Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else. -Bastiat

> This quote always comes to mind when i meet a socialist: 'Capitalism might not be the ideal thing, but it's the best we've got.' Yes, I agree. I remember first hearing this when listening to talks Milton Friedman gave about capitalism and the free market, and he said something like (paraphrasing) "There is no other economic system, so far discovered, that improves the lives of ordinary people more than a free market economy." More important than that for me personally comes human freedom. As sapient creatures, I believe we all have a natural right to be as free as possible while living within a society. And human freedom basically cannot exist outside of a free market system; free markets alone cannot make one free, but it is a pre-requisite for freedom, in the end. > Anyone who says 'not real socialism' doesn't understand that most political theory is garbage once you included more than like 5 people in a system. This is an important point, not just for socialists but for everyone. It's kind of the line between the underlying political philosophy, and the realities of the real world. So I'm a Libertarian, and I'm primarily one because I have found the underlying philosophy behind Libertarian thought to be correct, as least more so than anything else I've discovered. And one of the important tenets of Libertarian thought is basically "except where there is harm being done to other people, their property, or their freedoms, you don't have a justification to use violent action to prevent others from doing something within their own value system". Taken literally, this means you actually couldn't legitimately tax anyone unless they were causing harm to others somehow. And many "Libertarians" (I tend to think of them more as pure anarchists/anarch-capitalists), argue that this should be so. But to me, that's taking the philosophy too far; taking the idea as complete dogma that's not open to updating based on the needs of the world today. I believe that government is important, and that it has a very critical role - it's just a limited role, much more limited than is currently the case today in basically every western country. I think it's fine to have a political philosophy and use that as the guiding principles for how you think society should be structured (philosophy is actually extremely useful in this regard), but when you take it too far, it stops being a philosophy and becomes an ideology - which is much more sinister and frightening. So using philosophy in that regard, to determine values, for instance, is probably correct and fine - but just remember that there's also a real world, and you have to be willing to have a little give-and-take so that your philosophy can actually function when it hits the harsh reality of life.