Libertarian ping! Click here to get added or here to be removed or post a message here!
Posted on 04/30/2009 7:33:36 AM PDT by rabscuttle385
Over a year ago, Mitt Romney was losing primaries to John McCain, and conservative pundits from Ann Coulter to Rush Limbaugh predicted the end of the GOP – Coulter went as far as promising she would campaign for Hillary Rodham Clinton if McCain became the party's nominee.
By November 2008, the GOP had embraced a nominee who had considered switching parties twice, had opposed tax cuts, and had failed to advance an aggressive shift in a foreign policy that left the GOP discredited in an area it had always trumped in.
It's not that McCain's willingness to reach across the aisle was condemnable. On the contrary, had McCain been able to do that as a conservative, he would've had more than tepid support from voters.
It also has less to do with the reasons conservatives disagreed with him when they should have found common ground. For example, McCain angered many conservatives when he opposed the federal ban on same-sex marriage.
Here in New Hampshire, congressional candidate Grant Bosse was among the few Republicans who understood the importance of leaving some decisions for adults to make with God and their state, not judges and the federal government.
It's precisely the reasons many couldn't support McCain – even conservatives who stuck by their guns and refused to send him to the White House – that merit serious reflection.
So far it's difficult to sense the fundamental message shift required for the GOP to make inroads in 2010 and 2012, but it seems no state is better poised to nurture these than the state of New Hampshire.
They key to doing this successfully? Allowing New Hampshire's libertarian spirit to infuse the GOP grassroots and allowing that to spread nationally.
(Excerpt) Read more at nashuatelegraph.com ...
It was libertarian laisse-faire economic views that played a considerable role in the financial meltdown.
I strongly disagree:
1) Community Reinvestment Act
2) Ethanol Mandates
3) FED and their 1% interest
.....Just to name a few ways the government stuck it nose into the free market!!!
Flame away......
That is spot on.
All good points. We need to add that Reagan was not a rigid ideologue. He was an ideologue in the best sense - his ideas and principles were his keel, his spine, and he was rock-solid on his core ideals. But he was willing to work with people who didnt agree 100% to get what he wanted and make a positive difference.
We in the grassroots have been too abused by 'sellouts' and as a consequence we risk erring in the other direction, throwing out pragmatic conservatives with the RINO bathwater. In all cases, communicating and articulating the conservative vision and WINNING hearts and minds should be the key.
The author makes the common mistake that allowing gay marriage is the small government thing to do. If we lived in a libertarian society where the government was not involved in rewarding or punishing you based on marital status (taxes, student aid, federal benefits, etc) and was not in the role of forcing businesses to treat people differently based on marital status or sexual behavior than government shouldn’t get involved in a personal or religious decision. But that is not the world we live. Allowing gay marriage is an expansion of this governments power. That is the reason behind the gay rights movement, not to obtain some right to bond with one another but to use the government to force others to reward that bond legally and financially, and to force the government to indoctrinate children with their beliefs through the government school system. They don’t seek a libertarian government that leaves them alone, they seek an activist government that punishes those who do not share their beliefs.
I didn't say that laisse-faire policies were the only culprit. This is not an either/or situation. Like all things this messed up, the feds did way too much of what they shouldn't be doing (Fannie/Freddie/CRA, and creating a credit bubble), and way too little of what they should be doing (ensuring financial institutions have adquate reserves, preventing rampant speculation in commodities markets by those who neither produce nor consume commodities).
Until those on the right grasp that this is not just a Dem-created crisis, we will have little credibility with the voting public.
The trouble between traditional conservatives and libertarians comes from this second set of issues, which are increasingly prominent for libertarians and liberals.
GOP capitulation to lifestyle libertarianism would push traditional conservatives out of the party. That kind of political subtraction is self-defeating -- which is precisely why the claims of lifestyle libertarians against the GOP get such traction in the media.
Here's a better idea: let time and events resolve the problem. When the Obama economic program falters through high taxes, out of control deficits, high unemployment, and the lack of a strong recovery, newly energized economic libertarians and traditional conservatives will ally and make a revitalized GOP majority -- just as they did in 1980.
As I understand it, Credit Default Swaps and the like are built on debt and leverage, similar to how the banking system practices fractional reserve banking. Neither of those 2 practices would be allowed on a free market because. Fractional reserve banking is nothing less than legal counterfeiting in today’s world and it would seem to me that CDSs fall into the same category.
Call it regulation if you want, but it seems to me like mere prevention of fraud. And if that’s the case, there’s nothing laissez faire about it. A free market implies protection against fraud and crime and protection of property and contracts. I don’t see how anything that breaks with that definition of a free market can be considered laissez faire.
As far as I’m concerned, Greenspan was no libertarian. I mean he was the chairman of the federal reserve which has a monopoly on money and credit.
We had financial meltdowns long before fractional reserve banking, so that is not the only culprit. I don't see how we can get rid of the Fed now, but I do think it needs to be subject to much tighter rein regarding creation of money. But there still needs to be adequate regulation regarding reserve requirements. Credit default swaps are basically a form of insurance, but AIG was not required to keep adequare reserves against them largely because they were exempted from regulation by Phil Gramm's legislation.
The inherent problem with all politicians is that they view themselves as indispensable and what they do as indispensable so they relentlessly do more of what they do.
Social conservatives are the conservative movement, the anti social conservative and open border libertarians only have 226,000 registered members making it irrelevant in almost all cases. It appears to be only the sixth largest party of 51 national parties.
This is from the 2004 Libertarian Party Platform.
Immigration:
“We call for the elimination of all restrictions on immigration, the abolition of the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Border Patrol, and a declaration of full amnesty for all people who have entered the country illegally.”
Please don’t forget that in 1913 our economy began to change from one that was based on gold to one that is based on paper...& President Nixon finished it off, in 1971 (???), by eliminating the Gold Standard.
Exactly. Gay marriage is a positive right thinly disguised as a right to action.
Nothing like a good shot of insanity!!
I might add that just because libertarians favored “deregulation” doesn’t mean that in this instance, “deregulation” was a libertarian philosophy. I think that politics simplifies a complicated issue into “deregulation” and “regulation”. This being a complicated issue, it’s hard to see where “deregulation” leads for most people. No libertarian would be in favor of “deregulating” murder, but that is a clear case. Clearly “deregulation” of murder violates basic free market principles, and no one would call it “deregulation”.
There were depressions and panics prior to that - some very bad ones.
Is that all ten thousand of them!!
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