Libertarian vs. libertarian
So, apparently there’s this Boortz guy, who I had never heard of (I get my news and commentary from the web). He has this radio show and apparently has libertarian leanings. I caught about ten minutes of it this morning and, unfortunately, there was some CourtTV person guest hosting. And by guest hosting, she was name-dropping, taking calls from people she shouldn’t take calls from (some guy advocating the 10 commandments as law), and talking about Michael Jackson. I wasn’t impressed. She made one good point about justice for the wealthy, here’s a clue: there is none.
RTB’s own smijer has created an anti-boortz blog (which I hope is not some sort of Bozeman in the making). Apparently, smijer listed me as an example of “libertarian logic.”
It should be noted that I am not a Libertarian but I do like some aspects of Libertarianism. However, Libertarianism can’t work. Clayton Cramer opined that he watched the TV show Cops just to remind him of why Libertarianism cannot work. You will always have the lowest common denominator ruining it for everyone. Face it, not everyone is nice guy like me.
Libertarianism needs to drop the opposition to all social programs (it’s not practical to oppose public education outright); Libertarians need to stop nominating people who get into shootouts with the police (strangely, they’re not on Cops) or nominating people who die themselves blue from taking magic potions designed to keep the orbital mind control lasers from penetrating their brains; and Libertarians need to adopt a moderate libertarian approach first to get their foot in the door on the political scene. As of now, the weirdos have done the Libertarians in.
This is why I refer to myself as a libertarian with a small L. Libertarianism has some good ideals:
Small government
Personal responsibility
Valuing liberty among all else
All good stuff!
But other things that need work:
Opposing all welfare
Opposing public education
Wanting to ban all taxes
Aligning themselves with some of the whacko militia groups
You have to work on this stuff guys to be taken seriously. Yes, welfare, education, taxes and other things need some major work. But we can’t do without them.
December 12th, 2003 at 2:45 pm
Ann Coulter says her Libritarian fans are Trekies who live in their mother’s basements.
December 12th, 2003 at 6:26 pm
Comedy is all Ann Coulter is fit for.
December 12th, 2003 at 7:43 pm
SayUncle — I hope you didn’t mind the plug. I didn’t realize that you are not a Libertarian, because I had heard you mention libertarianism in an prominent light on occasion.
Anyway, I figured that some of those guys, having been nursed at the tender breast of Neal Boortz, might not know what real libertarian commentary sounded like. Since you do an exceptional job holding up your end in that regard, so I sent them your way.
I hope you don’t mind.
December 12th, 2003 at 7:44 pm
Oh yeah, ixnay on all the bungled sentences above.. I did a re-write & didn’t clean up all my loose ends, apparently.
December 12th, 2003 at 9:19 pm
Good summary of small L libertarian principles. There’s also a strong element of entrepeneurism and capitalism.
Some libertarians go too far. I forget who it was who looked at the U.S. budget and said “let’s keep the department of defense and get rid of everything else.” That’s taking things too far.
Then again, I used to look aghast at people who said we should get rid of the federal Department of Education. Now I’m starting to agree. Every presidential election there’s talk of reforming education, and nothing really changes. Education should be handled at the local level, not the federal level.
Just from a managerial perspective, you shouldn’t hold a manager responsible for the performance of anyone he can’t fire. If the federal government can’t fire a teacher (and they can’t) then they have no power over the teacher, and shouldn’t be accountable for that teacher’s performance.
December 12th, 2003 at 10:00 pm
I don’t mind at all smijer. Actually, i have only Libertarian tendencies which is why i use the little l version. I guess it is moderate libertarianism.
December 12th, 2003 at 10:16 pm
One more thing smiger, i darn sure didn’t mind the several hundred hits your link brought to me today 🙂
December 14th, 2003 at 1:25 am
There are also small “l” liberals, big “L” Liberals. Same distinctions, for the most part. I consider myself a small “l” liberal myself.
December 14th, 2003 at 1:46 am
The reason the LP won’t ever win an election is because of their personal philosophy, they are all essentially anarchists. Libertarianism automatically makes authority suspect. As such, it’s impossible for them to conduct a formal meeting, much less put up a Presidential candidate who had a snowball in hell chance of winning.
For instance, I went to an LP meeting one time and the President of the local party was there and fixing to start a meeting. About that time, one of the members chimed in and said, who gave you the authority to start the meetings? You can only imagine the problems that ensued.
It doesn’t take much to realize that the LP is doomed, but that libetarianism with a small l will have to live on through the Republican Party. In the younger generation…people like me.
The thing about that book, the Emerging Democratic Majority that’s correct is that there is more of a technological generation that has distinct voting trends. These techies will soon have a large electoral power. The techies, though, are more evenly divided than the book suggests though. Divided between libertarian leaning Republicans and Howard Dean liberals, who are more libertarian than the Democratic mainstream.
That’s just my two bits, though.
December 14th, 2003 at 11:04 am
The problem, of course, comes in the vagueness of the terms you use to describe the “good” parts of libertarianism. It’s easy to get people to agree that “we should shrink the government,” but once you start suggesting specific things to cut, it gets dicey. “Cut the government, sure, but not the programs that benefit me,” is the attitude. It’s also why flat tax proposals have fallen, well, flat. “Simplify the tax code? Sure, I’m all for it,” people say. “But wait, you can’t take away my deduction…”
Personal responsibility is similarly vague. One imagines this is a code word for doing away with regulation, but this ignores the “ounce of prevention / pound of cure” thing. Any system of government must take into account the tendency of people (especially the government itself) to do some pretty lousy things. So the rules need to be spelled out, and the remedies must be put in place for when such rules are broken.
Last, “liberty above all else.” (I assume you mean “above” and not “among.”) Here I’ll agree with you, but remember that your right to swing your fist ends at my chin. So, again, to some extent, those rules need to be spelled out, at least insofar as proposed remedies. Otherwise, you devolve into a completely litigious society, which is part of the problem of big-L Libertarianism.
December 14th, 2003 at 11:09 am
Wow! You mean a political party has a fuzzy ideology? That’s unheard of! Except in every other political party.
December 14th, 2003 at 10:03 pm
Well, we’re talking about the difference between limited specifics and no specifics. You rule out the vast majority of the official Libertarian Party platform, so what’s left? (And I think it’s good that you do this — virtually everywhere that the LP is specific, they’re insane!)
December 15th, 2003 at 10:36 am
One other classic Libertarian tenet is no initation of force. It sounds better in theory than in practice, since in practice they can always find a reason to justify the use of force. The most common way is to define fraud as the use of force.
December 15th, 2003 at 1:35 pm
What really shrank my L was when the subject of school vouchers came up. The government has no business taxing people to finance education, they maintain, so therefore we will leave the goverment school monopoly in place without competition until the glorious revolution takes place. I can comprehend the principals behind this, but the position is functionally anti-liberty in the real world.
May 31st, 2005 at 4:53 pm
[…] ughts I’d like to hear. === === === === === Two posts that caught my eye, one from Say Uncle, who writes about his differentiation of Libertarian and libertarian, […]