Essay on Libertarians

[ossuarian]

There's a few libertarians on my friends list.  I was considering writing up an essay explaining why, on the federal level, voting for Democrats best serves the libertarian ideals.  I've found an essay that says the less inflammatory things my essay would say.

Comments

[luvcraft]

Yay. He covers all of the reasons that I'm defecting to the Democrat party. I'm happy to see that I'm not just deluding myself and that someone else sees it the same way.

[ossuarian]

I could see cause an effect going either way. In the examples the essay gives, government is taking a stronger role in response to its own incompetence.

I'm not a Libertarian, but I see other factors than the level of government intervention. An government that's mostly hands off but intervenes only through corruption is worse than a government that takes a larger role but is more egalitarian.

[fruitylips]

*phew* At first I was afraid you were going to point us at Kos's lunacy. I got a chuckle from the reply at asecondhandconjecture.com that asked "Since libertarians already know quite well how to lose elections, what do we need you for, Markos

[fruitylips]

As in '02 and '04, this article makes the same point that hasn't worked as a campaign strategy for the Democrats in '02 and '04. It is easy to make a case *against* voting for a Republican these days. The Democrats have been miserable at coming up with a message of why you should vote *for* them.

Until, as a party, they can come up with something relevant and compelling, they'll continue to be a bunch of also rans. They'll still win the occasional election here and there, we'll be stuck with Republicans. Honestly, I think winning the House in '06 is the worst thing possible for the long term survival of the Democratic party.

[ossuarian]

It's easy to make a case for voting against Republicans, and with the incumbents, it's worth doing. It'd be worth having a different government exactly as bad as the existing government because the new government wouldn't spend most of its energy keeping its secrets from the last seven years (well, in Bush's case, the last thirty).

It's easy to attack a position without putting anything concrete forward, as you demonstrate frequently. Sadly, it's also easier to quote attacks, so some innovative stuff gets put forward, but it doesn't make the news.

As for the elections being identical, I believed that in 1999, but nobody who's paying attention thinks that now.

[fruitylips]

Amusingly, 'try to woo Republican libertarians away and actually win an election' is a concrete solution that I've been advocating for years. Nice job lunging at the silly, self righteous non sequitur. We already knew you were a liberal, so you didn't actually need it to establish your bona fides.

That it has taken an yet another impending election failure before any actual Democrats decided to consider it is telling. The Social Conservative/Business/Libertarian alliance of the last 35 years stopped making sense for libertarians as soon as the other two figured out that they were in power, so 'small government' was a tactic they were better off without. Maybe your Party as a whole will decide it is a more useful strategy then going after the Hugo Chavez vote now. I tend to doubt it.

Good luck. Maybe this time around you can get the Republicans to continue imploding and actually stay out of their way and let them do it. If history is any judge, y'all won't.