[Sakity Yaks]

Regular Libertarians think that no level of government should set any curbs any social or moral evil.

Nonsense. Libertarians are distinguished from anarchists in that the former believe that government has a legitimate function in defending the rights of individuals against the moral and social evils of force and fraud.

Limiting government to these functions has a number of advantages:

1. It enables fiscal conservatism by restraining the activity, and hence the spending, of government.

2. It allows government to actually function efficiently by focusing it on its core competencies.

3. It encourages social and political stability.

The first two are fairly straightforward and obvious, but the third calls for a bit more commentary.

There has never been much controversy about prohibiting theft and assault, because there is a practically universal consensus that people do not want to be robbed or attacked. When government expands, fungus-like, beyond this sphere, divisive political sectarianism arises.

Such problems arise in areas beyond the proper function of government even when they appear to be the subject of firm consensus. When the consensus is not rooted in the universal desire to protect basic rights to one's person and property, it can erode surprisingly fast. Take, for example, the case of gay marriage:

If traditionalists had had the wisdom to keep marriage separate from the state, this change of public opinion would be irrelevant -- as long as one's own church rejects gay marriage, the views of others could be ignored. (If one's church changes its position, one can of course find a new church.) Having gotten marriage and state entangled, traditionalists are now in a bind, fighting a rearguard action against hostile trends (though there is still time to salvage the situation by directing political energies toward the disentanglement of marriage and state).

That's the underlying problem with relying on the sword of the state. Live by the sword, die by the sword.

[ansel12]

LOL, do conservatives have a better chance of keeping marriage defined normally through the law, as they have done since our founding, or depending on the congregation at the “Church of gay love and marriage” to define marriage?

[ansel12]

Fine, let the libertarians drop all of the social leftism until conservatives and libertarians can recreate the economic fantasy first, once we reduce government, eliminate all the programs and so on, and get us back to 1790 America economically and government wise, then we look at the libertarian issues of the gay agenda and abortion.

That sounds more fair, since supposedly the libers only want all the social leftism and open borders in that perfect America described, surely not in the reality of the America that we have today.

Let us change the libertarian order of “change”. First eliminate all government programs by persuading the voters to vote to return to America of 1790, once we accomplish all that, which shouldn’t take long, then we vote on the social part of the liber agenda.