“I gather you think libertarians will vote for the Republican candidate regardless, so there is no need to placate their views?”
I think most of them have the mentality of communist party members these days, and so they’ll most likely vote for Obama if they think it’ll burn the world down faster. A lot of them are young, stupid, and don’t really have any core values besides a few platitudes which they mistake for libertarianism. Go to Ron Paul’s facebook page and count how many of them have a profile image revealing some young kid pointing his cell phone at his bathroom mirror. Try having a debate with them about a flat or a fair tax too, or about any real issue of importance, and only a few of them will have anything worthwhile to say about it. I don’t recall them being this degenerated in years past, but I could be wrong.
I think Libertarian thought on domestic policy is more popular and more mainstream with conservatives than it actually is with them. This would probably be different with a guy like Stossell or even Judge Napolitano, a couple of libertarian heroes these days, but they also have bought into the whole Ron Paul foreign policy nonsense, even though one would assume that defending the United States would be one of their top positions, since that is one of the few things that is actually constitutional. Herman Cain really tapped into the latent mainstream libertarian desire with his 999, and that is the direction we really need to go if we’re going to get anywhere.
I wouldn’t call Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, Milton Friedman and so forth stupid, and I don’t expect every one of their followers, especially the novices, to measure up to those giants. Similarly, I wouldn’t call Edmund Burke, Alexander Hamilton or Winston Churchill stupid, and I don’t expect every conservatives to measure up to those giants either. Just the opposite, I am really happy to see young people adopt libertarian (or, classical liberal) and conservative views, as opposed to anarchist and totalitarian views. I’ve always viewed us to be the moderates, caught between the anarchists on the one hand and the many forms of totalitarianism on the other.
With regard to foreign policy, I used to be more confident to my opposition to intervention in what George W. Bush called the Greater Middle East. But, when I saw President Obama essentially embrace the Bush policy, I figured his intelligence briefings must be scaring the bejesus out of him. If it were just them killing them, I’d be happy to let them keep at it, with our country serving to be a place of refuge for those who could escape. And, if they attack us, just bomb them back into the stone age using standoff weapons. But, I think the insiders know something we don’t. So, I’m just going to put my trust in our people.