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originally posted by: Phage
originally posted by: intrepid
I like the guy. He's likable. He's also unelectable.
Speaking as a registered Libertarian, I agree.
If "my" party has any aspirations of credibility at the national level the first step is the local and state level. Until we can demonstrate the viability of the platform there we well always be a Congressional, much less Presidential, sideshow.
The usual understanding of anarchism as a left wing ideology does not take into account the neo-liberal "anarchism" championed by the likes of Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman and America's Libertarian Party, which couples social Darwinian right-wing economics with liberal positions on most social issues. Often their libertarian impulses stop short of opposition to strong law and order positions, and are more economic in substance (ie no taxes) so they are not as extremely libertarian as they are extremely right wing. On the other hand, the classical libertarian collectivism of anarcho-syndicalism ( libertarian socialism) belongs in the bottom left hand corner.
originally posted by: Blazemore2000
"Gary Johnson is better than Hillary or Trump" That is not saying much. Any number of inanimate objects would do a better job than Trump or Clinton.
originally posted by: John_Rodger_Cornman
solution: Limit government to bare minimum and ban lobbying.
Who regulates the regulators? Corporations can control governments. Why do you think government is going to defend you when it has been hijacked by corporate interests?
I am sorry you feel that way
When has a tyrant ever wanted a an educated subject population? knowledge is power. Power imbalance is what gives them power.That is the rules of the warped game. You don't want the proles to get any ideas.
Of course. Only the "experts" and "officials" are allowed to have an opinion on the subject.
originally posted by: luthierIndustry can advise and have meetings with co guess as a whole
Yet our libertarianism is not an ideology in the old sense. It is a dogma. The distinction between ideology and dogma is worth bearing in mind. Ideology tries to master the historical forces shaping society by first understanding them. The grand ideologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did just that, and much too well; since they were intellectually “totalizing,” they countenanced political totalitarianism. Our libertarianism operates differently: it is supremely dogmatic, and like every dogma it sanctions ignorance about the world, and therefore blinds adherents to its effects in that world. It begins with basic liberal principles—the sanctity of the individual, the priority of freedom, distrust of public authority, tolerance—and advances no further. It has no taste for reality, no curiosity about how we got here or where we are going. There is no libertarian sociology (an oxymoron) or psychology or philosophy of history. Nor, strictly speaking, is there a libertarian political theory, since it has no interest in institutions and has nothing to say about the necessary, and productive, tension between individual and collective purposes. It is not liberal in a sense that Montesquieu, the American Framers, Tocqueville, or Mill would have recognized. They would have seen it as a creed little different from Luther’s sola fide: give individuals maximum freedom in every aspect of their lives and all will be well. And if not, then pereat mundus.
Libertarianism’s dogmatic simplicity explains why people who otherwise share little can subscribe to it: small-government fundamentalists on the American right, anarchists on the European and Latin American left, democratization prophets, civil liberties absolutists, human rights crusaders, neoliberal growth evangelists, rogue hackers, gun fanatics, porn manufacturers, and Chicago School economists the world over. The dogma that unites them is implicit and does not require explication; it is a mentality, a mood, a presumption—what used to be called, non-pejoratively, a prejudice. Maintaining an ideology requires work because political developments always threaten its plausibility. Theories must be tweaked, revisions must be revised. Since ideology makes a claim about the way the world actually works, it invites and resists refutation. A dogma, by contrast, does not. That is why our libertarian age is an illegible age.