Despite the constant frustration, I wouldn't choose any other path!
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Thought others might like to read it.
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IMO, the drug-crazed Libertarians need to be marginalized.
We are getting a methadone clinic in our tiny rural town because Americans weren't serious about keeping ALL ILLEGAL drugs away from this country's impressionables. We should have been shooting down known drug flights back in the 80s.
Losertarians need to lose the Open Borders mentality, and pull their collective heads out of the sand on Islam's nukes. We could have used some help against ACORN and Palestinian funding of The Øbama campaign. :(
I have admired a good deal of the Libertarian Party platform for many years. I have some issues with some of it, too; mostly in the realm of foreign policy, and a few others.
People would do well to take a closer look, IMO.
As a Libertarian, I agree completely with this article.
One point is not mentioned: Although we get assailed from the left, we also get assailed from the right.
We get assailed from the right from the creation crowd, the pro-life crowd, the Terri shiavo crowd, the anti-drug crowd, the “cotraception-is-murder” crowd, the “believe in the bible-or-your-going-to-hell crowd.
Truth is, Libertarians are the most conservative crowd there is. We believe that the constitution is sacred, and should be interpreted as it is written.
One difficulty of being libertarian is that the party we want to support (R) is chock-full of leftist whackos - religionists, compassionate conservatives, bipartisan-over-principle moderates, etc.
We’ve been voting for the lesser of two evils for so long we have a clothes clip grafted to our noses.
I use to think that Republicans were the party of principal and that the Democrats had none. It is the exact opposite. The Democrats are flat=out for more more government control, taxes, spending, regulation and less freedom, responsibility and prosperity. The Republicans are “we’re not quite as bad”. Republicans are 90% Dems. Faux Dems. Wannabee Dems. Second-rate Democrats. The Republicans are to the left of yesterdays Democrats.
Republicans are not for small government but for smaller government. Smaller than today’s Leviathan. Smaller than whatever the Democrats happen to be pushing today. But down the road they will accept today’s unacceptable.
The real shame is that we now hear that it is the laissez-faire policies of Bush and the Republicans that have created this mess. Compromise always leads to disaster.
I'd like to shift to the Libertarian side (because the GOP has lost me) but there's too much there that I cannot support.
Perhaps the scorn is due to an enhanced level of misplaced arrogance. For example, does the author want us to believe that open borders has been a success?
The libertarians need to grow a set of nationalist cajones. The founders and the Reaganites understood that rowing with the team is part of the deal.
...If democrats are socialists and republicans are nationalists, communists and capitalists, added together for the one party running government, National Socialists...
...Big business good ole boys and big government politicans together are trying to enslave the apathetic, docile, bovine masses. And getting away with it!!!
We've all seen this diagram before, and some agree that it is valid, and others argue that it really doesn't represent people's views. I would argue that it works, as long as you understand that the diagram is a political game board that it is constantly in movement, rolling around based on current events -- and the people on the board lean and sometimes move based on the board moving.
There are people whose natural inclination is to be libertarian-leaning Conservatives and others who are statist-leaning Conservatives. Whether or not we want to admit it, there are also centrist-leaning Conservatives who could have and might even have voted for Obama -- although I doubt that there are any of them here on FR . Yet those "leanings", not the Conservatism, are the source of most of our FR arguments.
The big question to me is where the Republican Party stands on this game board, and who does it want to capture with its message? If the Republican Party wants to survive, it must look to what attracts, not just its grumpy old farts (who are already basically "lifers"), but rather what can mobilize its younger generation to get out the vote. Because getting up a "McCain Facebook page" 5 days before the election when Obama has had one up for two years, didn't cut it last election and certainly isn't going to cut it in the future.
I would argue that the vast majority of the younger voters are going to be libertarian-leaning. They were as attracted to Ron Paul, as the statist-leaning Republicans were revolted by him. But these younger voters are the ones who really were mobilized to win -- they knew the latest and most popular methods of communicating the message and were wizards at fundraising. The problem is that no one took them seriously and the Republican Party completely marginalized them last election.
So the next question is: What now? Is the Republican Party going to stay the statist, old farts club? Or is going to capture the small "l" libertarians? Because, IMHO, that is going to make the difference between whether the Party can and will ever be taken seriously again.
In other words, they think that with the proper economic education, San Francisco or Detroit could become fiscally conservative cities with low taxes and little government spending or bureaucracy. That there's no reason why a city filled with feminists, homosexuals, and drug addicts couldn't be self-reliant and conservative when it comes to tax & spend issues. Nothing in the real world would support that belief.
It's a never-ending high you never come down off.
Mostly because you are on drugs all the time.
Being a libertarian means living with an almost unendurable level of frustration. It means being subject to unending scorn and derision despite being inevitably proven correct by events.
Seriously, though, this is more than a little cockeyed. As a libertarian you see all the failures of government and have an answer for them. So yes, you're pretty frustrated all the time.
But that's because government always acts. It isn't going to go away and it isn't going to stop doing what it wants to do. When it makes mistakes, you're the one who points them out first.
But if we really lived in a laissez-faire order, libertarians would be in a complacent fog and other people would be the Cassandras seeing and foreseeing catastrophes everywhere.
in 1997, Charles Murray published a short book entitled "What It Means to Be a Libertarian" that does an excellent job of presenting the core principles of libertarian political philosophy.
Don't tell me Murray fancies himself a "Libertarian". Last interview I watched, he was a socialist who thinks children should be labeled and sorted in a social engineering program.