> Also, ideas in politics are interrelated. A big core value or strategic objective will pretty naturally lead to a bunch of other related ideas. You can view this as "buying into political beliefs wholesale" but it's a pretty natural thing to happen.

Ideas may be interrelated but it doesn't say anything about their validity. Whether it's natural or not, I still find it incredibly stupid. The focus on ideas seems wrong in itself. The usual discussions like whether Free Market or Government-Regulated Market are Better™ are pointless; we should be talking about whether a free-market solution or a top-down solution is better for a particular problem, like determining wages or building a power plant.

I mean, the level of absurdity of buying ideas wholesale is obvious to everyone in almost every single discipline besides politics. Static vs. dynamic typing, or Lisp vs. rest of the world, or why PHP sucks are fun topics to discuss, but when push comes to shove, everyone knows that they should use the best tool for the job and get the job done.

Imagine for a moment that we're tasked with writing a grep-like utility. If we were to run this project the way we run our countries, we'd have several opposing groups:

- C supporters arguing for C, because everything fast and big is written in C!

- Their little more progressive branch arguing for C++.

- Perl supporters, saying that C is wrong because it was used by the Sov^H^H^HMicrosoft to write Windows, therefore it is evil.

- Lisp supporters, saying that other languages are infringing on programmers' freedoms, and that the only rule should be the one of non-aggressive macro writing.

- Fortranaries arguing we should write in Fortran because in Good Old Days everything was great and was written in Fortran.

etc.

Ultimately, running a country is about solving problems - some of the most important problems we ever face. Why do we accept this insanity where it matters the most?