[kahljorn]

No but seriously I'll respond to your other stuff, even if I don't have much to say about it.

"You tend to argue blindly, preferring to pick on the details of whomever you've decided to engage, ignoring the big picture."

Big pictures are made of details. Besides, this thread is all about details; "Well this many people have dishwashers, that's pretty good right?". "People in america aren't as poor as people elsewhere!" What about the whole social program part of your post? That's a detail. Let's not talk about details, because we all talk about details.
My big picture is the future world, and I look at everthing a person says and try to see what effect it could have. I simply look at your basic philosophy that you are going by, which effects all your other philosophies or rolls them into one, and I find a critical flaw. Whether it's important or not, you delegated importance to it due to the fact that you said the seperation of Government and Business is important; the idea is inherent in your basic philosophy, if it wasn't important why would you have a philosophy for it?
The fact that government creates it's power from the money created by business makes your seperation FLAWED. Besides that, it brings validity to many of my points. If you want to iron out the details of your philosophy, that's exactly what I'm doing.

Some of the shit you're saying basically runs down to this;
"Everything business does is fine because it's supposed to make money".
"Fuck american's their poor is better than other poor people help other poor people become as rich as the poor people in america while making poor people in america more poor".
"My plan is to make the poor of the world equally poor".

How is that looking at the big picture? The big picture is that there's ALOT OF POOR people and a few rich people. The big picture is that rich people want to become more rich and don't want to share their money with poor people(for the most part). Those are the big pictures. How can you ignore them in favor of the big picture of business needing more money so it can.. what? What will that do other than making rich people richer? What the fuck do they do with their money, because they certainly don't use it for the advancement of the human race like you might be implying.

"I would propose an answer: Because we have grown accustomed to government handling these sorts of responsibilities for us. We have learned that it is Ok to ignore other people's problems... that government will take care of them for us. "

I guess the Government has too much "power" because instead of us having money and power we're poor and need help from the rich and powerful. I'm still failing to see how any of this argues that there is no rich or poor in america and everything is fine. If anything, everything you've said has agreed with the fact.

Anyway, I'm going to take that down a strange avenue called dependence. If you use your mind you could stretch it to include why government's create social programs, why they do the various things they do; dependence. Dependence is a sort of power, no? You have power over anybody dependent on you. That's why our government likes poor, disadvantaged and stupid people. The dependence is born out of the fact that these people have no money(or power), while the government does. It's a simple psychological ploy playing on people's need for a teet to suck on when they feel pathetic and alone. They do alot of other things like that, too, and why wouldn't they? (it's a way to gain power, and they are supposed to gain power, right? That's the other type of power government's seek to acheive; especially one's based on the foundation of 'Choice'/voting.)

What realms do you think the government should take part in? Obviously, economically, especially if you have an economy like america. Why social, though? Do we really rely on the government to tell us it's okay to be Gay, or that it's not okay to be gay? What do you think this does to the psychology of people in america? Again, I belive the most important goal of the government is the raising of healthy, successful people who are a credit to the nation and the world. I don't see how anybody could disagree with this. I think if you form your philosophy and principles based on that concept you'd find alot more balance. With healthy, successful people, you'd have more highly educated people. That's one way it fits into your philosophy. I'm sure it could fit all of your values dead on.

Anarchism and libertarianism are practically the same thing; I believe the difference is perhaps in scale.

P.S. Some of what I said is not as a paranoid as it sounds, try to take a more realist approach to what I said. Try to imagine the effects(at least the effects, even if not the motivation) as real.