Libertarians win majority on Colorado City Council

LP News ^ | 13 November 2001 | LP

[Tribune7]

Good one.

[VA Advogado]

It's a twisted philosophy, to be sure.

Its like a cult of koolaid drinkers who get together and pretend to know what the constitution. "He Vern, waaaas dis here fivth amendment thang? Is Buddy's stoar steel salin Jim Bean in fivths?"

[Conservative til I die]

Libertarians don't get that all societies, from even the allegedly "most Libertarian" society of 11790's USA to today have "societal guardrails." They're called laws and rules. Everything from not being allowed to sell liquor to children to stop signs and parking rules are necessary for a civil society. Without rules and laws, people will quickly resort to illegal and immoral ways of doing business and interacting personally.

Libertarianism is also inferior to conservatism because libertarianism suffers from the same inherent flaw as Marxism: that you cannot treat people as if they are widgets in some economic theory. People are not numbers on a lecture hall chalkboard, and absolute theories that must be adhered to as dogma do not work in reality. Conservatism is pragmatic, and that's a good thing, not a bad thing. What may be right today may not be right for society tomorrow.

[Libertarianize the GOP]

Show me anything in the Constitution that addresses abortion.

[tacticalogic]

That's not at all what I said. However, I tire of the circular logic of libertines. It's deja vu all over again....

Well, rest then. But consider, if you will, that no two people will think, or argue exactly alike. If you find that arguing with "libertines" as you call them invariably leads you back to where you started, you might consider that the constant in all those conversations is your logic.

[Conservative til I die]

Let me guess which of the myriad banned Libertarian cultists this is. JRadcliffe? Inspector Harry Callahan?

[tacticalogic]

Leave it to the Libertarians to always make huge jumps in logic (eg., not wanting to remove all societal guardrails = government is the architect of society).

She submitted that the libertarians would remove these "societal guardrails" and I assume she meant that they would do so by changing the law. If they can remove them by changing the law, then I don't think it's a great leap of logic to think she believes they were put there by the law.

[Libertarianize the GOP]

If you want my position on abortion read this whole thread. DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS ADMITS TO ABORTION INVOLVEMENT

[BluesDuke]

From the gist of what I have seen, Libertarians want no governmental intrusion into their lives. They want to do what they want to do without regard to rules and regulations.

Not exactly. A libertarian believes government has no legitimate business except to stay out of your business, my business, and any citizen's business, unless one citizen would obstruct or abrogate a fellow citizen's equivalent rights; and, to protect her citizens against predators at home (real predators, if you please, not mere vicemongers) and attackers from abroad. (Which reminds me: I for one can barely comprehend why it was that some libertarians, conservatives, libertarian conservatives, or paleo all the above, had such a problem as they seem to have had with our hitting back after 11 September. Reality check: force was used against us! Whatever it was about our foreign policy and our ways and means of entangling with other nations that was, to be polite, ill-advised, that hardly confers licence on any foreign power - and though he is not strictly defined a foreign government, Osama Yo Mama [thank you, Mr. Boortz] certainly did have the protection and shelter, indeed the sanction, of a foreign government - to commission suicide bombers to hijack civilian airliners and slaughter five thousand innocents in the World Trade Center.)

What one citizen does in his or her own home on his or her own property is no one else's legitimate affair, unless they would a) cause deliberate physical harm upon anyone else while so doing; or, b) compel another by force to partake against their will. Example: An adult wants to watch porn in his own house, that's his own business. He wants to jam it down his wife's throat or substitute it for real intimacy with his wife, that's one reason they made divorce court. He wants to show it in your house against your will, or drag you into his house to watch against your will, then it's your and your local law enforcement's business - and let's have the punishment fitting the crime, please, punishing porn lovers as though they were attempted murderers is as ridiculous as it is to end up punishing burglars or shootists as though they were just shoplifting a couple of packs of Twinkies from the local deli.

Or, since only so many folk here seemed impatient to toss in the drug issue on this thread, let's have a whack at it: Someone's smoking pot or doing a few lines in his own house - that's his business. Someone attacks his wife or family while he's smoking pot or doing a few lines in his own house, bring in the police. And it shouldn't matter a damn what he was consuming - assault and battery are just that. Your neighbour decides you ought to join in the fun and smoke a joint or do a few lines with him, you don't want to join in but he forces you to join in either by dragging you into his house and not letting you out until you take a few good healthy hits - that's holding you against your will. He barrels his way into your house to force you to join in - that's breaking and entering. He decides to take a walk up the street and smoke his joint or do his lines out around the neighbourhood? Well, since he didn't exactly get the okay to do it anyplace outside his own four walls and square feet of property, that's a public nuisance. Then you have a perfect right to a) deploy whatever force might be at your disposal to defend yourself against his attempt to hold you against your will, b) call in the police if you can't hold him off, c) demand prosecution for his having carried his particular vice from behind his own four walls and square feet into the public square, so to say. But until or unless he does bring it out into the public square, someone else's vice, however distasteful or sinful to you or to myself, is merely someone else's vice and none of our business.

A libertarian, in other words, believes you know best how your own life should be lived, your keep earned, your home composed and run, your fellow helped by you, and how you relate to God. And, that when the government compromises or usurps that sovereignty - taking your money or other property from you by arbitrary force, deciding likewise that you have not used your money, property, or social power in what it determines the appropriate manner (as most clearly it has done, and continues to do), while failing to protect you against real predators at home and attackers from abroad - it is government no longer but, rather, the State.

[anniegetyourgun]

See #107. And he thinks I circumlocute! Goodnight, CTID....no more arguing their vain philosophies for me.

[Conservative til I die]

Ha ha ha lol, which society has ever been Libertarian? None. You utopians are no different than the Marxists in their fantasy-land.

[sayfer bullets]

Somehow, I just got the visual of that cat-herding commercial in my head.

[Don Myers]

ok

[Don Myers]

"What may be right today may not be right for society tomorrow."

We are a far different society today than we were in the 1790s. And many of us see that there must be checks and balances to even have a semblance of civil order. Libertarians don't seem to understand those things.

[BluesDuke]

Ha ha ha lol, which society has ever been Libertarian? None.

Refer, please, to the founding era of these United States. No, it was not a Libertarian government, since there was no Libertarian Party in existence, but it was very much a libertarian (lower case "l") government - as in, it butted out of her citizens' business unless one of them had any bright ideas about obstructing or abrogating his fellow citizens' equivalent rights - though not for very long...

You utopians are no different than the Marxists in their fantasy-land.

Utopians properly defined believe, generally, that it is the State's business to create nothing short of heaven on earth or else, since we poor individuals are just so not competent enough to know what is best for us. A libertarian believes, generally, that since heaven on earth has three chances in hell of coming about in the hands of imperfect men - namely, jack, diddley, and squat - it is left properly enough to individuals to decide how best their lives should be lived, their lives between themselves and God and nobody else's bloody business except as within their freely made associations, with government's single legitimate affair being to keep them within reasonable bounds from harming or murdering their fellow sovereigns. Or, in simpler language: To the utopian, the State is everything and the individual is nothing; to the libertarian, the individual is sovereign and the State - as opposed to a proper, legitimate, and unobtrusive government - is his enemy.

[Sandy]

Let me guess which of the myriad banned Libertarian cultists this is. JRadcliffe? Inspector Harry Callahan?

JRadcliffe has not been banned yet. There are still a few of us left here, you know. Give it time.

[Libertarianize the GOP]

I think the number of freepers with libertarian leanings may be increasing.

[parthur]

Best wishes for success in getting 100% of what you want 100% of the time. Especially with those less than single-digit candidates.

I realize that the libertarians are far from garnering political power. But I am arguing pure morality, rather than practicality. Morally speaking, people have a right to spend their money on what they want. Or, in other words: If you use it, you should pay for it. If you pay for it, you should get to use it. Rephrasing it again: It is immoral to force you to pay for things you don't use or want.

The only way this moral goal can be achieved is if taxes are cut back to provide only for common defense and security.

That is why I support libertarians. The Republicans haven't truly protected us against the leviathan. More than half of what I make is taken away from me by force (newsflash: Like most taxpayers, I pay taxes under threat of criminal prosecution! I don't pay them voluntarily)

[anniegetyourgun]

Wow...I really appreciate the reasoned response - especially from a Libertarian.

"The Republicans haven't truly protected us against the leviathan."

I must, however, point out that the Libertarians can't protected you.

[parthur]

Thank you. I think if you really delve into it, you will find that the libertarian/anarcho-capitalist group are the ones who do the most critical thinking.

Regarding who can protect us: Let's face it. No election, ever, ever has been won by a single vote. The closes margins were a few hundred votes. So your one vote will never affect an election. So, instead of wasting your vote, and endorsing one of our two mainstream-socialist parties, why don't you vote libertarian, and send a message?