On the up side, libertarianism is ending taxation and government spending, reviving the economy, and solving every political and social problem in America and the rest of the world. On the down side, libertarianism is reaching the point where its supporters are starting to think their fantasy world is real.
That’s a very odd position to take for someone who claims he was an Air Force veteran.
Libertarians believe in dramatically cutting military spending and generally are strongly isolationist arguing, amongst other things, that the purpose of the US military is solely to defend the US borders and object to having so many bases all over the world.
Most members of the military who are conservative tend to be big government conservatives for rather obvious reasons.
Ideally, that’s the way it should be and we’d all be conservative if the world was an Ayn Rand utopia, but the world isn’t made that way. There’s always that pesky 47 percent, and not taking them into account doesn’t make them go away. Hence, the liberal bias of reality.
Make up your mind.
True. There are some crazy libertarians.
Conservatism can never fail. It can only BE failed…
You give the Republicans too much credit. The real problem seemed to be that some of his female employees didn’t want him.
ahem Barry Goldwater ahem
Of course they will, because conservatism as you define it is a minority position among the American people. You do understand that, don’t you?
The most compassionate thing many extreme Christians have done lately is eat a fatty fried chicken sandwich to celebrate that gays can’t get married. The real reason the compassion part matters is for moderate voters who are a little too self-aware of the uncertainty in their own lives to embrace the black and white creator/leach dynamic libertarian conservatives embrace.
That’s the beauty of libertarianism. It’s all about you. Moonshot’s no longer in the military so the existence of the military no longer serves his individual self-interest.
That’s a really weird statement. What I just mentioned have been the standard libertarian platform and the beliefs of every Presidential candidate for the Libertarian party for the past few decades.
Do you know anything about this political ideology you claim to embrace.
I’m reminded of signs that used to appear in the French countryside in the 1960s.
Vote Communist! The Party of the Small Property Holder!
EuroCommunism grew to be a very different animal than Soviet Communism.
Compare the differences between the Pyrenean desman and the Russian desman.
I don’t believe the author has the faintest idea of what libertarianism is. He seems to confuse Republican attempts to explain free market economics as libertarian nonsense. What he has a problem with is the recent refusal of congressional republicans to compromise their stated ideals in order to get more votes.
The difference being?
I’ve never heard a libertarian frame his or her economic position in this “makers” vs “takers” jargon that some Republicans are spewing. Ayn Rand is not libertarian. I’m tired of hearing these lazy pundits lump her in whenever libertarianism is involved because she’s an easy target. It’s dishonest demagoguery that I would expect from Fox News or Rachel Maddow on her bad days. Not something that should be discussed on this forum.
If the author is too lazy to read the libertarians or Austrians he should admit as much and find another topic
. . . Seriously?
:rolleyes: Don’t even go there. No, Rand did not join nor approve of the Libertarian Party, but it’s full of her fans.
If you mean the Austrian school of economics, there’s a very good reason why the Austrians are not worth reading; they espouse a formalistic-like-math “economics” which explicitly rejects the very possibility of scientific falsifiability.
I’m not talking about the man on the street. I’m talking about academics.
And it bears no resemblance to modern Republican rhetoric. So my point is the author is full of shit.
ETA: how is explicitely rejecting scientific falsifiability and explaining your reasons inferior to implicitly rejecting scientific falsifiability by ignoring the evidence when inconvenient and not explaining why as the monetarists and keynesians do?
Cite that his main motivating factor was to evangelize?