There are two kinds of libertarians; sincere believers in liberty, and dopers who want to shoot up legally.
I vote Republican, lean heavily libertarian and always have. I don’t think we should concern ourselves with what adults do as long as they aren’t committing crimes-stay stoned and lose your job? Too bad-someone else will do that job and stay sober. Addicted? Pay your insurance co-pay for rehab ONE time-if it happens again, you pay the whole cost. Drive stoned/drunk? Go to jail. If you keep it up, you won’t last that long anyway-problem over.
Nothing trumps common sense and personal responsibility, nor should it-just leave people the hell alone-we do not all have to agree, for God’s sake. And leave issues like homosexual marriage, abortion, etc to the states, where the voters decide-not a bunch of tyrants in robes like the 9th circus did.
If I want to have an equal say about what types of behavior are harmful to myself or family there are many libertarians who want to deny me this right.
I have the right to represntation on issues whereas I feel the behavior of others is harmful to myself or my family. Many libertarians act as if they know better and want to deny you this right claiming that you need to have some sort of absolute proof that someones actions are directly harmful annd that all arguments that use a causation approach to showing the harm are not allowed to be used.
Libertarians are in many ways anti-liberty in my opinion and want to force others to live in a state of anarchy.
Do whatever the hell you want to do as long as you don't make me pay for it. Period.
We gotta have Libertarians to win? What a totally depressing thought. They have more books and pamphlets to push at you than the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons combined, do.
Jonah Goldberg makes the case that Libertarians are a essential to the Republican party and that conservatives and libertarians aren’t that different.
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Goldberg is a nut. Ron Paul is a nut. Conservatives and Republicans DO NOT NEED (L)libertarians.
See tagline.
Libertarians insist that Western ethics are “religious” and therefore illegal, like liberals do.
Being led or governed by people who reject a public Western ethical culture and character for the nation - especially among business and government leaders or the elite - precludes constitutional freedom’s self governance.
Marxism’s atheism goes with Marxism’s total governing structure. Constitutional freedom, born of Western philosphy, goes with a public Western ethical based, self governing public culture.
This is area where libertarians and conservatives will never agree. Rand thought it clever to mix Marxism’s social ideal of State enforced public atheism or amorality with free markets. It was not clever and it does not work - as we can see. We are losing the constituition as liberals and libertarians “progress” in cleansing the American culture of freedom.
But the "movement" idea throws things off.
Conservatives and libertarians agree much of the time, but when you toss the idea of a "movement" pursuing distant goals that aren't going to be attained anytime soon, it can look like the two groups are more different than they are in practice.
Didn’t Palin ask that Paul’s positions have a prominent position in the party’s ongoing policy debates?
Not to mention Goldwater, and remarks of a similar nature by Reagan?
Russell Kirk, whose conservative credentials and scholarly achievements are a good deal stronger than those of Jonah Goldberg, labelled libertarians ‘chirping sectaries’, a borrowing from TS Eliot, and insisted that conservatives have nothing in common with them:
http://www.mmisi.org/ma/25_04/kirk.pdf
“The ruinous failing of the ideologues who call themselves libertarians is their fanatic attachment to a solitary principle- that is, to the notion of personal freedom as the whole end of the civil social order, and indeed human existence.”