Oh goodie - Bob Barr is running for President as a Libertarian (LA Times):

WASHINGTON — Bob Barr, a former congressman from Georgia and a former Republican, today announced his candidacy for president as a Libertarian who would rein in federal spending and foreign wars.

“The government has run amok fiscally,” he said at a press conference. Saying that during the first quarter of this year the private sector was losing millions of jobs while the federal government was “hiring with enthusiasm,” Barr added, “As the American people see their standard of living falling, the standard of government keeps going up.”

So far so good…

“There’s not a great deal of substance there in terms of a commitment to cutting the size of government,” Barr said He said no one who had authored the McCain-Feingold campaign reforms that cap individual donations could call himself a conservative, “at least with a straight face.”

Fair enough, though, according to Army of Dog, some liberals are still afraid of what McCain wants to do to the government.

Barr also lashed Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton for saying that if Iran threatens Israel’s existence, the United States should “obliterate Iran.” Calling the New York senator’s statement “tremendously dire,” Barr called the possibility of Iran possessing nuclear weapons “remote” and said he has seen “no evidence that indicates that is an imminent likelihood.”

Saying both the Republican and Democratic Parties have “bought into a system of running a charity called the United States of America,” Barr blasted programs that use public funds to educate the children of illegal immigrants and maintain foreign military bases “that have no more efficacy in the 21st century.“

And there’s why nobody takes the Libertarian Party seriously.  The Libertarian Party’s idea of foreign policy can be best summed up as, “Take our toys, go home, get out of any and all alliances, and pretend we can just chill out in the Western Hemisphere for the rest of all eternity without anyone messing with us.”  I wish I was kidding - here’s the official LP foreign policy plank:

American foreign policy should seek an America at peace with the world and the defense — against attack from abroad — of the lives, liberty, and property of the American people on American soil. Provision of such defense must respect the individual rights of people everywhere.

The principle of non-intervention should guide relationships between governments. The United States government should return to the historic libertarian tradition of avoiding entangling alliances, abstaining totally from foreign quarrels and imperialist adventures, and recognizing the right to unrestricted trade, travel, and immigration.

Keep in mind here that the United States government hasn’t used the “historic libertarian tradition” outlined above since, oh, the First Barbary War in 1801 and the Monroe Doctrine.  Also keep in mind that, in many cases, many of the governments we deal with on a day by day basis don’t respect the individual rights of their citizens, which means it’s a little difficult to find a Libertarian way of dealing with those governments without, y’know, not respecting the individual rights of the people “represented” by that government.  Fortunately, according to the Libertarian Party, it is quite possible for us to exercise a right to unrestricted trade, travel, and immigration when we keep to ourselves and avoid foreign entanglements - this has plenty of historic fact behind it, if you ignore impressment, piracy, the Lusitania, Pearl Harbor, and any other issue this country has had while pursuing an isolationist foreign policy.

Look, I’m all for Libertarianism - I love the idea of a small domestic government and low taxes.  It sounds great.  However, if the Libertarian Party ever wants to be taken seriously in this country, they need to realize that, for better or worse, the past 200 years of American history did, in fact, happen, and there were some very valuable lessons to learn from that time period.  Trying to roll back the clock and pretend nothing happened between now and then while also pretending that, if we just magically wave our Constitutional wands, nobody will ever mess with us again is pure lunacy.  We have a strong foreign policy for a reason - every single time we’ve tried to not have a strong foreign policy, we’ve received the shaft each and every time without fail.  Until the LP comes to grips with that, I just can’t bring myself to vote for them in good conscience anymore.

This isn’t a continuation of my Small l post so much as a spur, a small branch line to an isolated resource hole somewhere.

Army of Dog had an interesting point today:

In the world of lefties taking guns away from law-abiding citizens who carry them for self defense will keep criminals and psychopaths from using guns to kill innocent people. Just how in the hell that happens no one seems to know. They just believe it and it doesn’t matter if banning guns makes you more, less, or equally safe, because as long as they can feel better about the situation, actual results are meaningless.

The difference between a liberal and a conservative is generally how they view the efficacy of governmental action. To understand why, let’s take a brief step into the wayback machine…

There’s just one problem - government actually is good at certain things. Government excels at solving any problem that the entire public, by necessity, is interested in.

The difference between liberals and conservatives is where, precisely, that line should be drawn. A liberal will tell you that the government is great at managing the economy and working the excesses out of it, and that it should because, by necessity, the entire public is interested in the economy. Conversely, a liberal will also tell you that the government is not so great at managing the private lives of its citizens - people will do what they want to do, after all, so there’s no point in regulating, say, what goes on in people’s bedrooms. A conservative will frequently issue the opposing position on both sides, declaring that government is more of a hindrance than a help in the economy, imposing unwanted inefficiencies and distorting market economics, but that government is great at handling moral issues, which the public, naturally, should be interested in. As a libertarian, I think both sides are right, wrong, nuts, and cogent simultaneously, which probably just means I need more medication.

Back to Army of Dog’s point, from a liberal perspective, they have a rather optimistic view of how well government can regulate market economics, which is precisely how they define gun control - if government eliminates supply, there will be no more guns. Of course, many of the same liberals that think that government can eliminate the supply of guns through market regulation are also the same ones that point out that the government can’t regulate drugs, but, realistically, we can’t ask all people to be as consistent politically and philosophically as yours truly, now can we? Point being, the reason liberals think that gun control works, regardless of statistics indicating otherwise, is because they believe in government and its ability to perform socially responsible actions for the public. More importantly, they believe that, since the government can be a force for public good, it is in everyone’s interest to allow government to solve these problems.

Of course, before anyone says anything, conservatives are absolutely no better at this - they just believe that liberals are focusing on the wrong problems. The approach is still the same - the government has the ability to positively mold the public. The difference is that, instead of gay rights, you have the protection of marriage. Instead of protecting the people from economic dislocations, conservatives prefer to protect businesses… and so on. If you have a conservative telling you that they should allow prayer in public school and a liberal saying they should ban it, they’re both talking out of the same side of the argument - government should have a role in whether there should be prayer in school or not. Is this right? Well, it depends on your point of view and whether you feel that the public should, by necessity, be interested in that specific issue.

Herein, of course, is the rub - we as a country really can’t agree what the government should be involved in. That’s why I said that government excels at solving any problem that the entire public, by necessity, is interested in - not should be interested in. When government attempts to tackle issues that the a significant portion of the public isn’t interested in, it fails miserably - see the War on Drugs, abortion regulation before Roe v. Wade, gun control, and more.

In the end, both conservatives and liberals enjoy talking about personal rights and liberties, and both conservatives and liberals have faith that the government can be used to affect positive changes in the issues they care about. From where I’m sitting, they’re both wrong, and I guarantee you I’m not the only one that feels that way.

I’m having a little trouble finding something interesting to blog about, so I’m just going to throw down something that I’ve been thinking of doing for a while. For whatever it’s worth, it’s lightly inspired by one of Rachel’s latest articles.

Politically and philosophically, I’m a small-L libertarian - I think that a smaller, limited government is best, and that citizens should allow their government to tell other citizens what do do as little as possible. That said, as I’ve made abundantly clear in the past, I definitely prefer a muscular foreign policy. I’m also not into some of the stranger parts of Libertarian dogma, such as privatizing our road system and abolishing public property. There’s a question that begs itself in these stances, however - when should government intervene?

To understand why many conservatives and libertarians have problems with government, it’s best to understand how the oft-heralded alternative of free markets work. Think of a retail establishment for a second. In a retail establishment, you have two players - the operators of the retail establishment and the consumers. The consumers want to get as much as they can for as little time and money as possible. The operators want the consumer to maximize spending in their store. Equilibrium is achieved when the consumers and the operators get what they want enough where both are happy with the situation. This is the most efficient method of distributing goods we’ve been able to come up with - it keeps everything between the entity that needs the good and the entity that is either producing or delivering the good.

The problem with government is that, by its very nature, everyone is involved, or, at the very least, a group of people are involved that reflect neither the interests of the consumer or the producer. A decent example of where this could be a problem would be in contraband - the customer wishes to purchase a good, the producer wishes to sell the customer a good, but the government steps in (for whatever reason) and forbids the transaction. Alternatively, the government can raise taxes to a high enough level on that good where it’s impossible for the consumer and the producer to achieve satisfaction. The end result is the same - neither the consumer nor the producer can get what they want. In Libertarian and some conservative circles (depending on the context), this can be a big problem. After all, what right does anybody have to tell two consenting adults what they can do with their time and money? Consequently, government is seen as overbearing and inefficient - it restricts these transactions and its interference makes it less likely that the consumer and producer will find an arrangement that’s maximally mutually beneficial. The Big-L Libertarian answer is to simply come as close to abolish government as humanly possible.

There’s just one problem - government actually is good at certain things. Government excels at solving any problem that the entire public, by necessity, is interested in. Take law enforcement, for example. At one point, law enforcement was largely a privatized, for-profit endeavor, engaged in by the likes of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. It was fairly effective, but there were two big problems with this approach:

1. Only the people that could afford the services could receive them.
2. The methods of the for-profit groups weren’t transparent to all parties involved - they only needed to be somewhat transparent between the entity purchasing the service and the entity providing the service.

The trouble with this arrangement is that law enforcement is something which all citizens have a vested interest in. In a just society, you want the law to apply equally to all people. If only the well-off are able to afford law enforcement, only the well-off will receive justice. That’s a problem, and is precisely the sort of role that government is great at stepping into. Equally importantly, government can also be a wonderful tool for ensuring that every possible party can have a say in the activities upon whatever government is tasked to do. In the example of the police, for example, government can circumscribe what limits the police in the process of solving or preventing a crime (How much force are they allowed to use? Do they have to read you your rights?).

As great as that sounds on paper, though, there are some very practical limits to the performance of a government. To start with, since our government, by its very nature, must be responsive to every single entity that addresses it (note that responsiveness does not correlate to satisfaction), it’s going to be extremely inefficient. To understand why, pretend you have a job where you’re assigned to do something but, whenever someone comes up to you and asks you a question, you have to respond with an answer. You don’t have to provide a detailed answer and you don’t necessarily have to provide the right answer on the first try, but you must come up with an answer of some sort. It doesn’t matter what your actual duty is going to be - if enough people are interested in what you’re doing, you’re going to be answering a lot of questions, and it’s going to take you a while to finish that task, whatever it might be. The second problem with government is that, by its very nature, it’s very difficult for it to do something that’s against the will of the majority at any point in time. Going back to our example, let’s pretend that not only can people ask you questions, they can also tell you what to do. If enough people tell you to do something else, you must do that instead. However, if enough people change their minds, or if enough people come in after the first group come in and tell you to do what you were originally doing, you have to go back to doing that.

Now, imagine that person being your doctor or a teacher. Sounds fun, doesn’t it?

Those are big weaknesses. Sometimes, things just need to get done - if too much time is spent talking about it, it may never get done, whatever it may be. Consequently, government action only makes sense in situations where either time is not a pressing issue or where a vast majority of the people involved simply don’t care about the particulars - they only care about the end goal. A great example of the former situation is the Interstate highway system; since it’s an organic system, it didn’t need to be finished quickly. Consequently, even though the Interstate Highway project began during the Eisenhower administration, it didn’t matter that it wasn’t finished until 1991, if you can ever considered it finished at all. A great example of the latter situation is the military; though people certainly care whether or not the military, say, abuses prisoners or shoots civilians, there’s not much desire by the public or the government (Harry Reid notwithstanding) to legislatively define strategy, troop movement, or logistics.

Note that, thus far, we haven’t even touched on morality. When should government intervene for the protection of its own citizens? What should government protect the citizens from, exactly? That, I’m afraid, will need to be a topic for another time.

Ah, the joys of going to Fark, finding a story about a congressman in Michigan wanting to increase gas taxes, and then watching the ensuing aftermath…

Most of the comments were along this vein:

Quel 2008-03-20 05:45:56 PM
Lets see:
-Less people on the roads, requiring less repairs and reducing pollutants.
-Lots more tax revenue.

Doesn’t sound too bad to me. Use some of that 50 cents/gal to fund projects to boost alternative fuels.

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chimp_ninja 2008-03-20 04:26:03 PM
burndtdan: the problem with this idea is that a vice tax doesn’t work on something that is a necessary part of the lives of citizens. if you tax cigarettes, they can quit smoking. if you tax gas, they can’t suddenly stop going to work or magically put an alternative fuel infrastructure in place.

Gasoline taxes are tricky for exactly this reason– regressive impact. At the same time, you do want people to use buses, trains, or even carpools. You want people to walk a few blocks to get their groceries. You want an incentive to buy locally-produced foods and goods instead of shipping them in from China. You want people to demand higher fuel economy from car companies. You even want people to frickin’ check their tire pressure once in a while.

Gas is ~$8/gallon in most of Europe, where incomes are lower. People find ways. If you phase in a significant gasoline tax, it will send a message to towns and cities– plan and zone appropriately so that people don’t need to drive everywhere, and get off your ass and put together a working mass transit system appropriate for the size of your town. For some places, that might mean a fleet of buses burning biodiesel. For bigger cities, it might mean light rail and a subway/el.

As for the botched headline– this should be a conservative/libertarian principle. Burning gasoline creates externalities (carbon dioxide, other emissions) which presently aren’t accounted for. By including the cost of cleanup (including future R&D to make petroleum-derived fuel obsolete) in the price of fuel, you’re advocating personal responsibility– use as much gas as you like, but you’d better clean up your mess.

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dallashockey 2008-03-20 05:46:31 PM
good. tax it like cigarettes. like a sin tax. we all know what emissions are doing to the world. killing it and people. tax the hell out of it and maybe people wont be so selfish and they might learn to carpool or take public transit or even better yet. QUIT BUYING CARS THAT GET shiatTY GAS MILEAGE!

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kc987654 2008-03-20 06:07:28 PM
Catsaregreen: You know, some folks actually need a vehicle that gets crap gas mileage, everything from farmers to small-bidness owners to families with more than 1 kid. (I have 1 kid, drive a Scion. If and when kid No. 2 comes, I’m getting something bigger with less gas mileage.)

But, alas, most Farkers are against soccer moms in SUVs since most of them live in the basement and the only MILF’s they’ll ever get close to doing are their own moms.

/Bring back $1/gallon
/Eventually the commodity traders are gonna lose their arses on oil and unleaded gas futures too
/Sits back, enjoys popcorn

Yes, I feel sorry you won’t be able to drive a Suburban to haul around 2 kids and yourself…

/if you can’t afford the gas don’t breed

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defects 2008-03-20 05:47:42 PM
Cagey B: If people want this tax to do what it’s supposed to do, they should probably jack up that tax to about $2.00/gallon, and use any proceeds to invest in alternative fuel R&D AND subsidizing diesel fuel for freight transportation.

IF you really want to get people to drive less.

FAIL.

There is no reason to subsidize a by-product, let alone so a shipping company can profit from it. Diesel is a by-product of gasoline production. A better idea would be to ban 18 wheelers from traveling more than 100 miles. All freight should be shipped by rail. We’ve all seen the commercials about how many tons of freight can be moved on one gallon a diesel by rail road. This would mean less wear and tear on the road infrastructure. Sure some truckers would lose their job but with the increase rail activity they could easily find work there. It’s not like driving a truck requires an 8 year degree.

That last comment is my personal favorite for so many reasons. If there was ever an off-hand comment that perfectly illustrated the sheer contempt that most so-called “liberals” have for the working man, this one was it. Did your job just disappear due to some government policy? Oh well - it’s not like your job requires any real skill anyways. I hope you don’t mind being unemployed while you learn a new trade since we just legislated your old one away.

I’m not even going to get into the fact that most of Nevada isn’t within 100 miles of a rail line, and that, in the west, that’s not that uncommon. I’m also not going to go into too much detail about how, while rail is comparatively cheap for large volumes, it’s generally not as fast as a truck (more stops, that sort of thing), which can make transportation of perishables somewhat tricky. I’m especially not going to go off on the simple fact that the entire reason our supermarkets have so much variety in them in fresh produce, regardless of season or location, is because we no longer have to pretend it’s 1803 and only eat what’s grown locally and hasn’t been consumed by locusts. It would also be highly unpolitic of me to point out that, if we make living in small, dense cities highly desirable by making it a poor investment to live in the suburbs, only poor people are going to live in suburbs… which, of course, means that gas taxes will still be highly regressive.

If you ever need to know who supports the likes of Obama, look at the above posts and remember this:

- They think they know what you should drive better than you do.
- They are willing to dictate your ability to have children based on what you drive.
- They believe that higher taxes are good for people and a way of enforcing “personal responsibility”.
- They are willing to take your livelihood away if it helps them feel better about the environment.

In short… they know better than you, and how dare you suggest otherwise.

Folks, these people are the lifeblood of left-leaning politics today. These people have hooked on to the “progressive” idea of an intellectual elite dictating rules to the plebes hook, line, and sinker. Do you want to know how people like Stalin, Mao, and Hitler came to power? The answer is simple - because each one of them convinced people like those mentioned here that he agreed with them and he could make their little petty utopian fantasies into reality. The worst part, of course, is that each man succeeded, to the detriment of every single person that didn’t share those “dreams”.

These people aren’t for the poor. These people aren’t compassionate, responsible, or even intelligent. They’re cold, heartless, selfish little imps whose sole desire in life is to tell everyone else how wrong they are and show them how it’s supposed to be done.

I say they’re welcome to their Party. I say they’re welcome to their candidates. I say they’re welcome to their philosophy. I also say they’re welcome to the product of their beliefs when every single freedom-loving American in the country (not necessarily every single American, mind you) votes for anyone but them and they lose yet again.

Via Instapundit, a couple of articles from former Big-L Libertarians… and I couldn’t agree more. An excerpt from Stephen Green:

I stopped voting Libertarian for local candidates, leaving lots of blanks on my ballot. Next year, I’m not sure which party I’ll support for President, much less which candidate. From here, it looks as if the Republicans have become wrong and corrupt, the Democrats are stupid and corrupt, and the Libertarians have gone plain crazy.

I’d like to follow that up with a personal anecdote. For the first couple of years that I was in college, I was just going through the motions - I didn’t get involved in much, I barely tried in my coursework, and I just wasn’t focused. Consequently, when I stopped going to class in 2000, I didn’t think I was missing all that much. After two years of working retail (lousy hours, worse wages), though, I began to realize that the best I could hope for with my education and experience was just more of the same, and it scared the crap out of me. I wasn’t interested in topping out at $35k/year, working 60-70 hours a week, and dealing with hostile customers day in and day out. I had dreams, damn it. So, I went back to school. This time, though, I was going to do it right - I was going to get involved.

This was mid-2002, about a year after 9/11.

One thing that I always wanted to get involved in was politics, and I couldn’t stand either of the major parties. I didn’t like (and still don’t) the Democratic proclivity towards tax-and-spend. I didn’t like (and still don’t) the religious baggage of the Republican platform. I needed a third way.

Cue the Libertarian Party.

It was great, and the thought process went quite similar to Mr. Green’s:

Being a Libertarian was hard work, but I set right at it. I even went so far as to read the entire party platform. Pro-choice? Right on! Free trade? Hell, yes! Privatize all the schools? Start with mine! Abolish that Social Security Ponzi scheme? I was never going to see a dime, anyway! Bring all our troops home from Europe and Japan and South Korea and everywhere else and close half our embassies and cut defense spending at least in half and forget about enforcing freedom of the seas? Whoa, Nelly! “But,” I rationalized, “they don’t really mean all that stuff. A Libertarian president wouldn’t be that naive.”

I actually did one better - I thought I could change that from the inside. Yeah, their foreign policy was a little naive, but platforms can change. It’s a small party. How hard could it be? So, I joined the Campus Libertarians. I started attending meetings with the Washoe County Libertarians. I even started attending meetings with an anti-PATRIOT Act coalition - yeah, I wanted a strong foreign policy, and I wanted to stop domestic terrorists, but I sure as heck didn’t want to throw our rights down the toilet in the process.

It didn’t take long for me to start seeing some problems. The first issue was local - ReTRAC. Reno had a very serious problem that had been an issue since the 1930’s - there were trains running directly through downtown. Downtown is the heart of Reno’s tourist economy - having trains regularly run through an area of heavy pedestrian and vehicle traffic is a big problem, to put it lightly. Having trains run next to hotels at night can be a problem if you plan on sleeping in those hotels. Due to some unfortunate zoning decisions, most of the casino-based tourist sector was crammed in an area within three miles of the train tracks, so moving the tourist sector wasn’t economical - even if it could be done, it would have gutted downtown, leaving it an urban wasteland. Many solutions had been considered over nearly 70 years. As early as the 1930’s, Reno considered moving the train tracks out of town - this was deemed too expensive and failed. Every other project considered since that time suffered the same fate. Meanwhile, the problem was only getting worse. More people were flooding the area. Reno itself was growing. Traffic was getting worse. Downtown Reno was becoming a disaster. Locals didn’t want to go there - even if there was anything for locals to do there, which there wasn’t, it was far too difficult and inconvenient to get around. Why go somewhere where, if you hit the area at the wrong time, you’d be stuck for up to fifteen minutes while a freight train passes? Meanwhile, many of the more marginal casinos downtown were closing, and they weren’t being replaced by anything, leaving blighted, abandoned buildings everywhere. Something had to be done, and if anything was ever going to be done with downtown, the first thing that had to get fixed was the trains. This is where ReTRAC came in.

ReTRAC is a giant concrete-lined trench dug in the same location as the original train lines. It drops the trains approximately 30 feet, keeping the noise out and the people away from the trains. Traffic would be able to move freely, pedestrians wouldn’t have to fear for their safety, and the trains wouldn’t have to blow cautionary whistles through town. There was one problem, though - it was going to be expensive.

At the time, it wasn’t particularly popular around town - if a majority of people in Reno wanted the trench, it would’ve been a very slim one. Meanwhile, the railroads offered some money for construction for a trench, but there were two catches - construction had to start soon, and it had to be a trench. Moving the trains wasn’t going to fix the problem; with the way Reno was (and still is) growing, there weren’t many places for the trains to get moved to, and any place they moved them would start experiencing the same problems in a few years anyways. Some people wanted either some underpasses or some overpasses, which would have solved the traffic problem but would’ve been an aesthetic nightmare and would have done little for the noise.

From where I was sitting, the trench looked like an expensive but necessary solution. I asked the local Libertarians what they thought. They didn’t like it, which was not surprising. I understood why. It was going to be expensive and much of it was going to be taxpayer funded. So, I asked them what they thought the solution to the problem was. Should they move the tracks? No way - that would almost certainly require eminent domain. Should they build bridges or overpasses? No way - that would require taxpayer money. Ultimately, no matter what solution should be used, it was a “downtown problem, and downtown should pay for it”.

Right off the bat, I saw some pretty serious problems with this logic. First off, it wasn’t just downtown Reno or customers of business down there that would benefit from it - anybody that went through downtown would be better for it. This included employees of downtown casinos, university students, anybody needing to use either of the nearby hospitals, or anybody using the city bus system. Secondly, a quick look around downtown made it quite clear that there was no way enough money could come from there to pay for anything - half of the businesses didn’t even have serviceable paint jobs, and the other half were empty. Worse yet, that wasn’t going to change unless something could be done to improve access to the area, which would be impossible with freight trains blocking traffic throughout the day. So, I became the only Libertarian in Washoe County to think the train trench was a good idea.

This alone didn’t bother me. I understood that the train trench was against Libertarian philosophy and dogma - as far as I was concerned, it was the exception that proved the rule. If City Council didn’t restrict zoning back in the 1950’s, there wouldn’t be a bunch of casinos by the tracks anyways - from where I was sitting, the city made the mess through excessive government interference, so it was going to take some action to get it cleaned up. Sometimes, cleaning something up requires more than just not making a mess - if you have dishes scattered through your house, it’s not sufficient to decide to not scatter any additional dishes. You’re going to have to pick them up and carry them to the sink. From where I was sitting, the train trench was in that vein.

Then came Iraq.

Most of the local Libertarians I was talking to weren’t big fans of our involvement in Afghanistan, arguing that, if we just left the world alone, the world would leave us alone. I’d regularly point out that the United States had tried that in the past, and that such an approach had already led to two World Wars that we stumbled into half-prepared and almost too late to make a difference. We’d smile and nod at each other as each side understood where the other side was coming from, but not really agreeing with each other.

Then, Bush invaded Iraq.

I figured we made the mess in Iraq, so the least we can do is clean it up. If Iraq had WMDs, it was probably because we sold them to Iraq so they could use them against Iran. Besides, we were already there anyways, with no-fly zones and sanctions that, in conjunction with some epically corrupt leadership, was absolutely crushing the people there. So, let’s put a stop to it - invade Iraq, kick the old leaders out, and see if we can’t get something more positive going there.

The Libertarian Party, locally and nationally, felt very different.

Before we even fired a shot, many of the local Libertarians were preparing anti-war protests around town and declaring that “it’s all about the oil”. They started screaming that, if they simply spoke up more before the invasion of Afghanistan, Bush wouldn’t have been “emboldened” enough to invade Iraq in the first place. Meanwhile, they argued, what was our military doing overseas in the first place?

That’s when they lost me, and, by the looks of things, countless others who would love to support the Libertarian Party if they weren’t completely insane regarding foreign policy. I could understand them not wanting to invade Iraq and not supporting the invasion once it happened - considering how things were there up until very recently, it would have been a rational decision. But, when they claimed that the reason 9/11 happened was because we wouldn’t leave the world alone… I didn’t buy that, and still don’t. Heck, when I play FreeCiv, I try to keep to myself and focus on technology and industry, yet my neighbors will demand favors from me and attack me without provocation - if that dynamic is obvious enough to put it in a computer game, how could it not be obvious to an entire political party?

So, it is with great sadness that I also list myself as one of the disenfranchised libertarians. Some day, I hope an organization will exist that speaks for myself and others like myself, representing our common interests so people will realize that, yes, they do need to listen to us. Maybe I’ll be the one that creates it. Until then, though, I’ll be another individual voice screaming into the cacophony.

Okay, I’m definitely against state-sponsored religion. However, when someone purchases something from the state and they want it customized, why would they not be allowed to put “God” on it?

Please note that the snarky libertarian in me is wondering what government is doing selling anything anyways. This is why government should really do as little as possible, folks - anything that government does is guaranteed to be political. That’s the nature of the beast.

Via Instapundit, I found this article explaining why Libertarians are happy. All in all, I don’t disagree with much of it, though there are a few points I’d like to address.

First, the reason Ron Paul’s numbers are so low is because he’s nuts. There. I said it. Unfortunately, he’s one of the “programmatically antiwar”, as the article puts it, and it shows. It’s one thing to have a rational, ethical dislike of the Iraq war. It’s quite another when you make it clear that you never see a reason to use force, a position which most of America doesn’t agree with. It has nothing to do with him being a Libertarian. It has everything to do with the moonbat Libertarian foreign policy platform that pretends everything from 1915 on never happened.

Second, I know that hindsight is 20/20, and I wasn’t around to see the ’60s (thank goodness). However, I took exception to this:

The civil-rights movement is an instructive case. Mr. Lindsey includes it in his list of libertarian victories, but it is a perfect example of the inability of libertarians to find a political and moral framework suitable to the big questions of American public life. If people ought to be able to do what they want, then certainly hating blacks–either by oneself or in the company of like-minded souls–is nobody else’s business, including the federal government’s. To the extent that libertarians are remembered at all for their role in the civil-rights era, it is not for marching on Selma but rather for their enthusiastic support of states’ rights and the freedom of white racists to associate with one another.

The solution to this problem is easily revealed in an earlier paragraph:

…the libertarian vision of personal morality–described by Mr. Doherty as “People ought to be free to do whatever the hell they want, mostly, as long as they aren’t hurting anyone else…”

Put another way, as far as Libertarians are concerned, yes, you’re free to hate blacks, but you’re not morally allowed to use that hatred to hurt them or restrict their ability to do the same (and vice-versa). Since many states at the time had laws that hurt blacks, federal intervention was necessary to rectify this. In short:

Individual rights > State rights > Federal rights

That said, federal rights can be used to override state rights on occasions when state rights are infringing on individual rights. That’s why we have the constitution we have - it enumerates what powers are available to the federal government, explicitly restricts them to those powers, and then commands it to defend the liberties of the people covered by it.

Other than that - good article.