To the editors.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
My second idea first: Back when I was a brave new voter, the Libertarian Party was what Lyndon LaRouche’s outfit called themselves, and they spouted the current libertarian line: “We want to get government off our backs and out of our wallets.” (I paraphrase Ms. Miller.) However, to abate or reduce government, as opposed to making it more responsive to citizens, is to leave a power vacuum. There are plenty of big players who would move right in–in our era they are transnational corporations, fundamentalist religions, and various Perot types to whom money is not enough. Republicans are against big government not on principle but because their backers can make ever greater profits unfettered by pesky laws that slow their ability to dump toxins cheaply and squeeze ever more labor for less and less pay from their employees. The free market (gag) is answerable only to the highest-end consumers, or corporate balance sheets. Democratic government has at least a paper duty to protect each citizen regardless of financial (or racial or social . . . ) status.
They can’t win without these crackpots, and the real danger to this nation and this planet is that the zealots will take over the GOP just as Hitler swallowed the industrialists and aristocrats who supported him for his antilabor pronationalist positions. (That was Germany. That was only 60 years ago. The Nazis were antiabortion and profamily too.)
L.D. Chukman
