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I resist the substitution of Liberal Statism with Conservative Statism. If that makes me a Libertarian then so be it....
Dadblastit, I was just going to post this article too.
This is a good thing. Libertarianism, by which I mean the Objectivist, Randian kind, has basically floated along on the coattails of real conservatism for far too long, and it’s assumptions need to be challenged.
One mistake people make is to assume that Ayn Rand and the Objectivists are “classical liberals.” They are not.
While libertarian and conservative philosophies have a lot of overlap, there are also multiple points of divergence. In this case, I think it’s a healthy dialogue. A few toes may get stepped on, but I think it the long run this will only serve to solidify, if not expand the political right.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2675120/posts
recent conversation on same subject...
I would guess that there are very strong threads of
small l libertarianism on this site
and this is what Reagan would have been speaking to.
Utopian Libertarianism is just as bad as Utopian Statism. Neither speak well to the realities of Human Nature.
But I despise Federal Governance
It magnifies the consequences of
Megalomania an Narcissism
And if I had to choose between a Liberal Libertarian
And a Conservative Statist, it would be a tough call
There’s no identity crisis -
Conservatives know what they are and what they stand for...
Libertarians wish they could be conservatives without making the tough choices...
Libertarians = wimpy, waffley....
Conservatism faced an identity crisis in 2001 when Lyndon Baines Bush started Great Society II and the “Republican” Congress spent the next six years going along with it. That completely undermined the conservative coalition. Now spending restraint has necessarily taken center stage and social conservatives are crying about how they aren’t the center of attention anymore. Big government is the Whore of Babylon that social conservatives ignore at their peril. It is evil, pure and simple. Unless we cut the size of government, there will be no more social conservatism. Conversely, if government is small, it won’t be pushing things like gay marriage and abortion on demand. It won’t be able to. The bottom line is that way too many social “conservatives” are Huckabee type Christian Socialists who want a big government as long as it does their bidding on social issues.
With all this new-fangled interweb stuff, I thought we wouldn’t need libertarians anymore. Nobody goes to the libertary anymore except those old perverts looking up porn and they don’t need a libertarian to help them find that stuff in the libertary.
Libertarians - liberals who actually looked at their pay stub.
You know the negative stereotypes: Conservatives who embrace both fiscal and social conservatism are either prudes who want to tell you how to live -- "bigots" and hate-mongers -- or people who derive their policy positions solely from the Christian Bible (which, depending on your views, may seem either admirable or dangerous).
Which is the stereotype of the pure social conservative. I'd hazard that most realize that if you are both, then you cannot support the funding necessary to have a state large enough to 'tell you how to live'.