Posted on 10/03/2010 6:22:52 PM PDT by neverdem
While there was a time when I might have described myself as a libertarian, those days are long gone. In fact, I don't even call myself a conservative anymore. Oh, don't get me wrong -- I agree with libertarians on many issues, and their governmental model is vastly preferable to what liberals have visited upon us. Yet there is a problem: However valid their vision of government may be, their vision of society renders it unattainable.
Thomas Jefferson once said, "The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." Now, I certainly agree with the first sentence, as it's merely a statement of the obvious. But then we have to ask, what constitutes "injurious"? And when determining this, do we completely ignore indirect injury? Then, if we do consider the latter, to what extent should it be the domain of government? (When pondering these matters, note that the Founding Fathers didn't reside on the modern libertarian page. They certainly would have, for instance, supported the idea of state and local governments outlawing pornography and would be appalled at what is now justified under the First Amendment.)
Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites ... Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.
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Mr. Duke is no leftist Lurker, I can tell you that. I’ve been reading his stuff for a while and he’s hard to peg. But if I had to describe him I’d say he’s a bit like Joe Sobran. He’s ardently pro-life, anti-immigration (he even opposes legal immigration) and extremely traditional in terms of sexual mores. He’s also never boring, whether you agree with him or nor.
He may claim not to be one, many leftists do. That doesn't make it so.
If you’re going to say that, why don’t you cite even one leftist position he’s taken? Look, I’ve been reading the guy’s stuff for ages and I’ve never seen him advocate any leftist position. He even calls Obama an evil man.
He also is a great defender of the west. He’s written many articles about why even legal immigration must be ended. Heck, even libtard John Conyers quoted material from one of those articles on the House floor and criticized it.
A person who knows his work might criticize him for being too far right, but he’s no lefty.
Deomonstrably false. Kennedy got well over half of the Catholic vote in MA. Pelosi in SF the same.
This guy's full of it.
ping
Define "indirect" for me. He uses it in the context of how people wish to order their private sex lives. He isn't harmed by two guys claiming to be married, not even one little bit.
The same is true for the idiot who wants to live with more than one woman. It's none of his business as long as he doesn't have to pick up the tab.
Trouble is there's all sorts of tabs he wants people to pick up.
Lest there be any misunderstandings, I don't propose that our central government establish religion.
Oh sure you do Selwin. You just don't have the balls to come right out and say it.
“I don’t believe that freedom of religion is totally absolute.”
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
It cannot be, suppose I come to you and say that my God requires me to take your son as my slave and your daughter as my concubine and that you must pay me for the privilege of having me take them? Does any of that sound in the least familiar?
In what way(s) is he a closet leftist? I am interested in knowing especially because I met him once, quite coincidently, and had an extended conversation with him.
Both prime examples of people believing they know better than someone else how he should run his life.
But do you believe in the Constitution?
for your info the US was supposed to be a republic baseed on Judo Christian ethics and tolerance of other religions
nothing in the Bill of rights says we have to tolerate cults or other beliefs that clearly are a danger to public safety and freedom
It seems hard to get libertarians to actually answer this question. It's easy to say you want less government than we have now, but when a libertarian is asked how much government they DO want, they usually don't seem to know. They only know what they don't want, they have no plan for what to do if they ever got in charge. Just being for less government is not a philosophy. Tell me what you're for, not just what you're against.
Read the essay linked in the first paragraph or my quick summary in comment# 1. He sounds better than a conservative when conservatives are content to halt a further advance by the left. He sounds like a reactionary. He wants to reverse the advances the left has already made, e.g. hate crimes, political correctness, etc.
If you would, would you identify whom you think was the foremost libertarian of the 1960s or one of the foremost ones, in transforming the public schools from whatever they had previously been into places of secular and socialist indoctrination. I mentioned Milton Friedman, who was the foremost advocate of the privatization of schooling through vouchers of his day. The libertarian approach to schooling has been one of privatizing, not one of promoting one view, described as liberal, over another, described as conservative. Parents should, for their own children, make the choice of schooling, not the political majority.
This is the portion of the leftist/libertarian agenda that they have so effectively advanced in our schools and throughout America in the last 50 years. Some of this is physically in the schools itself, the rest of it is in the curriculum, and cultural teaching of the schools.
Here is the leftists agenda hidden behind the Libertarian Party curtain.
Libertarian Party Platform:
Throw open the borders completely; only a rare individual (terrorist, disease carrier etc.) can be kept from freedom of movement through political boundaries.
Homosexuals; total freedom in the military, gay marriage, adoption, child custody and everything else.
Abortion; zero restrictions or impediments.
Pornography; no restraint, no restrictions.
Drugs; Meth, Heroin, Crack, and anything new that science can come up with, zero restrictions.
Advertising those drugs, prostitution, and pornography; zero restrictions.
Military Strength; minimal capabilities.
The Libertarian Party. And, they were influential in the culture, such as free sex and drugs?
Actually, I think the cause and effect goes the other way. As the ‘50s gave way to the ‘60s, the culture changed. I don’t know, some combination of the Greatest Generation moving through the life cycle, along with protests against the Vietnam War. Maybe the invention of the Pill. A lot of things were going on.
But, one of them wasn’t the Libertarian Party. The Libertarian Party came about during the 1970s. During the ‘60s, you had Bill Buckley who had some libertarian impulses, but was basically a conservative, and Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, who were Western-style conservatives.
There were some individual Libertarians who were influential back in those days. Milton Friedman was an unofficial advisor to Nixon. Alan Greenspan, who for a time was associated with Ayn Rand, was an official advisor to Nixon. The fellow who wrote Goldwater’s line “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue,” Karl Hess, was a libertarian. (But, he lifted that line from Cicero.)
So, even before the Libertarian Party, there were some influential Libertarians. But, no Libertarian Party, and nothing approaching a movement. When those things started to develop, you did have the emergence of the kind of Libertarian you’re talking about, whom Ayn Rand called “right-wing hippies.” Murray Rothbard, known within Libertarian circles as “Mr. Libertarian,” and a long-time associate of Ron Paul, called them “Leuftmenchen” or “air people,” for their lack of means of support. But, we’re talking of a subgroup of a group that was pretty small to begin with, no member of whom ever was individually influential.
To move the clock ahead a few decades, during the 1990s, there emerged a new consensus in the democratic world, the “neo-liberal,” or “conservative-liberal” view. Tony Blair and Bill Clinton reflected this view in the left-of-center parties. They kind of grabbed on to the economic policies of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. From the left-of-center view, this means that a market economy could support a secularized welfare state, Of course, today, with Barack Obama, we have the return of a radical left, multi-cultural and socialistic agenda.
I’m sorry but I don’t think we have yet to see the emergence of new, vigorous leadership in the center-right parties of the democratic world. Prime Minister Fujimori of Japan and President George W. Bush were promising, but were overcome by circumstances. Chancellor Merkel of Germany has been unimaginative and old school. Perhaps the most successful “market-liberals” have been the Polish Civic Party and the Swedish Moderate Party. But, their countries are on the small side.
In our country, “conservatives” constitute the majority, but that’s combining the libertarian- or economic-conservatives along with the social-conservatives and national security-conservatives. It’s a bit of a trick to keep all three of these balls in the air, and only certain leaders can do this on a sustained basis.
I know the history of the party pretty well, I first ran into them in 1974, and fell in love for about 30 minutes, until I could penetrate their Mormon like aversion to get to the rest of their agenda.
Ultimately, the tragic consequence of the libertarian mentality is that it guarantees the lefts victory in the battle for civilization.
A constitutional republic, yes. But prove where the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution are based on anything Biblical. You can't.
nothing in the Bill of rights says we have to tolerate cults or other beliefs that clearly are a danger to public safety and freedom
Wow. So much wrong-headedness there that I'm amazed!
Can't you think of a few mainstream denominations that were once considered cults?
If one can make the case that islam isn't a religion but is a criminal organization then one would have a case for abolishing it.
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