If the Libertarian Party and the Tea Party could find common ground in the fiscal issues, they could unite and take back the Republican Party.
Ping
self bump
If you think to promote your ideas by condemning Russell Kirk, I’m afraid you’ve lost me from the get-go. I consider Kirk one of the most cogent spokesmen for conservatism in the 20th century. And I don’t see him as a “big -government appeaser” at all, but simply a champion of the very morality you extol as a crucial Jeffersonian component.
I may read your book, if for no other reason than to gain a new perspective on the ideological schism that is your premise. But I would suggest that you can gain more adherents by synthesizing the best of Kirk and Rothbard instead of writing them off as crackpots or worse.
Let me suggest that the way back to the common ground, you urge, lies in returning to the experience based values of the Founders, by direct appeals not to dogma but to the easily verifiable experiences common to the human comedy/adventure/tragedy/or whatever.
Our institutions were clearly based upon reasoning premised on verifiable experience (See Experience & Reason).
The assault on our institutions has been premised upon a neurotic inability to accept the actual diversity of talent. People who feel a need, for whatever reason to pretend that people are in fact equal, have been susceptible to the appeal of demagogues to undo the result from different levels of achievement, motivation & family benefits, via collectivist interference in the economic & social orders. The demagogues have used the Blame & Envy Game to promote class & ethnic hatred, and focus the susceptible on what is no better than a cloud borne fantasy of the human future.
Yet no one ever sat next to his or her equal in a classroom, unless an identical twin or triplet. At least in the unexplored memory bank of all of us, is the evidence that egalitarian collectivism is absolute nonsense. All bureaucratic intrusions, intended to correct reality can only waste resources, while mucking up social interaction.
William Flax
Not hard to see which side this author's on...
Leftists are totalitarian thugs. Period.
Holder and goons think they have an excuse to go after white middle class Americans... but it’s racist and lots of people can see it now...
http://news.yahoo.com/u-revives-group-fight-homegrown-extremists-officials-155621629.html
Definitely worth reading, and an issue that should be discussed but won’t be, it will soon blend into obscurity.
We do see this bifurcation played out often here on FR, and the writer is correct, it seems we are as far apart as we are close together, although the libertarian is still accepted here, I sometimes wonder how long that will last.
So the author is saying who is really at fault for our current situation, both libertarians and conservatives blame the democrats, but refuse to look within and work together as Jefferson suggested would be required to maintain a free republic.
I’ve often wondered why we are so far apart, and why each sees the other as radical, it seems ideology is practiced like religion, in other words you have yours and I have mine (religion) yet both agree there is only one God, yet thousands of religions claiming to serve the one God.
Good Read to get people thinking rather than just conforming to the status-quo.
Now for awhile I will contemplate what the above comment has got me into, but I might not defend it, as it would be an endless effort, that ultimately results in personal attacks, it seems there is very little discourse anymore.
But I will probably be close to the last one to post a comment anyway as comments are somewhat few this time of day.
Many FReepers call themselves libertarians. They imagine being a libertarian in the classical sense. They imagine libertarianism is simply adherence to the Constitution.
They are delusional and clueless.
Modern libertarianism has been hijacked by the likes of Von Mises, Ayn Rand, Buckley, and the Pauls. The social agenda of libertarianism is enough to make your skin crawl.
It is not enough to want less government. It must be balanced with moral values.