Except of course, polls consistently show that more people in the U.S. self-identify as conservative than self-identify as liberal by a wide margin.

No, the liberal stance is that too much income inequality is bad, unless the people with all the money are liberals, in which case it is good. Of course, the thing they never point out is that income inequality actually increases when liberals control the levers of power.

This law certainly goes against the conservative ideal of small government. However, I have no idea to what degree the legislators of Kansas ran on that conservative ideal. The important point is that this law does not represent hypocrisy on the part of Sam Brownback...and I doubt you would be able to point to statements by the majority of the Kansas legislators which would make this hypocrisy for them (that is, I doubt there is a record, one way or the other, for most of the Kansas legislators on this ideal).

Which is sort of like saying, "Cleanest, best smelling septic tank in the whole world."

Did you miss the sentence in the summary which stated that the Governor had vetoed this bill, but the legislature overrode his veto? So, yes, Governor Brownback appears to believe that the marketplace should be able to take care of the question. It is the Kansas State Legislature who disagrees.

What I am worried about is them moving their wealth out of the country. And how exactly is the law going to distinguish between those who are hard working business owners and the parasites? The most important point is that the vast majority of the wealth we are talking about is not cash. Exactly who is going to be willing to give the government cash for it after the government confiscated it from someone else? What will happen in your system of "taxing" the wealthy is that wealth will be taken from those with insufficient political connections and given to those with political connections. However, none of that will generate significant revenue for the government.

By which you mean, confiscating some portion of the wealth of those wealthier than yourself. The problem with that plan is that if you do not confiscate it all at once, those with the bulk of it will move it beyond the government's reach when it becomes obvious that that is the plan. And if you do confiscate it all at once, there is not enough of it to cover the cost of what your are proposing. Oh yeah, one other problem, the vast majority of wealth can only be used to pay for stuff if there is someone willing and able to pay for that wealth (that is, most wealth is some form of property).

No, I do not mean patents. I mean actions by government officials which were designed to force other phone companies to a competitive disadvantage to AT&T. For example, after the Kingsbury Commitment (which theoretically reduced AT&T's monopoly position) AT&T agreed to allow other local providers to connect to its long distance service, but did not agree to allow them to interconnect with its local services. The result being that if you had non-AT&T local service you could place long distance calls to other people who did not have AT&T service through AT&T long distance, but not to those who had AT&T. There were other policies which also promoted AT&T's dominance. The Woodrow Wilson Administration was very active in promoting AT&T's dominance.

Ma Bell phone rentals were a result of government regulation, NOT the free market. Ma Bell did not get their monopoly in a free market. The federal government decided in the early 1900s that a single phone company was easier to control than a lot of smaller ones. So they worked with AT&T to make it the dominant phone company.

That would be a good example, except for the fact that Ole Ma Bell had a monopoly because the Federal government decided back in the day that it was easier to regulate one large company than many small ones. So, yes, Internet service is following the model laid down by phone service. First, the Federal government encourages a monopoly to come into existence (Ole Ma Bell, back in the day, the big ISPs today). Then it uses that monopoly to justify regulations over that service. Several decades down the road, the monopoly starts to obstruct advances which everyone wants, so the government breaks up the monopoly (only to allow it to reconstruct itself in another form). I will never see that happen to the ISPs.

Payola was not illegal at the beginning. It was only after the initial scandal that a law was passed to make it illegal. For that matter, they still do it. Except now the record companies do not pay the radio stations directly. They pay a "promotion" company, which pays the radio station.

The problem with that theory is that I was actually alive and paying attention when the local monopolies were created...and your argument is EXACTLY the argument made by the various cable companies to get the government to GRANT them a monopoly in the various local areas. What nobody in government thought about (and if you tried to say it, you were called a crackpot) was, if cable was a natural monopoly, why did they need the government to grant them a monopoly? Wouldn't the company that did the best just end up with a monopoly?

Except that isn't what happened. What happened was that local municipalities were allowed to grant local monopolies for cable service. Then once every area where it was profitable to offer cable service had cable service, the big players began buying up everyone else. It didn't matter that they had lousy service, they had a monopoly, and the local municipalities discovered that they no longer had any leverage because they could no longer take the franchise for the local area back and give it to someone else because there was no one else.

In the U.S., the police have always needed guns (at least to some degree). I am not sure how the influence of the NRA can be held responsible for the police "needing" military gear, considering that police began using military gear as laws restricting gun ownership increased. It is worth noting that when it was legal for the common citizen to own automatic firearms, the police were perfectly satisfied to be armed with civilian weaponry.

No, this is not ineptness. They found an excuse to justify shutting off cellphones in case of mass protests which the government does not approve of.

Except of course the person you are replying to told you that it is NOT made by mixing 1:1 ethanol to maltodextrin by mass. They claim that the ratio is 1:5. If they are correct it would be six times as heavy as 200 proof ethanol. That being said, considering that the reason the person behind Palcohol wanted to develop it was to carry it when he went backpacking, it seems likely that is a good use case for it.

Having read the comments here, I tend to agree that there are probably better ways to package alcohol for hiking, That being said, I believe that there are probably some good use cases for this product. I don't know what they are, because I am not willing to spend the time thinking it through. I will say that I, also, believe those use cases would make powdered alcohol a niche product in the long run