Posted on 02/11/2009 1:53:16 PM PST by rabscuttle385
All good points and I agree with them all to one extent or another. But — and you knew there had to be one — it bothers me when conservatives offer the blanket concession that social liberalism and the social aspect of libertarianism are one and the same.
To say you are an economic conservative is to say you are a libertarian on 95% of the relevant issues. But to say you are a social liberal isn't anything like saying you are a libertarian on 95% of social issues.
Social liberals are often quite aggressive advocates of using state power to impose their preffered versions of "liberty." Most libertarians are disgusted by thought-policing political correctness, by forced "sensitivity" training, by so-called Hate Crimes tribunals and racial and gender quotas. They detest smoking bans, forced volunteerism and the whole panapoly of Nanny State outrages. They may detest religious incursions on government, but they also detest governmental incursions on religion. Most libertarians are localists who believe that the federal government doesn't have an all purpose writ to make everything better. They believe in the autonomy of business and other institutions to do what they want — within obvious limits — even if what they do is bad.
. . . . .
...liber(al)tarians make a terrible mistake when they assume that a few shared values about what constitutes "social goods" or "tolerance" means that libertarians and liberals actually share a common vision of the role of government.
...liberals are dishonest or ignorant when they claim that they are particularly libertarian in their outlook when, more often, they are merely strong champions of having the State mirror and impose their value choices.
(Excerpt) Read more at corner.nationalreview.com ...
Anyone who claims to be a small-government conservative should deal head on with the use of the Commerce Clause to expand the federal government. Wickard and its progeny have allowed the central government to control environmental policy, health care, education, welfare and a host of others.
Do you think Wickard is in keeping with the original meaning of the Commerce Clause?
Do you think states should be able to legalize mj without interference from the feds?
I've seen you ask this question several times on a variety of threads. Have you ever received a direct answer?
The only responses I've ever seen were either a). clumsy dodges, or b). honest admissions that the poster didn't care.
I am listening now.
The 14th Amendment requires the federal government to guarantee equal protection of the law for all persons. Libertarians can oppose the 14th Amendment, but they cannot conclude that the federal government currently has no business in the abortion question.
The question of the federal government’s recognition of the personhood of the fetus is therefore the central issue in any consideration of the abortion issue. The federal government’s role is in fact decisive.
Do you think they intended the 14th amendment to cover fetuses when it was written and ratified?
It's not as absurd an idea as we once would have thought. In today's political climate, there is no "reason" to anything. This could very well come to pass.
“Why should we consider libertarians humans deserving rights?”
They are conscious humans.
“Both questions are equally morally obtuse.”
Many people don’t consider a fetus an individual person deserving of rights. You need to address that. Calling them morally obtuse isn’t going to convince anyone.
“Libertarians who are willing to draw lines between humans deserving basic rights and those undeserving of them expose a grossly utilitarian selfishness in their moral calculus: life and liberty for me, but not for thee.”
They don’t view a fetus as an individual.
Great piece, but as a self-professed libertarian, I don’t believe at all in the autonomy of business. The “autonomy” of business is how we arrived in the current sh*thole. Power corrupts, whether it be political power or business power, and a legitimate role of the government is its status as a “last resort” for the little people . . . those who lack the power to take on the leviathans who’d otherwise crush them and spit them out.
“They are conscious humans.”
So killing Libertarians in their sleep is o.k?
“Many people don’t consider a fetus an individual person deserving of rights.”
Many people didn’t consider black people deserving of rights 100 years ago—those people didn’t like being called morally obtuse either.
At the time the 14th Amendment was adopted, the embryological facts of human development were not well understood—many people who thought about it largely clung to the antiquated and arbitrary “quickening” distinction; as the facts of human development became better understood throughout the 19th century, the various states passed their anti-abortion laws which were considered adequate until the the Sexual Revolution overturned all restraints.
“And if the mother, due to medical reasons, spontaneously miscarries, does she then get charged with murder?”
You answered your own question with the inclusion of the word spontaneous. You obviously know the answer to this question, which is no, but apparently throw it up in an attempt to cloud the issue.
Fixed it for you.
This is part of the hyperbole that is used against Libertarians. Most of us don't give a damn about drugs, don't use them, and don't have them as a part of our lives. This is the typical tactic of the person(s) who have no intelligent answer to the argument.
Don't get caught up in it.
Incidentally, that plank says nothing about getting stoned, and it applies only to consenting adults.
Jury is still out on that. i will have to concede that the Libertarian Party nomination of Bob Barr was a huge gamble. The party lost.
Fact is for the Libertarians or any third party, the Presidential election is at this time, an opportunity to get exposure for the party and it's views. It provides funding to the party.
With as few as a dozen seats in the US House, the libertarian party would have enormous influence playing off the Democrats against the Republicans. In this way, the libertarians could find their core agenda addressed, and not have to compromise any of their principals.
Have to agree on this point. The obvious role would be a consistent national platform for the third party office holder to "hold the other major parties feet to the fire". Make them turn their campaign rhetoric into legislation or repeal of legislation.
Does anyone believe that if they applied themselves to it, the libertarians couldn’t get 12 seats out of 435 up for grabs every two years?
i don't.
There are three main third parties at this time: Libertarian, Constitution, Green. It tends to divide independent minded voters. There are some 'weak' districts that a Libertarian has ZERO chance of winning...but a Constitution party candidate might win, or a Green Party candidate might win.
The only problem i see is that as Bismark once said: Politics is like making sausage, you don't want to know what goes into it."
It’s not cloudy at all in our eyes. In what others would attempt to do with the Law though... That’s another story and something that should be guarded against because of exactly the issues we are dealing with today.
The problem with your argument is that government *IS* a business in and of its own right.
This argument is reductio ad absurdem. Every political philosophy is subject to similar complaints if you take a single thesis and extrapolate all of the possible consequences that follow from that thesis if it is unaffected by any countervailing considerations.
There has never been a state that does not provide protection for its members against violence by other members. A state that cannot do that or that refuses to do that is not deserving of loyalty and cannot survive long as an entity. Again, without that guarantee, there is no state, there is anarchy.
Merely that a state has a minimal duty to protect its members against violence does not prevent the existence of countervailing duties and limitations on a state's legitimate use of power to comply with that duty. In the case of libertarianism, a libertarian state can only be maintained and perpetuated when the society is highly homogeneous in culture, morals and ethics, the members are highly educated, and there is a strong ethic of personal responsibility. Without those factors -- and I'm sure there are more -- then libertarianism cannot work because the uneducated and irresponsible sheep will gladly pay someone else to take care of their messy problems like self protection. It comes down to the fact that it's easy to impose a totalitarian regime on people, but incredibly hard to get those people to make the personal sacrifices and take on the personal responsibility necessary to create a libertarian society.
Under your hypothetical, the gun control laws you propose could never happen because the citizens would not permit the sovereign to enact them. If they did get enacted, that would be a sign that the society had abandoned libertarian principles in favor of a more statist regime. No amount of lawmaking or constitutionalizing can prevent people from surrendering their freedom if they no longer believe in it.
On the one hand we have the reality of one million aborted babies every year;
on the other hand we have the hypothetical possibility that some women will be persecuted by overzealous prosecutor out to criminalise biologial misfortune.
As a tool for thinking about this, it should be noted that about 44% of homicides ultimately go to trial, and 85 percent of murder trials end in conviction. Even assuming that banning abortion doubled the number of reported homicides to around 35,000, what percentage of those would be women we believe were wrongly convicted through prosecutorial misconduct?
The relative risks and harm don’t make this a hard call.
I think “social conservatives” are elitists rather than statists, i.e. statists are a subset of elitists. Elitists all want to rule from above and keep the masses down below. Statists prefer to use the government to do this (and they are quite successful). Other elitists might prefer to use a religious tome or the ravings of a megalomaniac. Some combine all three, ha.
They all have the same goal, some just use different playbooks.
By the same tokern, the Libertarian party is as much “libertarian” as the Republicans are “republican” or the Democrats are “democratic”. All parties exist to advance their version of elitism.
And anybody who confuses the Republicans with conservatives is not very observant.
Do you believe that this application of the 14th Amendment is what was intended when it was written and ratified?
It has been my experience that some Libertarians are social liberals and some are not. Why the need to pigeon-hole?
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