This is John Galt Speaking

This is my first post, so I'll try to keep it brief. First of all, if you find yourself asking "Who is John Galt?" I encourage you to take a look at Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, which has been a major source of inspiration in forming my values.

Second, to echo the points below me, I too find it harder and harder to identify with one of the 2 parties, and words like "conservative" and "liberal" have become such vague terms. In fact, the liberals of today are almost diametrically opposed to the liberals of 200 years ago, who believed in limited government and the free market. For these reasons, I tend to avoid labels for myself, and instead stick to values.

1. Very limited government - The irony of the government is that it's primary function is to protect the freedoms and liberties of its people, yet at the same time it is the single biggest threat to our liberties. The founders recognized this, and explicitly limited what the government could do in the Constitution, a document largely ignored by the majority of politicians. I hope that we can return to a time of limited government and personal freedoms.

2. The free market works - History proves that the free market has ushered in a standard of living that our ancestors never dreamed of. History also proves that attempts to intervene and control the complex beast that is the economy almost always end in disaster. Taxes, subsidies, bailouts, stimuli, price-setting, regulation are all forms of intervention in the economy. And since the government can only act though force and the threat of force, any intervention in the economy is necessarily robbing people of their freedom to free exchange with their own labor. Regardless of the "noble" social goals these measures are designed to achieve, the government simply creates a bigger hole somewhere else, and generally makes the problem worse.

3. Personal Freedoms - I think this quote sums up nicely my stance on personal freedoms:

"There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences." P.J. O’Rourke (1993)

People have the right to pretty much do whatever they want so long as they don't infringe on others' rights. Of course this is a generalization, and there are exceptions.

Given these core values, I think that government intervention in health care can only worsen the situation, either within the healthcare system or in another area (perhaps the absolutely ludicrous national debt)

Economic "stimulus" packages and bailouts distort the market and create bad incentives, preventing the market from reaching equilibrium, all while the Fed manipulates interest rates and the money supply to send false signals and create money based on nothing. While these measures may appear to improve the situation on the surface, they are actually digging us a deeper hole. For any government action there are 2 parts - what is seen and what is not seen. The toxic Keynesian ideas that spending and debt and borrowing backed by nothing can spur growth has controlled the economic policy and while it can create short booms, it will lead to the eventual collapse of our system. The Great Depression and all recessions in history including this one will be absolutely dwarfed by the currency crisis and debt crisis that will inevitably strike us. As we saw with Greece (and soon Spain, Portugal, Italy...) the governments of today are simply unsustainable, and a massive crisis and re-equilibrium is heading our way.

It amazes me that our country has jumped on the Keynesian bandwagon and doesn't realize the long term consequences, especially given Keynes disregard for the long term, in his famous "In the long run, we're all dead" statement. Bu then again, we take up hundreds of unsustainable projects, so it should be no surprise.

Alright, I've ranted enough on my general philosophy - my future posts will address actual issues more in depth, but I'm tired of typing now.

Best,
John Galt