Man, you don't log in for a coupla days and all kinds of stuff breaks loose.

'Spaw - you are the devil (or at least devilishly funny). You had me with that first post. I was ready to fire back an irate post pointing out how what you were advocating was the bleak post-apocolyptic vision of the "Mad Max" movies when I decided to read on. And I'm glad I did. It's remarkable how good bad ideas can look on the surface.

Of all the posts (and there have been some great points made in most of them), the one idea that jumped out at me was Skeptic's statement about government mediating power within a group. And POWER is what it is all about. People form groups to begin with because "in unity there is strength". A group, properly applying the power that it's existence generates, can accomplish a lot more than individual's can on their own. If that is true, bigger should be better.

Standing against the concept of the power-generating properties of groups is the nature of Genius. Genius (at least as I understnd it), is the capacity for truly original thought, and is a property of the individual mind. Groups (brain-storming sessions not withstanding) do not possess genius. But once formulated in the mind of the individual of genius, an original idea gains potency when it is backed by the power of a group. There is, at best, an uneasy relationship between the needs of the individual and the power of the group. How the conflicts in this relationship are to be resolved is, at the most basic level, what separates the right and left politically. All the rest is details (sic).

There is nothing keeping big government from working theoretically. It all comes down to execution at the individual level. Greed leads to corruption, cooperation turns to coercion; the power of the group, when misdirected, can lead to no good end regardless of the system in place.

Can we solve the problems generated by the dynamics at work? We like to think so. As rational beings, we assume that applying reason to our problems we can find solutions that are acceptable for everyone. In practice, we eventually discover answers that (for some reason or another) we will not accept. We as a species are reluctant to change and to try new things. I personally think that one of the greatest obstacles to our ability to rationally solve our problems is religious dogma. But that's just me.

Where the hell is this rant going? I dunno. Maybe I'm tired of talking about symptoms and want to try to peel away a few layers to see the disease that's causing all of this dissension for what it is. It's not our politics that's the problem here - it's us. Someone cited Pogo once before in this thread; it still holds true.