Welcome

Well, hello there. Welcome to my blog. After much procrastination and excessive amounts of laziness, I have finally decided that I really ought to start a blog. I've always thought that blogs were best for sharing the mundane parts of everyday life (aka useless), and although this will be partially true for this blog, I think I will focus the majority of my posts on explaining and defining some of my political views, and in doing so, will hopefully keep it interesting--if only for myself.

I, having long considered myself a Libertarian, can probably define my political beliefs using the basic understanding of what constitutes a Libertarian, namely: Smaller government, lower taxes, and more freedom (this is actually the Libertarian Party's slogan). Now, don't stop reading here, because this is where it gets interesting. You see, although I consider these three facets as the basis of my opinion of what the role of government is, I also understand that no matter what I want and believe is best for the country/state/populous, it is guaranteed that some number of people, whether it be an individual, group, political party, or everyone else in the country, will disagree with me. Of course, this same idea applies to everyone else as well. No matter how many "conservatives" there are, there will always be a large number of "liberals" to oppose them. The same goes for any other political ideology: Libertarian, socialist, neo-conservative, anarchist, communist, fascist, etc. Understanding this, I tend to be more "moderate" than your average libertarian. Rather than stand unmoving on my admittedly slightly-radical political beliefs, I find that compromise will end up with better results in the end. In explaining this, I'm reminded of the Hegelian Dialectic, wherein two opposing thoughts/ideas, the Thesis and Antithesis, are resolved through an intermediate ground -- the Synthesis.

The final thing which I feel like I need to explain is that I believe in solving problems. Our country (our entire world, actually), has A LOT of problems. Whether those problems are economic, diplomatic, environmental, biological, ethical, etc., doesn't matter. It is part of my personal belief (this is more of my philosophy in general, rather than just political. Perhaps I will expound sometime in the future) that the human race is "morally" obligated, as a whole, to solve these problems. To allow problems to exist is self-defeating to humanity. For this reason, when there is a problem within our nation, I believe that it needs to be dealt with in the most efficient way possible, while avoiding creating even more problems. A quick example: the BP oil spill. Although the Libertarian Party would disagree with me here, I think that the government needs to take a more active role in the cleanup of this tragedy. The LP argues that the reason for the disaster occuring in the first place was because a limit on liability for oiling companies allowed for an increased level of moral hazard (BP and Transocean were less careful than they would have been if they knew they would be fully liable for any disasters which they might cause). Sure, that may have been a big reason why this happened in the first place, but the bigger problem is what do we do now that this disaster has occurred? Unfortunately for us Libertarians and those Conservatives who prefer free market principles, there really is no GOOD solution to the problem that doesn't involve the government using its broad power. Individual companies simply don't have the resources to handle the problem entirely, and the problem is far too extensive to just ignore it. In this case, I think the best way to solve the problem is for the government to take an active role in the cleanup Yes, this is not a Libertarian answer, but to me, it is the most rational and practical answer.

This has turned into a much longer rant than I originally intended, but I hope you know have a decent understanding of my basic political beliefs. One of my main intentions of this blog is to cover some of many "problems" existing in our country and around the world and give my opinion on them. Other posts will simple give my opinions on other important subjects. Some of my opinions will surprise you, some of them will anger you, and some of them will delight you.

My next post will probably cover Memorial Day and some of my thoughts about it.

Thanks for reading!