rcrocket wrote:Coggins7 wrote:I am a Libertarian Conservative,
I think this is oxymoronic.
Do you oppose abortion on demand? [If yes, you are not a Libertarian.]
Do you endorse drug interdiction? [If yes, you are not a Libertarian.]
Do you support the immigration fence along the border? [If yes, you are not a Libertarian.]
Do you support anti-obscenity laws? [If yes, you are not Libertarian.]
Do you support the war in Iraq? [If yes, you are not a Libertarian.]
Just wondering. Although I endorse your stand on religion, I take offense at neocons who claim also to be Libertarian. As I see it, the Bush administration has done more to bust the budget and support tariffs and subsidies than the Demos have ever done in this century.
rcrocket
Thank you,
thank you rocket for a response and challenge that really asks questions of me out of sincere intellectual curiosity and a desire to understand someone else's views. What a breath of fresh air that is!
William Buckley used the two terms off and on to describe his own philosophy, and I use it in the same vein. It should be understood, as applied to my own views, as a kind of cocktail, not as an assimilation of one into the other. I'm conservative on some issues, and lean more to libertarianism on others. It will come as no surprise that my libertarian leanings are primarily in the realm of political economy and the proper size, role, and responsibility of government. I'm a social conservative, but with certain reservations as I've grown older that might incense some conservatives. For example, I was positively Hell bent against any kind of drug legalization in my younger days. I'm not so sure today (and I've moved toward Buckley's position on this over time). I haven't made up my mind in toto as yet, and I'm not sure what such a social experiment would really create socio-culturally, but my position is not nearly as hardened as it once was. I believe in the minimal state (following Nozick) but with modifications and reservations. Our military is only perhaps half as large as it needs to be to deal with the very real threats faced by this country and the west in the foreseeable future, and one of Bush's major failings is his failure to rebuild it after its evisceration in the nineties and attempt to fight the global war on Islamism with a skeleton crew military. This is, indeed, the primary function of good government in a constitutional republic: to protect the rights, property, and lives of its citizens from both crime and external threat. Most of what government does today is completely extra constitutional, and invades many areas where the individual or local communities would be far better served by making their own decisions and finding their own solutions within the constitutional framework. So I'm a mixed bag.
Again, I don't think convenience abortion should just be banned. I think Roe should be overturned as a matter of the bad law it is and the entire question of convenience abortion on demand returned to the states where the question should have been worked out in the first place. That might upset some social conservatives, and I understand that, but the more libertarian position on this; that the courts need to be removed from cultural and political questions such as this entirely as they have no business inserting themselves into 10th amendment problems such as this is the better position, and indeed, this is something that I think conservatives and libertarians could come together on.
I don't see libertarianism and conservatism as oxymoronic except at the outer edges on some core issues. Both modern conservatism and libertarianism are modern variations of classical liberalism, abeit with some differences. Conservatism is very close to libertarianism in matters of economics, political economy, and what constitutes "good government". Where it diverges is the degree to which government has a responsibility to ensure that society does not fray and unravel due to the kind of moral deterioration we've seen over the last forty or so years and what is to be done about it. Libertarians tends much more toward a secularist, pragmatist view of society and can be quite hostile to religious sensibilities here and there. Conservatives, such as myself, take a dim view of purely economic or political answers to deeper questions of human nature and the effects that socio-cultural artifacts such as pornography and massive recreational drug use have upon the culture and its most important institutions, such as the family.
Unfortunately, on social issues (as well as national security), libertarians and the left have made common cause all to often, which is one reason I see myself much more as a modern conservative that as a Libertarian. Libertarians take a laissez faire position on many things such as pornography, prostitution, and drug usage and would simply legalize such practices and let individuals take responsibility for the consequences of these actions, ignoring, however, the larger effects for society as a whole--including effects reaching those who's rights or safety may be endangered by those who engage in such behavior, especially when such behaviors reach a critical mass in a society such that large scale effects begin to impact larger segments of society who want nothing to do with such things. Libertarians are right to want to allow individuals to suffer the consequences of their own choices but wrong to ignore the direct and indirect effects upon innocent cultural bystanders who must, regardless, suffer a number of costs associated with massive social degeneration of the kind we've seen just in my life time.
Smoking a joint in your living room doesn't affect me directly and its none of my direct business, its true. Until you ram into me at the intersection and brake my ribs. Then your drug use becomes my problem as well as yours, and
I now have a problem with
your use. Take a look at the numbers of increased medical costs, lost productivity, and increased social service spending just since the eighties due to recreational drug use (including alcohol, cocaine, marijuana, and other drugs of abuse) and you see that, as individual use becomes mass use, effects cascade and reverberate throughout society as a whole and suddenly, I'm feeling the effects, as well as my children (who have to put up with incessant badgering at school to try this or that, and endless glorifications of drug use in the media).
If you like to pay for sex with different woman and end up destroying your marriage, dissolving your family, and influencing the production of the various social pathologies associated with such conditions, then, or coures, as you're accomplishing your own destrution, I feel no direct effect. and if this happens only once in a blue moon in a culture in which such is rare, then the impact upon me is minimal if at all. If, on the other hand, you live in a society where such is common (as is adultery and marriage destruction of the normative sort), than, regardless of what happens to you personally, the social pathologies and psychological problems associated with such situations, and the manner in which those social pathologies and problems, as manifested in the continuing lives of you and your children on into adulthood, will be born not only by you and them but by the rest of society, not just in higher medical and mental heath costs born across the culture, but by the diminution and coarsening of the entire culture at its core as more and more people go through life bearing the scars of abuse, immorality, and the abandonment of principle by the one's they love.
Libertarianism tend not to take this kind of analysis into consideration, but leans toward a simpler utilitarian concept of cost and benefit, and this is one reason I actually lean more toward conservatism than pure libertarianism, although I still keep that label attached to my personal philosophy as a addendum.
Now as to your specific questions:
Do you oppose abortion on demand? [If yes, you are not a Libertarian.]
Yes, I oppose abortion on demand. However, I don't believe, with many conservatives, that this opposition should be understood as a battle of the stacking of the courts. The entire thing should be removed from the judiciary where it had no business being in the first place and taken back to the deliberative democratic institutions of state legislators, where the people can decide for themselves which they prefer, and accountable politicians can be held to answer for their legislation.
Do you endorse drug interdiction? [If yes, you are not a Libertarian.]
I still do at this time, but I'm of two minds on this matter, as I mentioned above.
Do you support the immigration fence along the border? [If yes, you are not a Libertarian.]
I support a something akin to The Great Wall of China along the border. In this case, I'm not a Libertarian.
Do you support anti-obscenity laws? [If yes, you are not Libertarian.]
I'd need a precise definition of this, but to be clear in just one point, I agree with Bork and Reisman that pornography has no inherent constitutional free speech protection since it is not speech, but simply imagery that creates feelings and perceptions within the individual.
Do you support the war in Iraq? [If yes, you are not a Libertarian.]
Yes, I do, even despite the serious mistakes that have been made, and in this individual case, again, I'm not Libertarian.
Just wondering. Although I endorse your stand on religion, I take offense at neocons who claim also to be Libertarian. As I see it, the Bush administration has done more to bust the budget and support tariffs and subsidies than the Demos have ever done in this century.
This administration's record domestically has been abysmal. Bush and a Republican majority have gone farther to destroying the Republican party as a functioning alternative to our indigenous Fabian Socialists than the Democrats ever have. The Republican's may have ruined any chance for smaller and less invasive government for the rest of our life times, as their base is poised en masse to desert the party. Conservatism is in abeyance within the party and we now have "big government Republicans" who have made their peace with Big Brother and its seductive charms.
I stood, jaw hanging, as these folks signed into law the biggest increase in the size of the welfare state since the original Great Society at the same time Medicare and Social Security are set to begin financially imploding in roughly 10 years (the time at which social Security begins spending more than it takes in). I watched as Ted Kennedy was allowed to write the education reform bill, while Bush signed McCain/Feingold into law, and while the Party I once supported marches Hell bent and heels dug in toward the rewarding of millions of illegals for breaking the law, oblivious to their constituents. I haven't been a Republican for about three years now, and won't be again until and if this Party comes to its senses.
Bush is very much a Nixonian president, governing to the right in areas of national security, but accommodating the Left domestically with a vengeance. The largest expansions of the welfare state occurred under Nixon, not during the Sixties under Johnson and the original Great Society. Its difficult to imagine a larger expansion of government were Al Gore to be President (Although Gore is a very dangerous fanatic who would be busy finding not as yet melted ice bergs for waterborne Poler Bears while Islamofascists plotted mass death in American cities, so we're all better off on that score regardless).
Loran