Right wing investigator who plotted against WaPo wrecks himself.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

While that sounds "fair" at first, and I'm unsure about your exact position, I often find such a position to be full of holes and double standards as well. Some examples:

1. If it's okay for someone to use inherited money to amass even more money, even by ruining other peoples' lives, should it not be okay to do the same with an inherited gun? Money is no more inherently moral than a gun and neither is trade inherently more moral than violence. If you want the invisible hand to guide the employment market, the food market, the market for drinking water and so on, why not the market for violence and death? After all, the market knows best in everything, right? Let survival become a function of merit again.

2. When someone from a think tank says unions are ruining the economy it's hilarious. IMO it's the absolute height of a double standard that poor people shouldn't be allowed to organize and pool their resources in order to further their interests while rich people have employers' associations, think tanks and "foundations" (potentially also fraternities and secret societies etc.) where they pool their resources to further their own interests... What is your position on that?

1. I have stated elsewhere that I acknowledge the pitfalls of the totally unregulated free market. An "Enron executive," however infrequently they crop up, can do great harm and caveat emptor fails in the face of out-and-out fraud. Some regulation for basic safety must be had (Clean air, water, food) and government needs to be death on fraud in all forms. I'd want these regulations put in place and enforced at the lowest practicable level of governance.

1b. Your linkage of money and guns doesn't quite connect smoothly. Yes both are tools, but their utility as tools is in completely different venues of action. I agree that their is no inherently more moral tool than any other. It is the uses to which a tool is put that defines the morality of the tool user.

1c. I do not believe that inherited money is more prone to fraudulent use than earned money. Fraudulent schemes etc. do need to be dealt with by government, and probably with more vigor than they currently are.

2. I have nothing against laborers, professionals, or whoever organizing. Efforts to violently or fraudulently suppress an effort to organize should be dealt with as the crimes they are.

2a. I loathe unions in my country because they are still trying to play the game with their 1950s playbook of attitudes and tactics and they blithely ignore the realities of the modern economy.

2b. Think tanks, professional associations, and the like are a better model for the modern union than the one they are using. Because they haven't adapted to the new conditions, unions have been largely irrelevant in this country (except as a Democrat party campaign labor pool and funding source) since Reagan broke PATCO.

[CrossLOPER]

I'd want these regulations put in place and enforced at the lowest practicable level of governance.

Not possible.