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Personally, I object to all political parties regardless of their
stripes. First, political parties are intended to be anti-democratic.
That is, if we assume two political parties, and the population is
evenly split between them, then the purpose of the political parties
is so that if more than half of one of the parties is in favor of an
idea, the ideas has a chance of succeeding. That is, if one fourth of
the population favors an unpopular idea, then the idea may succeed
because of the political parties.
The alternative is that no parties at all be reported for people
who are on a ballot. With the current popularity of primaries for
selecting candidates, this is very reasonable. Of course, to make it
work there would have to be some sort or runoff elections, such as
Instant Runoff Voting. Why have two elections, a primary and a
general election when it would be more democratic, and probably
cheaper, to put all the candidates in one pool for a general election
using instant runoff.
In the system I envision, political parties would be nothing more
than PAC's in todays society.
This ideal would require major changes in the law and culture we
currently live in. But the the current system is about to go down due
to its own bankruptcy anyway.
On to the parties:
Republican Party
My objections to the Republican party are:
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Their insistence on trying to use tax cuts to "stimulate
the economy." I have pointed out elsewhere that this will not
work. Tax cuts without a correspondingly huge spending cuts will act
as an anchor for the economy.
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Their insistence on fanatical, unquestioning, support is very
problematic. Regardless of the other objections, this alone is
enough because this feature allows someone to take over the
mechanism of and use it for their own selfish ends.
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Their support for governmental secrecy. Secrecy in government
for the most part is due to a lack of support for democracy. That
is, the main reason governments do not want their people to know the
truth is because they do not want the general public to base their
decisions on the truth because they fear democracy.
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Their support for a lie. It is very evident now that the
reasons given for going to war in Iraq were flawed. That is,
president Bush claimed there were "weapons of mass destruction"
aimed at the United States. These did not exist, rather than
plentiful examples, there are none. Similarly to the connections
with terrorist groups. These connections simply have not been found.
Some people might ask why I would
condemn all Republicans for the lies of President Bush. I will
justify this because Republicans have not been lining up to
investigate this. If there is a murder, and I witness it, then if I
do not report that to the authorities, I am guilty of a crime. So it
is with the Republicans.
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The hypocracy of the Republican Party. This can been seen
most evidently in the complaints they make about President Clinton.
The Republicans complain but they are worse offenders than Clinton.
For example, there are complaints because he was seeing a woman, yet
Bush the elder had his mistress. When this is brought up, they will
say, "The real problem is that he lied under oath." It is very
doubtful the founding fathers would have approved of his having to
defend himself in a suit because they were afraid someone could use
the threat of a lawsuit as a way of intimidating a president, so the
opportunity should not have happened. Yet, look at the lies Bush is
guilty of in leading us to war. His lies are much more of a concern
to me.
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Their insistence on dominating World Politics as a "Single
Superpower." Anyone who believes in democracy cannot believe in
dominating other countries because the threat of physical force is a
means of prevents people from expressing their mind.
Democratic Party
A lot of people will complain about my objections to the
Republican Party, and say, "That's just because you're a Democrat."
Not so. While my objections to the Democratic Party may not be as
much, I recognize that part of the reason is simply they are not in
power presently.
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Their insistence on using government spending to stimulate
the economy. This will not work, I have written a paper detailing
this (the same paper mentioned for the Republicans above).
Increasing spending will only act as an anchor on the economy, it
has never stimulated the economy in the past, and it won't in the
future.
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Their insistence on dominating World Politics as a Single
Superpower. This is more a complaint against the Democrats than
the Republicans because the Republican Ideals are and will drive the
United States into the ground to the point this issue will be moot.
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Their hypocracy is also a problem. That is, they claim to
serve the poor, but put in policies that favor the rich. When I was
younger I took part in a symulation Game in which everyone was
given tokens (to represent money) which they could trade. In
reality, some people were consistently given less. After a time, the
group with more was given the opportunity to change the rules. They
made some minor, insignificant, change. Be then the inequity of the
distribution of the tokens was obvious, though unstated. After the
exercise, the leaders pointed out that they could have changed any
rule, including changing the rules to eliminate the inequity, but
they chose not to. Often this is the problem with the Democrats.
The Libertarian Party
Some people will say this is moot because they'll never win, but I
think not because they do advertise their point of view, and this
does effect how people view the views.
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My first complaint is about their view of guns. The
Libertarian party takes it as an article of faith that everyone
should be allowed to buy an own an unregulated gun. Their
justification is if everyone has a gun, crime will decrease. For
example, they will say that if all the students at Columbine High
School had had guns fewer people would have been killed. Obviously
they have never seen Enemy of the State where everyone had
guns. The result would have been a bloodbath.
I have no doubt but what there war
places, particularly in western United States, where owning guns is
important, even desirable. The question is whether that should mean
that someone living in New York City should be allowed to own a gun.
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Their insistence on applying
restriction intended for the Federal government to the state and
local governments. For example, they will insist that we should not
have public schools because the Constitution of the United States
doesn't mention them. Yet the support of the writers of the
Constitution is unquestionable - They just didn't think it should
be handled by the Federal Government. Similarly with many other
ideas.
The Green Party
There are some people who say I am a member of the Green party,
and certainly in recent years I have spent more time being active in
the Green Party than in other parties. However, they are far from
perfect.
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Many people I have met are not really members of the Green
Party. They are frustrated Democrats. That is, they would rather
be a big fish in the small pond of the Green Party than a small fish
in the big pond of the Democratic Party. This often leads to the
exact problems their contradicting their ideals to support
Democratic ideas. For example, a wacko Democrat embraced a
universal draft. Yet this violates any idea of self determination
that is in the party pillars. Similarly, there were leaders
embracing national education standards despite the pillar with talks
about decentralization. In short, they compromised their ideals
rather than go head to head with the Democratic Party. (I have not
seen this sort of thing in the Libertarian Party, which does a good
job of sticking with their ideal regardless of how flawed they are.)
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The insistence on a strong military. There are many people
within the Green Party which might take issue with this point, but
the fact is the Green Party platform only calls for a 50? reduction
in military spending. This compares with the Libertarian Party,
which calls for what I think would be a much larger cut, I'd
estimate 90?, although it is called for by changes in the view of
the military rather than by a specific dollar decrease. That fact
is that if the United States made a 90? decrease in military
spending they would still be spending more than any other nation in
the world on the military. Personally, I would prefer a 100? cut;
we are not at war, really. Any threat against us is simply
generated by those who insist on maintaining a military posture.
Most people simply do not like being occupied by a military force.
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Failure to attempt to win. That is, I cannot approve of the
"win at any cost" ideal, but I see a lot of the "lose at any
cost" ideal in the Green Party. For example, they insist on using
the word "feminism" in their ten key values. Yet this word is a
red flag to a lot of people, who will see it and not look further at
what is meant. It would be more appropriate for an organization
that was planning of winning to remove this word, as some of the
earlier version did, and replace it with something which is not so
offensive to so many people.
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