To keep things in perspective though, is a speeding fine was 25 cents, would you be very observant of the rules yourself? I think the 'noble' kind of morality is grossly overrated, case in point from the article that when poor people are made to think they're special, they break rules too. Being rich doesn't make you less moral, it just greatly diminishes the consequences of being amoral.

Bottom line is that we're pretty much *all* selfish, we just can't all afford to be.

In my humble opinion, they're both equally crooked. The Liberals were 'better' because back then it was more risky to pull off this kind of crap. They've learned just as the Conservatives did that nowadays, people aren't politically involved enough to threaten established power and that they can do whatever they want. I really want to believe like you that the Liberals were better, but the truth is that they're all just about equally rotten. They each have their pet issues of which you might agree better with the Libs on but I assure you that we're getting just as screwed regardless of who's in power.

Canada has never done so good as under a minority government simply because, at long last, they just couldn't get anything passed to screw us over with. I'd honestly be glad to pay them all twice as much as they get now in exchange for their only purpose being to sit on their ass being bored all day and never pass a new law. I'm considering an extra bonus for everything they repeal but they couldn't help screwing us over with that too.

Allow me to disagree with you on the Fusion (I'm biased, I drive one), especially the 2013 model.

...but then they got a bailout.

Form your own party? Become active in one of the smaller ones that might actually be better? Fight tooth and nail for whatever little issue you consider most important? Activism?

By lazy, I meant in the broadest sense... Both the people as a whole and the individuals. The majority of people are still too comfortable to take real political action and such is the wonder of incremental encroachment. The new 'normal' gets shifted further and further into oppressive, but too slowly for people to notice... or really care enough to risk their semblance of comfort once they do notice.

There's only so much complaining on the Internet you can do. At some point, you're going to have to take real action yourself if you want things to change. Or you can do exactly what put you in this situation in the first place and wait for other people to fix it for you... That doesn't seem to be working too well however.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not pretending that you can change everything all on your own, chances are you won't. But you're in this crap because nobody wants to get involved, resist and drive significant change... Yet you're not doing just that yourself. It may seem entirely futile to you but it's not. If you're not genuinely fighting for what you believe in, then you don't really believe in it.

As a disclaimer, you might be the most politically involved person in your neighborhood and already doing everything you could possibly do. In such a case, my answer is: Keep fighting, brother, and never give up. You are not alone.

The only answer to that is: A government that doesn't have such powers. Sorry but you can't have your cake and eat it... You either accept that your rights are in someone else's hands to be abused, or yours to defend. The middle ground situation you're looking for is never stable enough to last more than a generation, if that.

Name-calling aside, I think Parent has a point. I'm pretty sure it's the responsibility of the people to keep government power limited and we definitely have been slacking off lately in favour of all the wonderful handouts. We ask that it runs everything then we complain that it does so for its own sake rather than ours. We kid ourselves if we think government any less selfish than those evil corporations. We're too lazy to vote with our dollar against the latter and too lazy to change the former and keep it in check. Bottom line is that we get what we deserve.

I see this as a natural reaction: The Internet has caused a little surge of activism lately and we can very well see how that has the government running scared.

Well, this far-right-wing mod entirely agrees with you so far... But has no modpoints to give, sadly ;)

On a more personal note however, I've crossed the entire spectrum from left to right and it's pretty clear that it's just divisive nonsense. Big government 'socialists' or big business 'fascists' are the same evil: Centralization of power. The people in the know play both sides equally well.

For the sake of my understanding, why would GDP be a good measure for government growth? A population that produces more requires more services? I don't think the US grew very much in infrastructure since then. It did grow in population though, but would it be by that big a factor? It does make sense that more people certainly would mean more services to provide.

I'm not an expert, hence the suggestion being qualified as humble, but I think the current tax revenus of the US government would cover the 2006 budget.

Assuming that this is right (could be wrong), were people dying in the streets for lack of government services back then? Is there any crucial reason why the government couldn't survive on a budget equivalent to what it had just a few years ago?

I'm so with you on that one... May I add screen space being used for my work, not giant blank areas that serve no purpose, like 10 pixel padding around every single item or giant icons that a Parkingson's disease patient on speed could never miss. I could also do without the nagging sensation that I'm using a 24" smartphone that even Jobs would have labeled too dumbed down for the masses.

There used to be a time when a larger monitor meant more information in front of you. I guess it's still true, only the information now is just blank spaces between inane UI elements. Were I still a kid, I'd feel like my parents took away my Lego Technic set to hand me a bucket of Duplo.

The sad part to me is that both these alternatives would also be very eager to pass similar nonsense. They'd just use cyber-bullying or some more liberal-friendly excuse.

I'm with you on that one.

I actually made a mental picture prior to clicking the link of what it might look like, guess what I came up with... It's a display on one side and no display on the other side... Was I surprised? No! It's so amazing... A tablet that just looks like a tablet and I had the great imaginative power to guess figure it out all by myself. Anyone interested in my predictions of what the iPhone 6 will look like?

Let's be pretend that it's 999 billion dollars over 10 years (the upper margin of hundreds). That's 100bn/year. Deficit is close to 100bn *a month*... I'm not sure that tax is going to do better than encourage the government to spend more. I humbly propose that a tad more attention be put on lowering spending rather than increasing taxes.

You have to kill the host, it's the only way to be sure.