...final word (for now) on libertarians vs. conservatives

reasononline ^ | December 20, 2001 | Nick Gilespie

[walden]

"Are the above your words, or Jonah Goldbergs? -- If yours, do you imagine that you have answered my question above in your last two posts at 69 & 70? - It is becoming obvious that you did not, but that you hoped to give that impression. "

The "limitations" line was, in fact, mine, and while you may not like my responses in #69 and #70, you don't seem to have any answer or argument to them. Conversation over, I guess.

[tpaine]

Inanity, thy name is roscoe.

[walden]

Do read Frankl, though-- contrary to common belief, it is not the love that we receive, but the love that we GIVE that sustains us.

[Roscoe]

Couldn't come up a single Libertarian accomplishment? Sad.

[tpaine]

As I said earlier, why bother nit picking pap? - Yep, over.

[EternalVigilance]

You are really too, too funny! ;-)

#74 is great...thanks for a good laugh.

[tpaine]

The US Constitution is a very libertarian style document. I consider it an accomplishment of libertarian thought & ideals, before the word 'libertarian' was coined.

[Kevin Curry]

The US Constitution is a very libertarian style document.

In the words of one its authors:

"We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other." -John Adams

See the problem?

[Roscoe]

The US Constitution is a very libertarian style document.

No, it isn't.

Come on. One accomplishment.

Surely the limitations of Libertarianism aren't so crippling that it hasn't managed to accomplish anything?

[jackbob]

Summing up several of your replies on this thread, sounds like you had a bad experience with libertarianism. Your emphasizing that libertarianism is a perfectly rational philosophy and its necessity for perfectly rational beings, I find quite suspect. Did you have a mind altering experience in some mini-libertarian cult? While I have not ever been involved with any such cults, I heard of some many years ago. Reading your roll on how your life is not your own, but belongs to family, teachers, friends, who all made an investment in you, seems like a continuation of that same cult mentality.

Your complaint that libertarianism didn't provide you something to tide you over when rationalism fails, sounds like the libertarianism you were seeking was a church, and when it didn't live up to the full church role you had hoped for, you jumped out and into something else that provided for that need. Most libertarians have many different things going for them in their lives, that they can draw upon when they "face the occasional emotional pits of life." I can't imagine any libertarian looking for that kind of help from the movement, a golf league, chess club, music band, an arts association, or even a baseball team.

I don't know any monks in the Almighty Church of Libertarian Holyness. But if you were a member of that church, actually thinking it could accomplish as much, then your rationality was not very sound to start with. But don't cast the rest of the movement into the utopian dreams you had, which required monk like robots with perfect rationality. This is a movement and philosophy that encourages individuality, and self ownership. The exact opposite of what you have conjured up in your mind.

Libertarianism is an opposite of utopia. Those who don't understand the philosohpy, continually expect us to live up to some utopian ideal, having answers to every imaginable problem under the son. Sorry to repeat the most often quoted libertarian saying; "Utopia is not an option."

[Roscoe]

I don't know any monks in the Almighty Church of Libertarian Holyness.

FR is full of them.

[Aedammair]

There can be little question that we are facing increasing choice--not simply in economic but cultural and social terms, too, where the "Chinese menu" has exploded into a wide-ranging buffet. Anthropologist Grant McCracken has observed what he terms "plenitude," or the "quickening speciation" of social groups, *gender types and lifestyles. "Where once there was simplicity and limitation ... there is now social difference, and that difference proliferates into ever more diversity, variety, heterogeneity," writes McCracken in 1997's "Plenitude."

*What does this phrase really mean; the varying roles of the sexes or transgender issues? It's a greasy slope and standardless; but perhaps that's the point and center (hence the platitudinous terms and phrases he quotes); and with standards that particular center won't hold.

His reply is cheerfully nihilistic. I am not afraid of the political and social ethos he describes I am turned off by it. His acription of fear as the factor driving most conservatives is wishful thinking on his part. IMO they don't fear it; they repulse it, which makes for a greater willingness to extend the battle against it.

I basically consider myself a conservative, but I hold absolutely no allegiance to party. I could vote as easily for a Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Green or Right to Life candidate, if he/she possessed the qualities I judge to be necessary in a leader. But the more I become acquainted with the manifesto of Libertarianism, via its best and brightest proponents, the more I find myself rejecting it a little more with each encounter. Not because of particular stances the party takes; some of which I'm in agreement with, but because of that palpable nihilism which this very bright author vehemently denies, but which his expression of thought, as penned in the above essay, belies.

[tpaine]

I can see Adams problem, yes. Can you?

[tpaine]

Well, one of our more minor accomplishments on FR, is to make you look like a raving loony. {easily done, granted}

[Roscoe]

Libertarianism's crippling limitations are evidenced by its lack of accomplishments.

[tpaine]

I'm a libertarian agnostic.

[tpaine]

You are repeating your inanities. - A sure sign of insanity.

[Roscoe]

Come on. Just one accomplishment. Surely they must have managed to do something after thirty years?

[walden]

No, dear, I've never been a member of a cult, and my life has contained no more ups and downs, bumps and bruises than anyone else's. I'm just OLD-- I thought I told you that. :) I also spend quite a bit of time dealing with young people, and trying to talk them out of collecting their own Darwin awards-- too many funerals the last couple of years.

[tpaine]

I'll humor you.

-- Libertarian thought, & principles have gained national prominence in the last 30 years. Conservatives such as Reagan & Goldwater have spoken highly of many of its ideals.

Socialists & authoritarians have irrational fears of its precepts. As is evident here on FR.