought to have known better) pooh-poohed the idea that they were serious threats at all when they were "new."

The "we have more important things to worry about" dodge is why we are in the mess we are in to begin with.

What we already know about government is even scarier than what they know about us.

Bullshit. And in any case, neither of those things is anywhere near as scary as what we don't know about the government and what it might be doing with whatever it knows - actions that are swathed in a cloak of super-secrecy on the excuse that they are "for our own good" (when in fact, they are as often as not for the government's own good - or the good of some partisan or special-interest faction within the government). This is perfectly illustrated by things such as the recent IRS scandal. This is why what Edward Snowden has done is so important and valuable.