[hove]

Hey Republicans! Here's a great idea. Let's keep attacking libertarians until the next election cycle. After all, they are far worse than democrats...right? And they deserve the hate. And the libertarians will have a real score to settle and purposely run candidates to suck votes away from mostly republican candidates. After all, far more libertarians are converted republicans than democrats. And then they'll spoil elections for republican candidates. You know....like what happened in Oregon's governers race. C'mon republicans....you show those rascally libertarians. Show everybody how smart you are. Just keep on dissing those libertarians!

Hey....stop that snickering you democrats! Don't forget...Nader and the greens are still out there.

[driftless]

I'm a Republican who voted for a Libertarian for governor in Wisconsin because the standing Rep. Gov Scott McCallum was to busy smearing his opponent rather than enunciating conservative principles. I believe in a number of what could be considered Libertarian tenets, but some of their rhetoric is really wacky. I don't know how many anti-Lincoln articles I've read by persons who have identified themselves as Libertarians. I would dearly love to go back in time and see how these wonderful protectors of liberty would have felt to have been slaves. It's easy to proclaim states rights when you are not the one being chained, whipped, or sold down the river.

[Tokhtamish]

The fundamental problem, as this article so wisely pointed out, is that a minimalist state requires a maximalist culture. Small government can function in a culture where people live in fear of 'what the neighbors will say'. And in a society where social welfare systems were informal, family, friends, neighbors, church, falling afoul of group norms had real socioeconomic consequences. That means also religion and a decidedly anti-individualistic cultural uniformity.

Libertarian ideas on national defense tend to be flatly idiotic, a naive assumption that an isolationist America would be so loved by everyone that it would have no enemies. People who don't understand that to have something that someone else covets is to have an enemy are idiots. They babble about militias and guerrilla warfare, cheerfully assuming that 'freedom' will make amateurs a match for trained professionalism. They babble about Vietnam as if the Viet Cong were a libertarian militia, as if they did not pay a horrendous price in casualties in the face of American firepower. They understand nothing about suffering or sacrifice (and self-sacrifice is the antithesis of libertarianism) or duty. They don't understand that the values of a good soldier are antithetical to the anarchic individualism of libertarianism. They don't understand that a militia can only work in a culture so tight and cohesive that shirking means social suicide.

Libertarianism smells of the politics of the gated community. A world where the well off can live behind walls with private police, private courts, private sanitation, private schools, private everything and to hell with anyone else.