I take it that as confirmation that you don't have any examples of your "all or nothing" approach succeeding. Thought so.
Why so smug? You couldn't provide a single instance or example of a government reducing it's power piece by piece, little by little either. That was the original point of argument when it was brought up.
As to your question, I've resigned myself to nothing.
Horsefeathers. Your reply in 146 specifically cites AFDC as a program reduced, but then you go on to correctly note that it still exists, having been simply reshuffled and reapportioned oversight elsewhere and only to have the welfare reform package that achieved that reapportion revoked by Obama and his party when he took office.
Once accepted that government has a role in welfare, forever the fight is going to be about how much is to be stolen at gunpoint from the producers to give to those who vote the politicians into perpetual power. That is all your argument is. Once you accept that government has a role in administering healthcare - forever your fight is going to be about how much they can regulate your lifestyle, your diet, your activities and so forth. You will spend the rest of your life fighting to retain what crumbs you want to hold onto - when you lost the fight the moment your principles surrendered to the idea that government has the authority to administer your healthcare.
As the adage was stated, once you have allowed yourself to be sold into slavery - the only haggling that remains is for how much. That is all you will end up doing.
Your approach suggests that life is not worth living unless we have 100% liberty, and a full-on laissez-faire economy. I reject that.
Of course you do. Your statement is the epitome of what Jefferson penned when he wrote that
"All experience hath shown that mankind are disposed to suffer evil, while evils are sufferable, rather than abolish the forms to which they have become accustomed". You have decided that this particular evil is sufferable and worth suffering under because you bought into the lie that evil is going to leave you alone - when both scripture and experience illustrate that a little leaven, leavens completely and thoroughly. Eventually it will dominate you, and your posterity.
Additionally, I keep fighting because you never know what can happen.
Well you are certainly welcome to consider your POV to be fighting and waging war. To me, it appears more like practicing insanity than making any progress towards liberty.
We just see these things completely opposite. To me, your argument is no different from someone saying "well, I'm going to die anyway, so there's no point in even trying to stay alive because death will win in the end anyway. I'm not a defeatist, so I don't accept the fact that we may lose in the long run as a reason to stop fighting now.
You seem to have accepted enemy occupation of a contested area they claim is their right to hold and demand tribute from. You have already accepted their claim and authority that such area belongs to them and tribute due. So you are going to spend the rest of your life arguing and pleading for your tribute to be lessened. How sad that your definitions of victory are so temporal and your eyesight so limited to other ground available to wage resistance from rather than in the corrupted fetid swamps of DC politics.
That said, the warnings go out - the pleas and arguments have been made - and the consequences are still going to be visited upon us unless this nation's course pulls a 180. Yet both of us agree that is not likely to happen. You say full repeal is impossible, I say it is necessary - so where you and I differ, is that I note the consequences for leaving any part of it intact and you deny they exist save for being caused by people like me for merely reminding others of what those consequences are going to be.
If this people choose to jump off the cliff into full blown Marxism, then they are going to jump. You can 'fight' all you want on your flight down to regain your altitude - but the impact is going to be the same. Settling for government to have authority over your healthcare is a past-tense leap off the cliff into that chasm. I may be yanked down with the rest of the mob, but it will not be due the fact I shrugged my shoulders and said 'Oh well, let's work to reduce the impact' and jumping off the cliff myself.
