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There are a variety of sound reasons that many Libertarians do not see a significant difference between Republican and Democrats. Among the many reasons is that many Libertarians are neither conservative, nor liberal in their broad general outlook on politics. While all hold both liberal and conservative points of view, Libertarians do not have a common outlook on which points they are conservative and which they are liberal on. Nor do they have a common set of priorities on which to set their values with regard to either. For these reasons, Libertarians are all over the spectrum.

Here at Free Republic, most Libertarians are conservative, that is that they have prioritized those issues on which they identify with as conservative as a having a higher value, than those they identify with as liberal. To further complicate this matter, Libertarians out in the world away from Free Republic have differing opinions as to defining which particular position on an issue is best described as liberal or conservative. Of course their are majority points of view, but those can and have changed from time to time.

Then their is motivating causes behind holding a particular view on a particular issue. In that regard, one can even find many conservative Republicans coming at their particular conservative stand on an issue, from a very liberal view of the issue. There are those for example who place very high priority on caring for the poor (liberal view), and say that the best way to do it is to have a laissez-fair economic policy. An agreeing conservative view on this would be that such a system would motivate the lazy into pull up their sleeves and get to work. A Liberal view on this, is that it would replace the current employer market with an employee market and would additionally allow for spontaneity in business, which is always advantageous to those lacking skills who have not found their nitch.

The Libertarians that you seem to have the most trouble with are those who identify primarily with conservative views. These Libertarians are in their own eyes out conservativing the conservatives. Currently within the LP, this is also the dominate accepted strategy. The idea to do this was advanced with in the LP between 1983-87, and has been the main strategy ever since. I say the best strategy is a conscious beyond left and right balancing strategy, which would carfully avoid any favoritism toward democrats or republicans. And now today, because we have had this out conservativing the conservatives strategy for so long, the LP needs to take a serious look at out liberaling the liberals so as to bring some balance back to the party.

The reason Libertarians moved to this destructive strategy, was that they correctly reasoned that they would face less resistance with it, and would gain a quick increase in membership. I say the route of least resistance, in this case, was not the route of greatest advantage.

The biggest mistake of this strategy, is that it replaced education as a primary goal in the LP, with winning elections. The funny thing here is that those of us who opposed this strategy were smeared as being dreamers. Oh well.