LOL, this hits it exactly.
It should come as no surprise that part of the blessing of liberty that conservatives should be conserving includes...drum roll please...the sort of "social conservatism" (as it is termed now) that restrains our baser instincts and enables us to actually function as a commonwealth of self-governing individual citizens.
One of libertarianism's many problems is that it doesn't truly understand the concept of "self-government." The average libertarian thinks "self-government" means "doing whatever I want to do, whenever I want to, regardless of what anyone thinks of it, so long as I'm not putting somebody's eye out while I'm doing it." The Founders, as well as the entire series of philosophical ground-layers upon whom the Founders rested from Algernon Sidney and John Locke all the way back to Marcus Tullius Cicero, would have disagreed.
Self-government involves voluntary restraint of our own desires so that we can function within the commonwealth in a way that facilitates civil society among us all. Or at least that's the way John Locke would have defined it. Libertarians, on the other hand, want to take us back to Locke and Hobbes' "state of nature" in which there is no commonwealth.
Because man is what he is, the unrestrained fulfillment of his every whim will ALWAYS end up infringing on the natural liberties of other individuals. To see the truth of this in our society merely requires us to read the news with at least a modicum of understanding of human nature. Hence, man always needs government. The issue is, then, whether that will be self-government or other-government. To the extent that we do not exhibit the former, we will have that much greater a proportion of the latter.
I would be willing to bet that the argument that people are incapable of “self government”, and would devolve into anarchy, hedonism and reduced to a crying baby state, without a govt that seeks to CONSERVE traditional life, was the self same one voiced by King George in 1775.
Self-government involves voluntary restraint of our own desires so that we can function within the commonwealth in a way that facilitates civil society among us all. Or at least that's the way John Locke would have defined it. Libertarians, on the other hand, want to take us back to Locke and Hobbes' "state of nature" in which there is no commonwealth.
Right. Libertarianism is anarchy. BS.
Well said Titus. Wish I had something to add, but you summed up my feelings in four paragraphs.
Well said.
LOL, this hits it exactly.Except that it doesn't. The Paulbots, for all their faults, are usually pro-life and generally skeptical of the gay marriage movement. Their position is a bit more nuanced than my own or most other conservatives. They don't want a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, but they also don't think other states should be forced to recognize gay marriages simply because Massachusetts does.
Their main divergence with some aspects of conservatism on "moral values" issues is not pornography or abortion, but rather the drug war. And they usually attack it in historical parallels to the prohibition movement of the early 20th century. While I wouldn't go as far as them in the whole legalization movement, I do not find this position to be fundamentally at odds with conservatism proper. Since the founding era we've always had an internal division on the regulation of "vices." Historically it was tied to religion, usually pitting the fundamentalists against the mainline protestants and catholics over alcohol.
True, but I would add that there seems to be a ratcheting mechanism in "other-government" that will not allow a reversal. Also, "other-government" has a one boat philosophy such that it wants to give everybody the same serving of itself in spite of effective self-government. Finally "other-government" is actively looking for fantasy arenas of governance such as global warming in which no self-government is necessary but the punishment will still take place.