It seems that you already knew about the stingy Czechs. I don't know why, but your previous message gave me the impression that you didn't. I guess I could read it again, but let's move this thing along.
From what my parents told me about my grandparents, they were poor in the Old Country, which was the reason they came to America in the first place. Here they found more opportunity to get ahead in the world, and they tried hard to take advantage of it. One of the things that is still true in Europe is that not as many people own their own homes as in America. Home ownership was a big deal to the Czech immigrants, it represented the American Dream to them more than anything else. In those days, banks only loaned money to people who didn't need it, so the Czechs and other immigrants patronized the savings and loans, which were originally called "building and loans". Do they still have savings and loans in Chicago? I remember there was some kind of crisis centered around them awhile back and, since then, I haven't heard anything about them. In Northern Michigan we have credit unions instead of savings and loans, and they fulfill the same purpose. When I first moved here, our local credit union only made short term loans, but they have since expanded into home mortgages, and now do pretty much everything that banks do.
Another thing that the Czech immigrants pioneered was group life insurance. The Czechoslovak Society of America was a fraternal organization that provided life insurance to their members at a time when the big insurance companies wouldn't do it for immigrants. Last I heard, they were still in business, headquartered in Berwyn.
I agree that, logically, libertarians should be somewhere in the middle between the Dems and the Reps but, for some reason it doesn't work out that way. There was some talk awhile back of the moderates of both major parties forming a third party of their own but, as far as I know, nothing ever came of it. Another possible scenario is the moderate Republicans drifting over to the Democrats. I think that either one of those scenarios is more likely to happen than your idea of the libertarians and the Democrats getting together but, of course, anything is possible. The Tea Party might just peter out after awhile, but I don't see that happening anytime soon. I think it's more likely that all the criticism they are getting will just toughen their resolve. With neither the left, the right, nor the middle commanding a solid majority, we're likely to have political gridlock in this country for a long time to come, which is fine by me.
I know this Irish lady on Ipernity who is deep into genealogy and has traced her ancestry back to the three digit years. She says that, in 19th century Britain, it was generally believed that, if people were poor, it was their own fault. It was believed that their condition was due to some kind of character flaw in their family's gene pool. They used to put people like that into work houses that were little more than prisons. Much before that they would have been peasants or agricultural laborers who lived on the ragged edge of starvation most of the time. Poor people were also transported to Australia for petty crimes. After seven years or so of slave labor, they were offered the choice a return ticket to England or 40 acres of land in Australia. Most of them took the land.
Although Thomas Paine and the other Founding Fathers took much of their inspiration from John Locke, they were not his contemporaries, living about a century later. Locke must have been a historical hero to them, like they are to us. Well, some of us anyway.
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