But because 95 percent of the libertarianism one encounters at cocktail parties, on editorial pages, and on Capitol Hill is a kind of commonplace “street” libertarianism, I decline to allow libertarians the sophistical trick of using a vulgar libertarianism to agitate for what they want by defending a refined version of their doctrine when challenged philosophically. We’ve seen Marxists pull that before.
In fact, quasi-socialist "liberals" of the vulgar modern American type (ranging from Barbara Streisand to John Kerry) try to pull this maneuver. When they are pushing for freedom for perversion (or slaughtering the unborn), they invoke all of the personal freedom/"privacy of the bedroom" pieties as if they were written somewhere on stone tablets and brought down from Mt. Sinai by the Archangel Thomas Jefferson.
Ping.
"quasi-socialist 'liberals'" are not in fact libertarians. They love Big Brother. They cannot get enough of the state to suit them. Libertarians (at least most of my big "L" Libertarian friends) want just the opposite - minimal government. People like Walter Williams (who is pretty clearly a libertarian based on his writings) are not at all on the same page as the Anarcho-capitalists (who in reality just about don't exist [statistically speaking]).