The two-party system guaranteeing this outcome is a separate discussion.

What finance reform does is reduce the pressure to adhere to the status quo once a major-party candidate is in. This can only help.

What I want is the one kind of campaign financing system we haven't yet tried. All candidates should receive a large, very generous campaign fund from the government. It should be an equal amount for all candidates who meet the criteria of being on the ballot. Then, any additional contributions from any source is considered bribery, with the offering party punished severely with hard prison time, and the candidate also punished if he or she accepts.

That's how you disenfranchise the monied interests and return the campaign back to winning over the voters. An extremely generous, lavish campaign fund that comes from taxpayer dollars would still be very much less expensive than the way we do things now.

If that were actually true, he would be doing everything possible to reduce the size and power of the federal government. The opposite has happened.

The contempt Obama shows for America and its past is just a propaganda effort designed to appeal to an increasingly impoverished and angry American voter. None of his actions are consistent with it. "I really don't like the way things are and the way things have been ... so .. I'll do it even harder! Yeah let's perpetuate the power structure that brought us those things!" makes no sense at all.

There are a few like Ron Paul. No they're not terribly visible because of two reasons. One, the media is not friendly to their message. Two, they say funny things that sound really different from a lot of mainstream thought, so it's fashionable to make fun of them and portray them as looney. It's a bit like being too different in the schoolyard and yes, that's about the level of emotional maturity involved in it.

You see, I used a little benefit of doubt there. This caused me to assume that perhaps I'm not the only person here who's not a moron. Thus, his words read, to me, like he was talking about a viable future free of human-caused disasters. It didn't occur to me to think he was proposing humans would stop needing oxygen in the future or anything as silly as that, since he plainly made no such claim. In fact I question the security of someone who has to go to such lengths just to make him seem wrong and themselves seem right.

"Need-free" doesn't mean you never have needs, it means those needs are being met. When we say people around the world are starving, it is understood that they have no access to food (poverty, famine, local warlords, etc). It would be asinine to think "heh those dumbasses, why don't they open their fridge?" That's what you are doing here.

You're really coming across as either insecure or smug on this one.

That would be another case of learning from nature.

In what other industry is there so much active hostility and disdain towards paying customers who make their wishes known? In just about every other case, the groupthink would be that the companies are stupid not to listen to what a significant portion of the market is demanding.

In that case, I believe it would be misleading and unethical not to make this clear to the potential customers prior to purchase.

That's not some mere difference of ideology; that's an expectation of doing business in good faith.

I forgot who said it, but I really like the notion "it is better than ten guilty men go free, than for one innocent man to be punished". There is going to be error; this is the correct side on which to err.

Though in my own experience of reading about trials in the news, generally if a person who probably was guilty goes free, it's because overzealous police failed to correctly perform their jobs.

Considering that I'm more likely to be struck by lightning than die in a terrorist attack, I think I'm willing to take my chances. I also believe that we're less likely to encounter people so desperate to hurt us if we stop manipulating other nations and attacking them for such flimsy reasons. A return to loving freedom would mean no longer trying to tell each other how to live -- this is also the way we should respect the sovereignty of other nations.

I'll tell you what else is much more likely than dying in a terrorist attack: being killed by your own government.

Which is really hilarious considering that I've read the Bible, and I couldn't find "tell thy neighbors how they shall live" anywhere in it. I did, however, find a great deal about not judging.

The religious right's only real interest seems to be using force and threat of force (police power of gov't) to demand that others live only in ways they approve of. They obviously have no real belief in the power of their Biblical message to convince, nor in their own ability to set a good example which works so well that others want to follow it voluntarily. It's just the name of Christ used as an excuse to control people. If they were true to their belief and had the love and forgiveness it demands, and attained the joy it promises, I believe the urge to control others is one of the first character flaws they'd overcome.

The modern political arm of "Christianity" reminds me of what Gandhi (a Hindu) said. He said, "I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians; they are nothing like your Christ."

That you have the self-awareness to know this and the integrity to admit it lends credibility to your poll, unscientific though it may be.

I too want most experience of government to come from the state and local levels, like the Founders intended. It was never intended that the average person would be affected very much by anything the federal government does, except in times of an actual, Congress-declared war (heh remember back when we did that?). The States are about the only entities able to stand up to the feds, and to do that, they first have to stop being addicted to the federal money that so many of their budgets have come to depend on. The Free State Project is, in fact, an effort to do exactly that.

Yes, they have an amazing talent for speaking out against something, saying what they know you want to hear, but never actually doing anything about it. This is enabled by the short memory of the public combined with the media's desire to remain cozy with government officials so they can get those exclusive interviews.

Meanwhile, no matter what is said, whatever the monied interests and the military-industrial-complex want is what will happen anyway.

Cue the highly emotional, belligerent, ignorant people who think anarcho-capitalism and libertarianism are exactly the same thing.

On the other hand, if you have to make shit up in order to find fault with something, anyone with sense will recognize that you're paying a high compliment to it.

The other problem with libertarian thought is that small-minded people are terrified of that degree of freedom, because it means others might do things they disapprove of, and the small-minded just love using government to tell people how to live.

Yes, for some reason there are still large numbers of people who need proof that something which happened every single other time (power being abused) is, in fact, going to happen again this time if you start with the same conditions.

I generally call these people "idiots", but you may prefer such terms as "numbnuts", "morons", "imbeciles", etc.