Quote:
Originally posted by taxwonk
Doesn't that run the risk of just making us the most powerful thug of all? How do we know we are always right?
|
Life is risk. I'm willing to take the chance that freeing people is generally a move in the right - i.e., the "moral" - direction. Do you just watch them die out of some fear that you might offend someone, somewhere?
Quote:
|
And what keeps us from moving to "empowering people" to run their lives the way we say?
|
Hopefully, our sense of justice, and right and wrong. Given that we're taking risks and incurring costs and pain in order to free them, I'd give us a fair amount of benefit of doubt on that one.
Quote:
|
You don't trust the federal government to decide when a religious majority is imposing its views on our children here at home, but you trust it to go roaming free throughout the world, picking off governments it decides aren't sufficently democratic?
|
No, I give the American people that trust. Historically, I think we've earned it.
Quote:
|
And how are we to pay for this? You are on record as saying that taxes are too high now. How much higher do you think they would have to be to support a standing military that numbers in the tens of millions?
|
Cuts. Lots of cuts. Bridges for polar bears, Lawrence Welk museums, road beautification projects, subsidies for sugar beets and mohair and sex-change operations, parks and ampitheaters serving local interests and named after congresswhores, studies about mollusk pheromes, designations of state fungii, . . . I can find some slack in there somewhere, probablly enough to pay for the invasion of Syria and Iran, too.
