Limited Libertarianism

Politics & Elections
1

I’ve recently acknowledged that my beliefs are consistent with libertarian thought. There is no doubt that I haven’t put as much thought into my positions on issues as some libertarians have. I seem to see a trend with libertarians in that there are battles and infighting concerning doctrine and goals. I’m sure some would regard me as not being pure in my libertarianism. I think a more practical approach needs to be taken than what some espouse.

We have to face the fact that despite the simple truth inherent in libertarian thought, many see it as something radical. People have been so conditioned to a certain way of thinking that some of our ideas seem just plain nuts to them. Instead of shooting for the moon, maybe we should be happy with winning small battles here and there until minds can be gradually changed.

I’ll give an example. Despite difficulties, there is no doubt in my mind that legalization of pot will happen in the relatively near future. I advocate for the legalization of all drugs based solely on the principle of it, not to mention the economic benefits of ending the war on drugs. It’s frustrating that people can’t see the wisdom in doing this. But maybe we should be happy with small steps. Pot legalization would be a great step in the right direction.

Gambling should be an easy one to win. There isn’t the social stigma attached like there is to drug use. Besides, states already run their own gambling operations in the form of lotteries. So many want to and do already gamble in one way or the other that this one seems like a no brainer.

I would suggest that libertarians have to rely on the same tactic that got us into the mess we are in to begin with. People have to be conditioned. People have to be eased into change. We can fight all day long about whether this person or that is a true libertarian. We can cast people out for compromising libertarian principles. But the reality is that there will not be some sort of libertarian revolution. People are not going to swallow all of this whole. The change has to come a little at a time. The change just seems too radical for people to accept otherwise.

Voting for Gary Johnson for president is a good place to start. There is no doubt that he is not a perfect libertarian. However, this election presents the perfect opportunity to make a dent in the current system. Dissatisfaction with both Clinton and Trump has some looking for an alternative. Gary is that alternative. He’s really the most common sense candidate in the race.

2

Maybe there’s no such thing as “libertarianism.”

Maybe all people, barring a few bureau-masochists, want to have “government leave them alone to do their own thing.” Maybe some very large percentage of people want the government to restrict itself to “essential government things, and no more.”

And maybe most people who want these things fervently enough to strap on some variations of Libertarian colors have no sense at all that parts of government they think are excessive are essential to others.

It’s hard to regard Libertarianism as anything but a rather egocentric notion that government is for other people, to keep them from bothering the precious Self, and Self shouldn’t have to put up with any of the restrictions, costs and limitations borne by those other people.

3

Why do you think he has any interest in talking about libertarianism? This is just another advertisement for Gary Johnson. Just like his last thread.

4

Gary Johnson is a nasty, bigoted piece of dog-puke.

Limited libertarianism – essentially, “minimum necessary government” – is a perfectly valid idea, and consistent with many of the better ideas espoused by liberals and by conservatives. You’ll find very, very few people who want more government, just for the sake of more government.

So, opinionator starts out with a fairly reasonable exploration of political theory – and then goes all “Flat Earth Society” at the end.

Pseudo Socrates: “All good efforts are for the best of the people. What is good for the people is what we call righteousness. The best leadership strives for righteousness. Therefore, let’s kill all the Moroccans.”

5

No. He is trying to trick you into reading the thread, and then it turns into an advertisement. He did the same thing with his last post about Trump and Hitler… It starts out with a perfectly valid argument and then turns into an advertisement in the last paragraph. I also think it is funny that OP has only made two posts in the last ten months, and both followed the identical veiled advertising formula.

6

When I was first told about Libertarian ideals, I thought “yeah those sound good”. But then I did a little research. What I realized is that libertarians leave out a number of other ideals I have, mostly in humanitarian areas. And they take their ideals as proven law, and without any limits.

So the libertarian solution to a problem would not be a balance between ideals of personal freedom and the realities of the need to help and protect the little guy, rather it becomes cruel and heartless. I think maximum freedom is making the factory stop polluting my water, the libertarian thinks that the factory owner should have freedom to make stuff without government bugging them. We both start with “maximum freedom” but we end up with completely different policy ideas.

7

I must admit that I find the two examples you focus on to be quite peculiar. Is the “mess we are in to begin with …” related to the criminalization of drugs and gambling? :confused:

There is wide support for legalization of pot and on-line poker among folks who don’t align with “Libertarianism.” If you want to discuss libertarianism honestly you need to focus on the real Libertarian agenda.

Gary Johnson wants to abolish the IRS, abolish the Federal Reserve, abolish Medicare and Social Security as we know them, and abolish or diminish the powers of regulators like EPA and FDA.

The Koch Brothers are leading Libertarianisms. Their political platform is that they want the Liberty to pollute streams, rivers and atmosphere without government regulations. They want the Liberty to employ workers without guaranteeing safety standards or allowing unions.

Some people who call themselves “libertarian” like smoking pot but are too naïve to realize that the real focus of Libertarianism is allowing businesses to pollute, etc. Are you naïve, OP? Or are you trying to trick citizens who like smoking pot into supporting a right-wing Libertarian agenda?

8

Libertarianism has become so broad a term that it has lost all its meaning. Want to legalize pot, want to stop going after porn dealers? I’m right there with you. Want to eliminate public schools? Not on your Nellie. There are so many different flavors of libertarianism that as soon as you show how one is logically flawed, they come back and say “That’s not REAL libertarianism” or “Not all libertarians believe that”. It’s like nailing jello to the wall. Personal freedom to abuse one’s own body or mind is one thing, using some pseudo-intellectual fig leaf to clamor for tax cuts and end to environmental protections is quite another.

9

It’s the absolute worst place to start. Voting for Gary Johnson takes a vote away from one of the candidates who will actually win. One of the two - Trump or Clinton, will better serve your interests than the other, and one of the two is going to be president. Voting for Johnson is voting against your personal interests.

An actual good place to start would be to support a Libertarian candidate locally - get somebody elected to a city council or schoolboard position or whatever else, and actually grow the party from the ground up.

Every four years, bunches of people crawl out of the woodwork declaring that now is the time to support a third party candidate, but when the election is over, none of them seem to actually want to do the hard work of growing their third party of choice at state and local levels.

Agreed - so go get an alderman elected and stop trying to convince people to vote against their interests in a presidential election when the stakes literally could not be higher.

10

I’m a libertarian and I support the legalization of both of these, but I completely disagree with your idea to focus on these sorts of things, largely because they send the wrong message. Yes, all rights are precious and the more we can gain, the better off we are, but it’s exactly the sort of focus on rights like these that make it difficult for people who have moral opposition to them to understand why they’re important and it makes an impression that the only reason people are libertarians is because they want to smoke weed, gamble, and bang prostitutes.

Instead, I think it’s important to provide context for why they’re important. I have no interest in smoking pot or gambling, but I support them because of the underlying philosophy that government should be minimally involved in the sorts of decisions that those activities entail. Yeah, the pro-pot train is a great way to get some people on board to support a candidate or a cause, but in my experience, there doesn’t seem to be any real correlation between legalizing pot and libertarian ideas; there’s plenty who support legalization who are also very pro-statist too. Instead, I think it’s important to talk about them, but certainly not focus on them.

Instead, I think the better approach is to find where the common ground is as there’s aspects to libertarian thought that appeal to both the liberals and conservatives. As a generality, libertarians support marriage equality, legalization of pot, reforming immigration rather than building walls and deporting people, protecting free speech and civil rights, ending foreign intervention, among other things that ought to appeal to the left. And, similarly, libertarians generally support smaller/decentralized government and more pro-capitalist economic policies that ought to appeal to the right.

When I’ve had real, heart-to-heart conversations with people, liberals or conservatives, about my libertarian ideas, I ALWAYS make a point to find that common ground first, see where their concerns are and then we talk about our differences in perspective. Sometimes I convince them, sometimes I don’t, but they always end up seeing libertarianism as less fringe than they thought. And, really, with this election cycle, I’ve run into TONS of discouraged Democrats and Republicans, I’ve found I’ve been getting in a lot more conversations that are about people looking for alternatives to the status quo. Hell, even if people strongly disagree with me, I’m happy enough just to see people questioning it and looking for ways to fix it.

11

I agree that the OP is much more f a plug for Johnson than a serious effort to discuss libertarian values, goals, or policies.
Off to Elections.

12

Libertarianism is to the social sciences what Creationism is to the physical sciences.

Avoid both. Avoid anyone who advocates either.

13

And those are his good points.

14

I was going to type out a longer post, but I’ll just agree with** BobLibDem**. Libertarianism means nothing except what a particular person believes it means.

15

I don’t see the problem with being both socially liberal and fiscally conservative, as those things are reasonably defined within the general parameters that policy is being realistically discussed. It is hard to not give such a person the label “libertarian”. The problem is there are some libertarians who give the rest a bad name, just like Creationists who claim God made everything give a bad name to “Creationists” who merely assert that the universe was created from nothing by a power we do not understand, and continued to develop in ways that we cannot fully explain. That philosophy is in line with what both religious and secularist people believe, just with different emphases.

Acting like every single person who leans libertarian is a radical that wants to stop government from doing anything is acting like anyone who wants to redistribute income in any way is advocating for communism, or that anyone who is opposed to elective abortion wants the government to implement their religion’s entire code of law. The two things are not even close to the same thing. The reason why the Libertarian Party has been on the fringe for so long is that they are entirely populated by the lunatic fringe at this point. If they actually advocated for reasonable policies that draw from both major parties, they’d be seen as more reasonable, but anyone who supports those kinds of things now are just attached to whatever major party they feel comfortable with most.

It is not hard to have leanings in the way of wanting government to do less in our lives rather than more, but at the same time acknowledge there are a ton of things that government absolutely should do in order to better serve society. The Libertarian Party certainly deserves no respect, but the idea of looking for government to only do that which is clearly necessary for an orderly society is not something far-fetched. It’s just that the LP’s ideas for what is absolutely necessary are totally ludicrous to anyone who understands how society is structured now.

Most people are libertarian in some senses, the main question is just how libertarian. I doubt there are many people out there that think every economic and social decision should be made by the government. Everyone except true lunatics believes in the free market at some level, and everyone has some idea that people should be allowed to live their lives at least slightly differently from how they themselves do. No one is advocating for 100% price controls and only one legal recreation activity, and only those theoretical people are truly 100% not libertarian. Everyone else wishes the government didn’t control some aspect of people’s lives. The question is, again, how much. The idea of getting rid of government entirely is truly abhorrent, but the idea of scaling it back slightly from where it is now, such as undoing prohibitions which are truly useless, should be something to be reasonably thought about. Those that wish the government would do even very slightly less than they do now are classifiable as libertarian; when their suggestions are made because they are supported by enough people they cease being libertarian and become centrists.

16

I disagree with your interpretation of the term “libertarian” at least as used here in the United States. The fact is that the term is attached to “the lunatic fringe at this point.”

The term you really want is “conservative” – or at least what the term used to mean before it was taken over by the radical right.

17

As you put it, the notion is not far-fetched.

It is, however, completely wrong and actively dangerous at this point in our history, more so than any time since 1932.

If you had Libertarians saying anything specific that was rational and not lunatic then it might be possible not to dismiss them out of hand. What you actually get are people like you saying that libertarian policies will do everything that is good and nothing that is bad. So will liberal policies and conservative policies when you talk about them like that.

Should some things government does be ended? Yes. Should some things government does be changed? Yes.

Should government do much, much more that it is currently being stopped from doing? Hell, yes.

That’s the line libertarians won’t cross. If you are somehow a rational libertarian then you should be limited in all fair ways from gaining any public power, just like the mostly successful campaign against Creationists. If you are like the real-world libertarians who actually advocate abolishing government, then you should be mocked until your very name is a badge of scorn, just like Creationists.

18

There are a couple of subjects in this thread - the main one is the libertarian question, but the other is the more general 3rd party issue in American politics.

I do not support the Libertarian party, and the Greens have wondered away from me, but at the same time I would like to see a system where more than 2 parties have real influence.

The way things are now, most people have to jump in with some pretty strange bedfellows to address their favored issues. We have anti-abortion people , the anti tax on the rich people, and the warmongers all lumped together. On the other side we have pro-nuke and anti-nuke environmentalists, social justice, world peace, and a whole bunch of other issues all under the Dem-brella . It would be nice if those different interest groups could build alliances on a per-issue basis.

Currently, there is too much party-line voting that does not allow for dynamic coalitions to build for specific bills. One solution to this could be proportional representation that would bring smaller parties to congress. On the other hand, there have been some periods where congress worked across party lines very effectively, and there is no guarantee the coalitions would not calcify, with a similar result as we have now.

Looking at the presidential race, it is unfortunate that I am not able to vote for a candidate that is close to my politics, and also vote pragmatically for the most viable left of center candidate at the same time. Something like in an instant runoff style ballot would allow this. I think it would tend to elect more moderate candidates.

I hate to say it, but in the current system, a vote for a 3rd party will not elect a president, and may not do any other good. I live in CA, so my individual presidential vote is nearly irrelevant anyway. For people living in swing states, a vote for 3rd party is a vote not given to the lesser of 2 evils, and thus a vote against their own interest.

If the Dem party had been as off track as the Reps this year, we could have ended up with two extreme, unprepared for office, candidates. Yikes!! In the past our system has often been perceived to nominate two candidates that were barely different, giving the people very little input on direction (see Simpsons, tree house of horror, 1996. “Don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos”). Both of these possibilities are sub-optimal.

I’m all for more choice, but we need to develop 3rd parties from the local level up, and our election systems would need to change or we would most likely end up with the 3rd party just pushing out one of the existing parties, and becoming one of the new dominant parties. Significant regional 3rd parties and sub-parties have all either become dominate, disappeared, or were absorbed into one of the big 2 in the US, up til now anyway.

19

Speaking of lunatic fringe the one libertarian I knew at all well wanted the government to get out of the business of building roads and streets. He imagined that each would build (or not bother) a street in front of his property and charge tolls to everyone who wanted to pass through. So there would be no public property. Of course if all the owners in a stretch wanted to get together and had 100% agreement, they could agree to a common street building and toll-collecting enterprise. But if anyone objected, well tough.

Essentially, the only right was property (which there would a government to protect). And if you didn’t want that protection, you would pay no tax and get no protections.

Sounds like total anarchy to me.

20

Very well said. Bravo.

There are fully Libertarian societies on Earth today. Yemen is one. Everyone is completely free of government interference. And is entitled to exactly as much freedom and safety and property rights as they have combat power to enforce. By and large it’s a Hobbesian life: poore, nasty, brutish, and short.

Libertarianism, like Communism, is (at best) an example of “right idea; wrong species.” In most incarnations it’s not even that good. It’s simply childish levels of thoughtless spoiled selfishness writ large. I can have a pony and I can have an ice cream and you can’t make me do anything. Neener neener.

If that’s the highest best aspirations of Mankind I pray for a large meteor to wipe this scourge off the face of the planet and thereby de-pollute the Universe.