Here is my first political post discussing libertarianism

Since this can all be edited, I will post this and continue to make changes to it for awhile, as I hone my message and clarify what I am saying or what I mean. 

In addition, though my ideas sound very original, I have discovered there seem to be plenty of academics who seem to think this way, but they generally tend to write in esoteric sounding language not easily accessible to the uninitiated reader. However, the fact is that the ideas are actually quite simple, and academic speak often has this habit of obscuring meanings which are very easy to understand beneath a haze of jargon.

My previous writing experience, however, has always aimed at presenting ideas in ways that are SIMPLE. And easy to understand. 

This website is to allow me to present intelligibly my thoughts and insights on various social, political, historical and even scientific issues I've been studying in the past two years. 

Some of which I have background knowledge of due to having been involved with and interested in various political movements many years ago. 

My political viewpoint leans towards libertarian, except that I am not completely happy with the way some of them think. Libertarians want limited government and civil liberties. As a matter of principle, that is excellent. But then libertarians seem to suffer from this ingrained bias of Western Culture that you can somehow intellectually decide that government "should be" a certain way and then the perfect society can then be achieved by some legislative body sitting down and crafting some written rule decreeing that that is how society is to be from now on.

Actually, I think government and the larger society it is embedded in is more like some kind of living beast that you can train or that can morph in one direction or another, but it can't be so easily manipulated or changed as we think. Written rules don't have the exact effect they literally intend, but instead enforcement of the rules and all sorts of other considerations regarding government bureaucracies results in all sorts of ripple effects or unintended consequences. As a result, the most free society does not necessarily result from the one with the nicest and most free sounding written constitution or constitutional rights guaranteeing liberty.

A very good example of this issue is the liberal Warren Court expanding all sorts of fifth amendment procedural and technical criminal protections for defendants. Liberals saying they want to do this might be arguing this is to help the poor. The opposite is the truth. This is to help defense attorneys, and why is that a bad thing? Because criminal procedures and technicalities of the liberal Warren Court only resulted in defendants having protection IF they could hire an expensive enough attorney to do a good enough job PRESSING them. Public defenders are part of the corrupt court system, they deliberately do a bad job so as to make sure well heeled defendants find it worth their while to pay defense attorneys extra.

Huge sentences ALSO give well heeled defendants more incentive to pay extra. Thus, defense attorneys representing rich criminal defendants have a vested interest in maintaining the strict sentencing policies responsible for Mass Incarceration. Furthermore, there was a law school bubble which burst, and now law schools are doing poorly because lawyers are not finding it worth their while to spend so much money on a law degree. Fact of the matter is, those liberal Warren Court protections indirectly increased legal fees for defense attorneys, thereby contributing to the upward pressure on college tuition and law school tuition, simply because the amount of money attorneys could make from a law degree made it more worthwhile.

Those attorneys then need steady work afterwards. They then use their membership in bar associations to lobby for guess what? More law enforcement of a bad kind designed to increase crime rates or otherwise increase the number of defendants so as to increase their customer base. Combine that with businesses that make money off of cheap prison labor, and local politicians who like to award government or union jobs to public employees working in prisons or in all sorts of welfare or "social services" offices made necessary by so many fatherless homes and single mothers, and you can see a motive for defense attorneys, prosecutors, police, academia, and politicians to collude in a manner that results in large constituencies becoming dependent on such evils as mass incarceration and public housing and other welfare policies that sabotage the poor.

It also is true that this example I give with mass incarceration is just one of many examples. The regulatory state has actually increased in many other ways, all tied with the higher education bubble and a need to pass more regulations that force more companies to hire more white collar professionals to help them process red tape. This trend going on in all of society on a massive basis can, I think, be tied to the USA having won World War II, established something of an empire allowing productivity to be shipped overseas, but this can only happen if political constituencies are paid off to counteract political unions that worked on behalf of manufacturing in the USA. Obviously, the rise in mass incarceration and the regulatory state were necessary to increase employment opportunities for college grads and other holders of advanced degrees, and in this way academia was paid off and harnessed so as to split up old blue collar trade unions.

Along with all that, tons of liberal policies suddenly were enacted, ostensibly to help the poor, but really to help academia and related constituencies. And the Warren Criminal Defendant Protections, is just one of many examples showing how a policy that, examined in the most superficial way you think it's designed to help criminal defendants overall in the long run has the exact opposite effect. Because these protections are ones that only can be accessed by those with the money to pay for top dollar attorneys. And, it isn't always necessarily related to the facts of the case. The attorney usually has an incestuous relationship with everyone else in the court system, so much so that basically if you pay the right attorney enough money, you will get off because he is friends with all the judges and prosecutors, and parole officers, etc.

And for me to say that could lead to others thinking it is rather awful to have a court system so incestuously corrupt. Except, these are all nice people who know each other and court systems have ALWAYS been like this, more or less. And they always will be this way. Government is incapable of being perfect. Or at least government is incapable of being run by unfeeling human beings with no personal prejudice. Indeed, I am not sure I even want a government run by coldly calculating unfeeling automatons. Understanding its inherent imperfections such as this are necessary when it comes to avoiding passing laws which interact with such a culture in a way to produce very bad outcomes.

After all, we have always had government and, for some reason, it would appear if we always have had it, that is because we need it. The inner workings of government are so awful, you discover after you observe it, it can easily lead many to think we should just abolish it. But, given that that is impossible, the best alternative is to understand it as inherently flawed, and realistically think of how to make things "the least bad."

This is what I have thought for a long time, yet only recently have I stumbled across some law professors who subscribe to a movement called "legal realism." It turns out they think exactly the way I do, and see the same flaws in our society (or in the thinking of popular culture which leads to wrong-headed policies in our legal system) that I see.

Oddly enough, some of them seem to describe themselves as leftists yet they are not the kind of ordinary mainstream leftist most people would understand to be "of the left." Which is strange because I never would have thought of myself as a liberal -- but not a conservative either.

Of course, why categorize oneself? I like to not limit myself or pigeonhole myself into any one "box" or "category."