The irony is that when I started this blog and named it Delaware Libertarian, I wasn't intending to be provocative.
When you see those bumper stickers (more often on the Net than on cars today, I'll grant you) that say, "Socially liberal, fiscally conservative," that's pretty much me. What I wrote that's still at the top of the page represents my paraphrase: "An idiosyncratic voyage into the proposition that maximum personal and economic freedom represents America's best hope to thrive in the 21st Century and beyond."
So damn foolish I can't now believe it.
Within the Delaware blogosphere, which is where I intended to set down one of the major roots of this endeavor, I quickly discovered that if you had the nerve to self-identify as a Libertarian you would be met with scorn that had to be overcome before anybody would even listen to your ideas or your analysis.
Which, frankly, is because the national Libertarian Party--like lots of third parties (maybe most third parties)--confuses ideology with issues, candidates with campaigns, and webcasts with building a political movement.
I posted recently about the simplistic idiocy of Libertarian presidential hopeful (is he really hoping? or just on drugs?) Wayne Allyn Root, who wants to be taken seriously while saying, "the solution to any problem is simple- less government, lower taxes, more personal responsibility, more rights for the individual, more choice, more free market competition (to solve the education and health care mess), and far more freedom."
Then there's the Libertarian Party's apparent plan to auction off its nomination to the highest fund-raiser, moronically titled, Liberty Decides, which at least one candidate--George Phillies--had the good sense or good grace to stay the hell away from.
I always thought Cynthia McKinney running for President as the Green Party's candidate was funny enough, but that's before I encountered a whole bevy of Libertarian wannabes, including:
The afore-mentioned Root, who has raised a whopping $14,330 for his campaign war chest, making him the number one fund-raiser in the contest. That would be, what, a substandard twenty minutes for Ron Paul?
Michael Jingozian, who wants to Reset America, and who really appears to be running for President in 2012 (he's socked away $8,415).
These two are followed, at $6,575 by Bob Jackson, who promises us (no shit) an Eagle Scout in the White House who will deliver cold nuclear fusion to end all of our energy problems.
Last but not least, there's Daniel Imperato with $5,999 and a platform that only his mother could love (that is, if she knew what the hell he was talking about):
Put in a grrr and it could have been written by donviti (because I'm often unsure what the hell he means, either).
Meanwhile, even though the national Libertarian Party opposed FISA and lobbied Democratic Senators to vote against it, that piece of sanity has to be matched against the official party response to the State of the Union address. Here are two excerpts, one about education and one about health care:
I think that's the Libertarian that Al, and noman, and Dana, and Jason all expected me to be.
The Libertarian Reform Caucus, on the other hand, would define me as a moderate or perhaps pragmatic Libertarian: "A moderate libertarian is one who merely wants significant cuts in the size of government and significant increases in personal liberty."
But that's still far too vague to be satisfying, especially to the kind of Libertarian who actually runs a labor union (in his spare time) and advocates strongly for a national responsibility to educate young Americans with disabilities and/or special needs as a budgetary priority.
So I guess I'll have to spell it out, again.
I am an American citizen with Libertarian beliefs. Please note that the "American citizen" part came in there first.
I believe that property rights are fundamental rights, but that doesn't diminish my allegiance to the other rights and obligations spelled out in the US Constitution--including all of its amendments.
I don't believe that your property rights can serve as an excuse to discriminate against anyone else on the basis of ethnicity, creed, gender, national origin, or sexual orientation [Dana, cut me a break if I left any out here; it's late.]
I believe in limited government with specifically defined powers, but--as Thomas Jefferson pointed out, "The Earth belongs to the living"--advances in technology, growth of population, and other factors will force us as a society to deal with issues that the Founders never could have dreamed. So the limits of government have to be redefined every generation.
That's where I become more specifically Libertarian. It scares the hell out of me that our redefinition of government never even appears to tolerate discussion of government getting smaller in some areas.
There has not been a justifiable reason for maintaining the US Post Office monopoly on the US mails for nearly twenty years.
While the government investment in interstate highways has revolutionized America for the better, the government fiasco with Amtrak and municipal experiments in light rail (that nobody wants to ride) point out that there are many areas in which a free market works better.
I'm a veteran of 21 years service, but the Department of Veterans Affairs should never have been elevated to a cabinet level post. Nor should we have ever invested in the creation of a substandard, socialized VA medical system; it would have been far cheaper, far more humane, and far more effective for the government simply to foot the bill for applicable veterans' health care on the free market (even if you think the free market distorts prices upward).
I do not advocate the elimination of the Department of Education at the Federal level, but if you ever met an organization without a defined purpose, DOE is it. No Child Left Unpunished represents the single largest nightmare visited on public education in this country since Plessy v Ferguson (although, as a child of the 1960s, I give the "new Math" a strong second place). It is a piecework of haphazard, heavy-handed interventions that has diverted more money, attention, and expertise away from the actual work of educating our children into the process of filling bureaucratic pigeonholes. You know what DOE ought to be doing: (1) coordinating research on best practices; (2) collecting educational data and statistics to describe American education; (3) providing resources and support in the most unfettered manner possible to states and localities, with specific targeted funds for (a) failing schools and (b) special needs children. And that's it. If we're not going to have a national curriculum (and culturally, we're just not going to accept that), the role of the Federal DOE is to support what the states and localities can do, helping out with money and expertise where possible, but not to dictate ridiculous standards.
I do advocate the elimination of the cabinet level position for Homeland Security. This is one of my professional research areas, and I can tell you this: you do not meet the challenge of terrorism by creating the largest bureaucracy in American history. The TSA should not only be eliminated, we should destroy the records that suggested we were dumb enough to create it in the first place, lest our grandchildren think we are idiots.
I believe in the 2nd Amendment: the right to arm bears--oops.
I believe that the rulings in the 1870s and 1880s that converted the civil rights language in the 14th Amendment into due process protection for the "artificial personages" that are corporations was one of the greatest disasters in American history. Libertarianism is about personal responsibility; how does codifying into law practices that do nothing else besides allow individuals to escape personal responsibility for their actions meet any reasonable standard of Libertarianism? It doesn't.
I believe in a non-interventionist foreign policy.
I believe in gay rights. (I think the only thing the government ought to be doing is sanctioning civil unions for everyone. Marriage is a religious and cultural term. If you want to get married, go to a church. If you expect tax breaks or to name the person who will make medical decisions for you, file for a civil union.)
I don't believe in the death penalty. Yeah, I'd like to. There are scum out there I'd be willing to pull the switch on myself, and I do know there is some evidence that it works as a deterrent. But you know what? I'm also a Libertarian Catholic, and I think that the State's right to take a life, whether in war or through the criminal justice system, has to be more carefully circumscribed than any other potential infringement on our lives and property rights. (Paradoxically, I am willing to support jury verdicts of justifiable homicide for any boy who brings my daughter home late.)
I believe in the right of workers to form contractual organizations with their peers (they call them unions, I believe), and to use those organizations to bargain with the business entities that intend to purchase their labor. I don't believe either party has the right to use coercion, but that's a really sticky subject that has to be discussed on a case by case basis.
I believe coercion comes in many forms other than purely physical, and that the overwhelming majority of them are morally repugnant. I am coerced into wearing a seat belt "for my own good"--what utter nanny-state horseshit. On the other hand, denying workers bathroom breaks or reasonable leave time to get their children to the doctor is also coercion.
I hate abortion, but I believe in the right of any woman to reproductive freedom. I may be going to hell for that one, my bishop tells me. But I live in a civil, secular society, and I like that fact. People who insist on a "Christian America" have missed the point of both.
I believe that it is a moral obligation of my representatives to craft a government that lives within its means. The power to tax, James Madison reminds us, is the power to destroy. I think first that there should be complete, mandatory transparency in taxation (like abolishing FCC rules that don't allow phone companies to list mandatory fees and taxes as such on your bill; or Delaware's big lie that our gross receipts tax isn't a sales tax). I don't like high taxes, and I don't like social engineering through the tax code, but I think there's a lot of self-serving crap on all sides to be cut away before we get down to a data-driven discussion of what we want government to do, how much we should be willing to pay for it, and what is the fairest way to spread that burden.
I oppose single-payer health care (no shit, say the regular readers of this blog), but I also see our system as broken in many ways. I honestly don't think anybody has yet thought far enough out of the coffin to find the right answer.
As you can see, I'm a mess.
But so are most people.
I label myself as Libertarian not because I fit any doctrinaire definition (hell, after this post even the Libertarian Reform Caucus may disown me), but because I see the personal and economic freedom of individual and families increasingly threatened by both statist and corporatist intrusions and coercions.
I label myself as Libertarian because I reject Democrat or Republican as party choices, Conservative or Liberal (Progressive) as ideological choices, and I think people who want to be Moderates are too squishy to be depended on in a fight.
I label myself as Libertarian because I am a damn crank with often conflicting values that refuse to reconcile themselves seamlessly into some cloth that other people can understand.
My mother introduced me to a saying that covers this when I was about six years old: "Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."
[Oh yeah, in case you're still reading.... I also believe in life on other worlds, and that it makes sense to spend the billions to go back to the Moon and onto Mars....]
That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
When you see those bumper stickers (more often on the Net than on cars today, I'll grant you) that say, "Socially liberal, fiscally conservative," that's pretty much me. What I wrote that's still at the top of the page represents my paraphrase: "An idiosyncratic voyage into the proposition that maximum personal and economic freedom represents America's best hope to thrive in the 21st Century and beyond."
So damn foolish I can't now believe it.
Within the Delaware blogosphere, which is where I intended to set down one of the major roots of this endeavor, I quickly discovered that if you had the nerve to self-identify as a Libertarian you would be met with scorn that had to be overcome before anybody would even listen to your ideas or your analysis.
Which, frankly, is because the national Libertarian Party--like lots of third parties (maybe most third parties)--confuses ideology with issues, candidates with campaigns, and webcasts with building a political movement.
I posted recently about the simplistic idiocy of Libertarian presidential hopeful (is he really hoping? or just on drugs?) Wayne Allyn Root, who wants to be taken seriously while saying, "the solution to any problem is simple- less government, lower taxes, more personal responsibility, more rights for the individual, more choice, more free market competition (to solve the education and health care mess), and far more freedom."
Then there's the Libertarian Party's apparent plan to auction off its nomination to the highest fund-raiser, moronically titled, Liberty Decides, which at least one candidate--George Phillies--had the good sense or good grace to stay the hell away from.
I always thought Cynthia McKinney running for President as the Green Party's candidate was funny enough, but that's before I encountered a whole bevy of Libertarian wannabes, including:
The afore-mentioned Root, who has raised a whopping $14,330 for his campaign war chest, making him the number one fund-raiser in the contest. That would be, what, a substandard twenty minutes for Ron Paul?
Michael Jingozian, who wants to Reset America, and who really appears to be running for President in 2012 (he's socked away $8,415).
These two are followed, at $6,575 by Bob Jackson, who promises us (no shit) an Eagle Scout in the White House who will deliver cold nuclear fusion to end all of our energy problems.
Last but not least, there's Daniel Imperato with $5,999 and a platform that only his mother could love (that is, if she knew what the hell he was talking about):
My strategy for Iraq is to implement an immediate cease fire, strengthen our troop base, and join with the Arab states for a long-term peace solution. We must get support within the Iraqi leadership to collaborate with, and bring peace to Iraq. In addition, America must setup a payback system for the US taxpayers and the money that they have spent in Iraq using revenues from oil sales. Iraq and its people must have compassion for the US troops that we've put in harm's way to protect their future democracy.
Put in a grrr and it could have been written by donviti (because I'm often unsure what the hell he means, either).
Meanwhile, even though the national Libertarian Party opposed FISA and lobbied Democratic Senators to vote against it, that piece of sanity has to be matched against the official party response to the State of the Union address. Here are two excerpts, one about education and one about health care:
Education: The President's 'No Child Left Behind Act' has failed from the very beginning, and its reauthorization would be a travesty to the American education system. Instead of unfunded, federal mandates with the intent of fixing our failing public schools, alternatives involving the private sector should be explored. Increased local control over public schools and the increased use of private alternatives will increase the quality of education for all American children. We call for abolishing the Department of Education and removing the federal government from educating our children.
Health care: Far too long have our politicians tried to find a government fix for the health care problem we have in America. Government interference in the health care system is the root of the problems we face. Only in eliminating government subsidies of health care will we find relief from increasing costs. The Libertarian Party calls for the elimination of all government entitlement programs related to health care.
I think that's the Libertarian that Al, and noman, and Dana, and Jason all expected me to be.
The Libertarian Reform Caucus, on the other hand, would define me as a moderate or perhaps pragmatic Libertarian: "A moderate libertarian is one who merely wants significant cuts in the size of government and significant increases in personal liberty."
But that's still far too vague to be satisfying, especially to the kind of Libertarian who actually runs a labor union (in his spare time) and advocates strongly for a national responsibility to educate young Americans with disabilities and/or special needs as a budgetary priority.
So I guess I'll have to spell it out, again.
I am an American citizen with Libertarian beliefs. Please note that the "American citizen" part came in there first.
I believe that property rights are fundamental rights, but that doesn't diminish my allegiance to the other rights and obligations spelled out in the US Constitution--including all of its amendments.
I don't believe that your property rights can serve as an excuse to discriminate against anyone else on the basis of ethnicity, creed, gender, national origin, or sexual orientation [Dana, cut me a break if I left any out here; it's late.]
I believe in limited government with specifically defined powers, but--as Thomas Jefferson pointed out, "The Earth belongs to the living"--advances in technology, growth of population, and other factors will force us as a society to deal with issues that the Founders never could have dreamed. So the limits of government have to be redefined every generation.
That's where I become more specifically Libertarian. It scares the hell out of me that our redefinition of government never even appears to tolerate discussion of government getting smaller in some areas.
There has not been a justifiable reason for maintaining the US Post Office monopoly on the US mails for nearly twenty years.
While the government investment in interstate highways has revolutionized America for the better, the government fiasco with Amtrak and municipal experiments in light rail (that nobody wants to ride) point out that there are many areas in which a free market works better.
I'm a veteran of 21 years service, but the Department of Veterans Affairs should never have been elevated to a cabinet level post. Nor should we have ever invested in the creation of a substandard, socialized VA medical system; it would have been far cheaper, far more humane, and far more effective for the government simply to foot the bill for applicable veterans' health care on the free market (even if you think the free market distorts prices upward).
I do not advocate the elimination of the Department of Education at the Federal level, but if you ever met an organization without a defined purpose, DOE is it. No Child Left Unpunished represents the single largest nightmare visited on public education in this country since Plessy v Ferguson (although, as a child of the 1960s, I give the "new Math" a strong second place). It is a piecework of haphazard, heavy-handed interventions that has diverted more money, attention, and expertise away from the actual work of educating our children into the process of filling bureaucratic pigeonholes. You know what DOE ought to be doing: (1) coordinating research on best practices; (2) collecting educational data and statistics to describe American education; (3) providing resources and support in the most unfettered manner possible to states and localities, with specific targeted funds for (a) failing schools and (b) special needs children. And that's it. If we're not going to have a national curriculum (and culturally, we're just not going to accept that), the role of the Federal DOE is to support what the states and localities can do, helping out with money and expertise where possible, but not to dictate ridiculous standards.
I do advocate the elimination of the cabinet level position for Homeland Security. This is one of my professional research areas, and I can tell you this: you do not meet the challenge of terrorism by creating the largest bureaucracy in American history. The TSA should not only be eliminated, we should destroy the records that suggested we were dumb enough to create it in the first place, lest our grandchildren think we are idiots.
I believe in the 2nd Amendment: the right to arm bears--oops.
I believe that the rulings in the 1870s and 1880s that converted the civil rights language in the 14th Amendment into due process protection for the "artificial personages" that are corporations was one of the greatest disasters in American history. Libertarianism is about personal responsibility; how does codifying into law practices that do nothing else besides allow individuals to escape personal responsibility for their actions meet any reasonable standard of Libertarianism? It doesn't.
I believe in a non-interventionist foreign policy.
I believe in gay rights. (I think the only thing the government ought to be doing is sanctioning civil unions for everyone. Marriage is a religious and cultural term. If you want to get married, go to a church. If you expect tax breaks or to name the person who will make medical decisions for you, file for a civil union.)
I don't believe in the death penalty. Yeah, I'd like to. There are scum out there I'd be willing to pull the switch on myself, and I do know there is some evidence that it works as a deterrent. But you know what? I'm also a Libertarian Catholic, and I think that the State's right to take a life, whether in war or through the criminal justice system, has to be more carefully circumscribed than any other potential infringement on our lives and property rights. (Paradoxically, I am willing to support jury verdicts of justifiable homicide for any boy who brings my daughter home late.)
I believe in the right of workers to form contractual organizations with their peers (they call them unions, I believe), and to use those organizations to bargain with the business entities that intend to purchase their labor. I don't believe either party has the right to use coercion, but that's a really sticky subject that has to be discussed on a case by case basis.
I believe coercion comes in many forms other than purely physical, and that the overwhelming majority of them are morally repugnant. I am coerced into wearing a seat belt "for my own good"--what utter nanny-state horseshit. On the other hand, denying workers bathroom breaks or reasonable leave time to get their children to the doctor is also coercion.
I hate abortion, but I believe in the right of any woman to reproductive freedom. I may be going to hell for that one, my bishop tells me. But I live in a civil, secular society, and I like that fact. People who insist on a "Christian America" have missed the point of both.
I believe that it is a moral obligation of my representatives to craft a government that lives within its means. The power to tax, James Madison reminds us, is the power to destroy. I think first that there should be complete, mandatory transparency in taxation (like abolishing FCC rules that don't allow phone companies to list mandatory fees and taxes as such on your bill; or Delaware's big lie that our gross receipts tax isn't a sales tax). I don't like high taxes, and I don't like social engineering through the tax code, but I think there's a lot of self-serving crap on all sides to be cut away before we get down to a data-driven discussion of what we want government to do, how much we should be willing to pay for it, and what is the fairest way to spread that burden.
I oppose single-payer health care (no shit, say the regular readers of this blog), but I also see our system as broken in many ways. I honestly don't think anybody has yet thought far enough out of the coffin to find the right answer.
As you can see, I'm a mess.
But so are most people.
I label myself as Libertarian not because I fit any doctrinaire definition (hell, after this post even the Libertarian Reform Caucus may disown me), but because I see the personal and economic freedom of individual and families increasingly threatened by both statist and corporatist intrusions and coercions.
I label myself as Libertarian because I reject Democrat or Republican as party choices, Conservative or Liberal (Progressive) as ideological choices, and I think people who want to be Moderates are too squishy to be depended on in a fight.
I label myself as Libertarian because I am a damn crank with often conflicting values that refuse to reconcile themselves seamlessly into some cloth that other people can understand.
My mother introduced me to a saying that covers this when I was about six years old: "Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."
[Oh yeah, in case you're still reading.... I also believe in life on other worlds, and that it makes sense to spend the billions to go back to the Moon and onto Mars....]
That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
Comments
My only genuine problem with the Libertarian Party, other than the fact that I get tired of hearing minor parties bitch almost as quickly as I do for major parties, is that their arguments seem to be based on absolutist ideological declarations. Big government is bad government, prohibition is ineffective, a free market benefits everyone... there are pragmatic aspects of these arguments that are probably very effective when applied with proper discretion, but simply saying that government is bad doesn't convince me.
By that definition, I'm a libertarian and so are many conservatives, even though we'd reject the label. Like Mat, I have many libertarian leanings (although I bet they're different ones), but, in my case, they are outweighed by a resistance to swift and sudden change. Small government is a good thing, but suddenly changing structures the people have grown accustomed to can be more harmful than leaving them in place is my basic issue with the more doctrinaire libertarians.
I, for one, welcome your incisive, detailed, thoughtful, logical contributions as well as your cool-headed, fair-minded argumentation style. I know others do too.
I have been meaning to write it, but I really really enjoy reading your stuff. I find myself marveling at how prolific you are without being sloppy or verbose. I can only imagine the speed at which your mind works.
You are a CREDIT to libertarian ideals and Libertarian politics. Thanks for joining the fray and please keep it up. You are doing yeoman's work for many of us not as gifted in crystallizing our thoughts and maintaining a coherent, sustained dialogue about the merits of libertarian lines of thought towards society, culture, politics, and life.
Your blog should be read by far wider audiences than the limits of Delaware's blogosphere.
Just my opinion, for what it's worth.
As to the question, I think Paul put his finger on a problem for libertarians generally, which is how far gone is our “system” into massive centralized structures built into governance, big and small. Libertarian-thinking people usually have a revolutionary if not rebellious nature such that gradualism and incrementalism in rolling back leviathan can seem tedious and ultimately unproductive. It is so frustrating that many seem to retreat into doctrine and all-or-nothing politics. However (unfortunately) a sustained gradual tearing-down of the multitudinous, freedom-crushing hydra may be our only practical path. The beast will not be slaughtered in one fell swoop, but more likely by a million careful and well-placed cuts. Nevertheless let's begin and never give up!
Dana may have been the most virulent of early critics (and he's come around quite a bit in the last two weeks), but you can find knee-jerk Libertarianist dismissals in recent posts from noman, Al Mascitti, Jason, and others.
I don't mind it at this point, because it is a necessary part of actually building a relevant Libertarian brand in Delaware.
I just honestly didn't realize that level of antipathy was out there when I started.
Thanks for your other kind comments.
When I finally (tee-hee) take over the LPD, maybe I can convince you to make a run for office under that banner.
I have a problem committing myself to any ideology. It’s just not always clear cut, and I have a hard time understanding people who are staunch “whatevers”, be it Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, or any other party-with-a-platform-and-you-had-better-believe-it-or-else.
I think there are many libertarians out there. They just don’t know it yet. Thanks to your blog, maybe soon they will.