The end of the year and taking stock: all that. What do you want to be when you grow up, Daddy?

Two months into the blogosphere with Delaware Libertarian and I have learned several things, the most important of which is:

Attack health care, debate global warming, talk about gay rights, but never NEVER publish anything that might suggest that circumcision is OK.

If I hadn't decided from the outside not to turn off comments, I'd be tempted by now.

I've also learned that it takes awhile to find your own style and your niche in the blogosphere, and that there are ways you do and do not want to fight about ideas.

As an example, let me reflect for a moment on the health care slugfest that I got involved in with Dana Garrett, noman, Liz Allen and a few others over on First State Politics. I wrote some posts here expressing my profound fears about a single-payer system being adopted in Delaware. (For the record, nothing there has changed, but it's the process I want to talk about.) Dana and I went back and forth a few times in the comment section (each of us actually pasting in full-length articles that nobody else probably ever read), and nobody much noticed because this is a new blog. Then Dave Burris picked it up at FSP, and we went at it again--badly.

The tactics of the back and forth at its almost worst (for worst, so far, I am still reserving the various interchanges between Al Mascitti and Nancy Willing) include (A) clipping segments you think you can parody or rebut, not exactly out of context, but definitely at the expense of dealing with your opponent's main argument; (B) lecturing your opponent on his/her incorrect moral stance for having a different opinion; (C) taking your own analysis of your opponent's deep-seated psychological problems or intellectual shortcomings and then contriving to put it into his/her mouth: (D) battling over sources in a "na-na" way that merely befuddles the overwhelming majority of people who will never access the links; and (my favorite); (E) convincing yourself that in an incredibly complex debate you've found the one-liner from which your opponent will never recover, and instead will come crawling to your door with bleeding palms to request terms of surrender.

That's not the way I want to do business. Yeah, I understand that political commentary and fighting about issues is rough and tumble, but you know what? It doesn't justify the cheap shot.

Don't get me wrong (again): there are plenty of bloggers out there in our local blogosphere who specialize in the cheap shot for the entertainment of us all, and I read them. I just don't want to write them.

Of course, with all year-end resolutions there's a life-span, and we'll just have to see how well I can do, and whether or not your attention can be kept without it.

So, that having been said, what do I want to do with this blog as I grow up?

First off, I started this with the idea of raising consciousness of libertarianism in Delaware, necessarily my own pragmatic brand of it, that says (essentially) the hell with too much theory, libertarianism is about human freedom--economic and social. Libertarianism is about trying to run a society as much as possible without coercion, and with as much decision-making power placed in the hands of the individual as possible.

For libertarians, our biggest nemesis is statism--the idea that the government should be able to tell people what to do in a manner that keeps incrementally increasing until smoking in the house where your family lives can be characterized as child abuse.

This is often a tough sell because many people firmly believe that society has become so complex, and corporations so rapacious that only government can be counted upon to stand up for the people who have no voices. In their view, problems start in the private sector and must be resolved by the public sector. They multiply entitlements into rights, turn civil servants into civil masters, and insist on the state's right to protect us from ourselves.

They see the state as the collective embodiment of the people; we see the state as the unfortunate but necessary mechanism to which the people delegated expressly limited amounts of sovereignty.

And that sounds good, but our critics also have a couple of real good points:

(A) When most of the seminal libertarian thinkers like Mises and Hayek wrote, it was possible to juxtapose the state against the individual, and to see entrepreneurial capitalism as firmly on the side of the individual. Unfortunately, since the end of World War Two and the onset of both de-colonialism and the Cold War, we've seen the rise of two separate sets of entities that make this analysis somewhat dated: the mega-corporations and the non-governmental organizations. Both mega-corps and NGOs have muddied the waters of this pristine libertarian philosophy, because they've proven that the impulse toward aggressive, coercive authoritarianism is not limited to the state. For lack of a better term, there certainly is "corporate statism." So a challenge for libertarians in the 21st century is to defend the economic and social freedom of the individual against not just the state, but against any and all organizations that resort to coercion to achieve their ends.

(B) The second and most damning charge that can be brought against many (but not all) American libertarians is that they made a Faustian bargain with social conservatives in the last half of the 20th Century. And while social conservatives are generally pro-capitalism/free enterprise, they are NOT believers in limited government or, especially, intellectual freedom. More to the point, the social conservatives have proven JUST AS WILLING as the so-called "progressives" or old-fashioned "liberals" to utilize the incredible power of the state to remold society according to their own desires.

If you want a simplistic analysis: when libertarians held the reins in the Republican Party, America ended up with Ronald Reagan. When social conservatives took control, we got George W. Bush.

(C) Libertarians cannot afford to ignore either local/state politics or the challenges ahead of us in the next fifty years. We have to engage openly in the debates over health care (but do it with more class than I have done thus far); global warming; interventionist foreign policy, immigration, education, and so forth. And because libertarians assert the rights of the individual, we must also accept the responsibility of the individual: do your own damn research, and then base your position on facts and not preferences or prejudices. Libertarianism needs to be a political philosophy and not an ideological prism like social conservatism or progressive liberalism that blinds people to the information they don't want to see.


(D) Libertarians have to take a consistent stand for human freedom in all forms, including the freedom of people in other countries to tell us to screw off, the freedom of our neighbors to form the kinds of families that meet their needs, the freedom of people to make their own informed choices (even bad ones).

Libertarians need to think about how we actually get other people to think. For themselves.

So that's what I want this blog to be about.

I have an interest in Delaware politics, in religion, in gay rights, in global warming, in foreign policy, in science fiction, and in science (not necessarily in that order). I'm going to write about those things.

And, oh yes Lin, maybe even occasionally about baking bread.