That’s got to be the single biggest difference I notice between libertarian types and, well, everybody else. We hear “common good” and want to vomit, thinking it a ruse by which some private party benefits at the expense of everyone else. Of course we know these “private parties” are often within the government itself.

And this isn’t necessarily the difference between “right wing” and “left wing”, but a particular strand of awnry Anglo-American individualism and just about everyone else. That kind of reductionist, cynical individualism is at least as angering to the national greatness and populist conservative as it is to advocates of “social justice”.

Just when you think the most disgruntled, disaffected folks (apart from militant seperatists, granted) are listening to Lewis Black and Jello Biafra, the minute they start complaining that the public sector is being starved the even more disillusioned libertarian will burst their bubble and reveal the greedy interests that exist within “the people’s romance”. Indeed, the angry leftist is actually quite romantic. How daft!

Ok, that was all just a bit of piss taking on my part…

And why I am talking like a stereotypical Brit? Must be all that Peep Show I’ve been watching lately.

That all said, I don’t think the liberals who invoke the “common good” equate to Nazis.

It’s scary to hear Americans justifying oppression on the basis of the “common good”. I’ve been reading The Ominous Paraellels lately, and that kind of rhetoric comes straight out of Nazi Germany.

It’s how the Nazis justified their extreme statism.

Bingo.

I think education funds would be the likely carrot/stick, sort of like highway funds are the carrot/stick for minimum drinking age laws. So long as the Feds can tax a state and then selectively withhold funds from that state, federalism is an illusion. Which is why my only legislative/political priority at the federal level is something that prohibits the Feds from such selective spending.

The good thing, though, is that even this reading of the commerce clause and the supremacy doctrine, taken together, only means that the feds can independently enforce federal drug laws despite state decriminalization. The states can still decriminalize drugs and refuse to contribute their own resources to the drug war. This, by itself, would be enough to cripple the drug war (which depends on state and local participation in “interjurisdictional task forces” to supply the vast majority of its foot soldiers). If every city and state in America would simply tell the feds “OK, you enforce it yourself,” it would be a huge blow for liberty.

Of course then they’d probably try attaching mandates to some kind of federal aid.