Gay Marriage

[Chaerophon]

Today's wage slaves have any number of potential masters to work for, and it is even possible to check out of the race entirely if you so desire.

Typically libertarian, and typically wrong. Look outside of the United States and 'Western World' for once and you'll see that that is not the case. Hell, look 15 minutes south of Texas. Below subsistence wages are the norm in the Mexican Maquiladors because workers are not allowed to unionize. If they do take action, they are either forcibly removed (that's right, the military), or the corporation takes its business to some other third world country without the same class consciousness, and the working population is left to fend for itself. The IMF and World Bank instate "reconstruction frameworks", destroying any chance of 'internal industry building' by making impossible the kinds of Keynesian demand-side manipulation that led to our own industrial boom. Stripping them of that capacity means that our own corporations are more than welcome to come and go in these countries as they please, while their own self-sufficiency is rendered conditional on 'playing by our rules'. Rules which are deliberately constructed against the construction of their own socioeconomic well-being and render these countries dependent on Western investment for their survival. While these people may not, strictly speaking, be slaves, they are certainly not "free to do as they please" in such a way as you seem to think is the case. Completely reconstructing a country so as to please western investment interest takes its toll on "traditional ways of life". With the new reality of the working woman and "Free trade zones" in countries such as the Phillipines, a subsequent return to "tradition" following oppositional labour movements that drive corporate investment from the region is all but impossible.

A few prominent lurkers need to look beyond their own domestic interest and see how libertarian (in the definitional, rather than "Pat Buchanan" sense) free trade policies of which we are so proud play themselves out worldwide. While libertarians may look at how our modern society is constructed and argue that we are much nearer the ideal than what we were under the Keynesian Welfare State of 25 years ago, it is ridiculous to suppose that we would have our present industrial capacity without having undergone such domestic industry-building as took place during the crucial postwar era of 1950 to the late 70's. The supply-side Reaganomics of the 1980's were only possible because demand stimulus had favoured the creation of domestic industry. Stats bear this analysis out (If you can find a copy of a book by Stephen McBride entitled 'Paradigm Shift', the statistical analysis found therein is quite striking. Unfortunately, I doubt if you can.) Thus, the imposition of our present neoliberal models in foreign countries and free trade agreements such as NAFTA serve to lock third world countries, such as Mexico, into societal models that can be catastrophic for their own capacity-building potential. There's probably not much we can do about that. However, if you want to vaunt the merits of libertarian ideology, you should realize that the West's present drive towards the individual rests on the back of Keynesianism's process of domestic structural construction. Structural factors play as much (probably more) of a part in facilitating the reality of your individualist vision as does the rational 'soundness' of your ideology. The drive away from demand-side economics and towards supply-side measures has little to do with the "rationality" of libertarianism and a lot to do with the shift in the interests of dominant political elites (read mega-capitalists) following the industry-building phase of Western development in the mid-20th century.