[royalcello]

Thanks for your excellent and very interesting comments on this thread, which as you say indeed moved it towards my favorite topic. I certainly agree that there is much to be said for feudalism. While I am not exactly a libertarian, even of the paleo variety, compared to 21st-century democratic statists any traditional monarchist is relatively libertarian.

I once asked one of my Catholic monarchist correspondents who has Distributist leanings what he thought of paleolibertarianism/anarcho-capitalism; he replied that he certainly wished that these two camps constituted mainstream political discourse instead of Democrats and Republicans.

[annalex]

I used to call myself libertarian, till I noticed that it completely misaligns people's expectations of what my position would be on any particular issue.

I do think that individual rights are the correct framework to discuss social theory. But I think that libertarianism understands rights as property rights, which puts the cart in front of the horse. Rights are behaviors that conform with the Golden Rule; property rights may or may not emerge from that, depending on political culture.

Further, libertarianism misunderstands morality -- what we discussed at some length on this thread. This leads to moral decay as a part of libertarain package. Moral decay leads to collapse of freedom as a social institution, and of course, ontologically freedom cannot be understood outside of morals.

So I do not think that libertarianism is sufficient for productive political discourse. Democrat/Republican is simply not a useful framework for anything, particularly since the GOP has morphed into a big government interventionist Wilsonian party.