Musings of a Patriot

Category: General

  • Federalist No. 3

    Federalist No. 3 continues the discussion as to why a unified national government would be better than thirteen sovereign states or any number of weaker confederacies of the states. Once again the logic is sound, but it exposes how we have strayed from the government envisioned by the founders. It is of high importance to…

  • Federalist No. 2

    Federalist No. 2 has been a really interesting read, and I look forward to Nos. 3-5 which continue discussion of this issue of union vs separation. One of the things I find so fascinating is that I agree with the argument, that union is preferable to a looser confederation of the states such as regionalism,…

  • Defining “Rights”

    I liked this very succinct argument about why health care is not a right. With one exception, the right to representation in court and a trial by jury, {the rights safeguarded in our Constitution} require nothing of any other citizen but that they recognize your rights and not interfere with them. Your “right to health…

  • Federalist No. 1

    Starting on my goal to read the federalist papers and glean a greater understanding of the logic of the founders, today I tackled Federalist No. 1 – the introduction. I like the way that the topic is opened with the admission that noble intent may lead to the wrong side of a great question just…

  • The Wide Middle

    I just discovered The Wide Middle today and I think that the concept of “open source public policy” is an example of how more political discourse ought to take place – based on the assumption that we agree on more things than we disagree on and that we can find solutions where we identify problems.…

  • Passing in the Dark

    I thought it was interesting to read that Randy, at the Utah Conservative Democrat Blog, is seeing progressives among the Republicans and some rather undemocratic things among the Democrats and has begun considering the possibility of turning into a Utah Progressive Republican. This comes at the same time as I look at the big-government conservatives…

  • The Declaration of Independence

    I doubt that I could add any new commentary on The Declaration of Independence but in reading it again I was reminded of why there are only three paragraphs with which most people have any familiarity (the first two and the last one) – all the rest of the declaration is filled with statements that…

  • Block Grants

    When I read The Coming Crisis of Big Government I gained a measure of hope that there might be some possibility left for averting the crisis of our soon-to-balloon costs for social security and Medicare. One of the central examples in the article relate to the use of block grants to restructure some of the…

  • Political Wrap-Around

    I found Libertarians for Obama very interesting. I don’t consider myself to be a libertarian, though I have libertarian tendencies, but the points that were cited as places that Obama could score among libertarians are positions I generally agree with and I thought it was ironic that “the most liberal member of the Senate” could…

  • Free Marketer’s Dilemma

    I’m a proponent of the value of free markets and their ability to enrich people. The problem is that the free market only works in a closed system, in other words a free market is not favored when intersecting with markets which are being manipulated. The issue of how to compensate for intersecting our supposedly…