lib•er•tar•ian: Two roads diverged in a wood…

good job, you made a whole argument out of an ad hominem attack… for the record, I am a “Kos Libertarian” supporting ron paul

The issue that’s coming about here, and I’ve seen it plainly for some time, is that while Ron Paul supports old-school libertarianism the ex-democrats who fell out with the party when they refused to stop the fascism of the Bush administration liked the idea of libertarianism too but were soon disappointed to realize that this included social programs such as universal health care and is removing the idea of political correctness that has been a heavy democrat ideology.

The “Kos” camp allows this to influence them to a point where they want to fall out with someone with as much to gain as Ron Paul. Even though Paul has been a consistent voter in giving power back to the people his own personal beliefs weren’t sterilized enough for the ex-democrats. The “Kos” camp would rather ignore that it is completely within their best interest to back Ron Paul considering every other Republican candidate is actually fascist in some way but because Paul does look towards Christianity, feels strongly about life, and agrees with some other usually friction-creating Conservative beliefs he also understands it is not his duty to implement them on a federal level and use federal money to support them. Ron Paul has stood strong on his voting record to always make the federal government smaller but the “Kos” camp is having a hard time looking past his own beliefs even though he has no serious desire in implementing them with taxpayer money.

Ron Paul is the only excellent candidate attempting to get the Republican nomination but he is already being looked down upon as if he’d create worse or similar mistakes as 9/11-screaming Giuliani. Similarly the “Kos” camp is not focusing on their own problem – the fact that their type of candidate (a Gravel or Kucinich for example) is not gaining any serious momentum whatsoever with primaries on the doorstep with Hillary, Obama, and Edwards all with commanding leads. The “Kos” camp is still dealing with a majority of democrats who see all the failings during the Bush Administration as Republican while the truth is Democrats have failed us greatly as well. This is a topic not really brought up in the “Kos” camp and if it is it doesn’t garner the heavy support someone like Paul is.

So the “Kos” camp needs to remember that they probably are still registered as democrats an a “health care president” like Clinton who also wants “security before liberty” is going to be far worse than Bush considering she not only wants to stay entangled in foreign affairs but wants to spend EVEN MORE federal money for universal health care. The “Kos” camp needs to stop focusing on the petty differences with Paul and focus on whether they seriously can choose between Gravel and Kucinich and if they can do that they need to decide if either of them can get enough points in the polls to beat Hillary or Obama… or they need to look at Obama and see that he wants presidential transparency and believes that liberty and security go hand in hand and see if he is the best candidate to back.

This petty arguing over what kind of “libertarianism” is the best needs to be focused. By far we NEED Paul on the republican side – whatever your differences with him. He does not show even the slightest desire the control from his position, he desires to disseminate. Now would this be a proper candidate to put up against Obama? Definitely. Obama having to appeal to the Libertarians of this country will give us a healthy president. And we don’t have much time to do it.

Nice article. Thumbs up.

Joe:
I agree that the government can be used in progressive ways. Everybody does to an extent, but when it comes down to it – we have to cover it issue by issue. I enjoy public roads, public education, corporate limitations and obligations because of their sheer power, public protection of the environment, and those things… but on what level needs to be reworked when we have the finances to see what bureaucracies are unnecessary and too expensive (Department of Homeland Security for example) and which ones are needed to help our country run effectively and freely. Paul is questioning them all and accounting for them to give a reason that the public can back strong enough to keep existing.

Our country should focus on the perilous things that our nation is facing such as ever-rising gas prices. Bringing all the money home from foreign spending and focusing a strong part of it on alternative energy sources that are safe would be a bureaucratic entity that would be useful for the American people especially putting American funds behind it, America could even profit off of any significant findings. With the money Paul would bring home from foreign spending we could lobby for things like that.

Paul is not perfect but he is the libertarians only shot right now (no matter what you support) and if you want a serious candidate that would be more liberal then there needs to be a massive movement for unified backing of Kucinich of Gravel (neither of which I personally believe have enough supporters) or they can go for Obama forcing Obama to feed in to more libertarian ideas, Obama seems to be a generally acceptable person and both Paul and Obama could bring out each others weak points better. It just pains me to see discrepancies within libertarianism before it is strong enough to even take root. Clinton or Giuliani promise no change from high bureaucratic spending and ignoring transparency requests so it’s best to focus on who libertarians in general should agree to back on the democratic side and stop worrying about the Republican side until the primaries are over. Republican libertarians are doing their job.

Ideologically, I consider myself to be a “kos Libertarian” to large degree, but I disagree when it comes to Gun control which I strongly support. I feel that just as the government has an obligation to ensure that corporations regulate their environmental emissions or properly dispose of waste that companies can be mandated to put safe guards on their guns ( tirgger locks, guns that only fire for a particular finger print register etc) and that just as car salesmen are required to check that someone does not have a poor driving record before selling them a car, that checks on gun ownership are needed…

These do not contradict the basic premises highlighted above, but stem strongly from them.

i think checking corporate power is seen as a non-issue for libertarians, since they believe:

1) the place to check corporate power is in the courts, if and when they harm you or your property.
2) corporate lobbies and special treatment are all by-products of a large federal government. reduce the money at hand in washington drastically and you will see the lobbyists disappear… forcing large corporations to compete like anyone else. they would only survive if they serve customers well.

i think these points are valid. but i also appreciate the democrats fear that under a system with a minimum of economic rules, you may experience an unacceptable (to some) widening of the wealth/power gap between rich and poor. not to mention there are some functions the free market just never seems to get around to tackling. should people have to wait decades until some entrepreneur figures out how building a dam can generate profit? or is it fair for citizens to pool their money for projects of general benefit?

generally i agree with Mike on this. the phrase “libertarian democrat” is pretty stupid. i think it just shows how much influence ron paul has. he is pulling democrats into his camp with fearless stances they agree with on the individual liberty issues, and some may even be crawling in his direction on economic philosophy.

I think we have to recognize that there are more collectives than just government, corporations, and political parties. If it was that simple then middle class America will always be on the short end of the stick – constantly being taxed or robbed for the benefit of corporations. The domination of corporate money in politics is what we can continue to expect.

But luckily for the middle class, there are more collectives. There are churches. There are charities. There are consumer advocacy groups. There is the ACLU. There are environment protection groups. There are property rights associations. There are gun right associations. However, unlike politicians, these collectives have narrow objectives and their leaders rarely owe anything to the corporations. Kos is rather dismissive of these types of associations. Yet they are powerful, and could be even more powerful if government didn’t occupy a part of their niche or impose its power over these associations.

Government is special in that it is the only collective that can use force to back up its decrees. And so all these collectives go to government to get their will imposed on the other collectives. Instead of negotiation and bargaining between worker unions and corporations, the two groups go to government to try gain an advantage. Each group attempts to buy politicians and convince voters. Usually money wins and of course the corporations often have more money.

blank: You’re right, Eugenics was a big strawman. But prohibition isn’t…. we’re currently ensconced in the war on drugs, and that’s just prohibition of different substances. We’re also well down the road towards a new prohibition of alcohol, what with MADD and other groups moving away from being anti drunk driving and into being anti drinking. Plus: cigarettes will probably be illegal sooner or later.

The problem? I don’t think the Kos libertarians are on the right side of this issue. Most progressives are all for freedom, until you want the freedom to hurt yourself with tobacco, alcohol, drugs, or guns. Then it’s just more lust for big government control of the people, with lots of rationalization about the negative effect smokers have on the cost of health care or other collectivist blather.

Kos libertarians are NOT libertarians unless it’s convenient, or if they think it will get them a few votes from anti-war libertarians who are sick of the republicans.

Quite a lot of silliness here:
First off, to the two people who were saying that Kos was just jumping on the bandwagon of Libertarianism now that Paul has made it ‘cool’, 15 seconds of reading would have showed you that he wrote about that stuff years before Paul was anything other than a Congressman who was generally regarded as a nutcase.

As for prohibition and drug laws, nobody has any good answers to any of those questions. If you’re a Democrat/Libertarian type, you want to say ‘legalize everything and tax it.’ And then you realize that if you legalize everything, then the FDA pretty much goes away… how do you allow stores to sell PCP and not the latest experimental drug from Merck? I mean, really, how likely is it that it’ll be MORE dangerous than the stuff that’s already legal? And if they want to say that it cures baldness and impotence and PMS, well, they have a first amendment right to do so, don’t they? And the only recourse is to sue them, if instead it makes your fingers fall off, or your brains leak out your ears. I will be the first to admit that the FDA isn’t perfect, but anyone who wants to go back to the early 1800s, where people were selling ‘miracle cures’ made with lead, mercury, or whatever else they found under the sink, is a lunatic.

As for the claim that Kos libertarians are somehow not self-consistent, what you don’t understand is that as I understand it, Kos libertarianism is about two things. The first one is civil libertarianism, which is the freedom to do what you like free of social constraints SO LONG AS YOU DON’T HARM OTHER PEOPLE. I worked for a couple of years in a store, and I was getting bronchial infections about once a month, and pneumonia twice a year, and once had to be hospitalized for it. Why? Turns out I was working with two smokers and, unbeknownst to me, I was allergic to cigarette smoke. Due to my skills, I would have had to have taken at least a 25% pay cut if I’d worked anywhere else around there.

This also meant that for many, many years I was unable to go into a bar, ANY bar. Smokers were physically harming me and preventing me from visiting places that I had just as much right to visit as they did. So before you talk about ‘lust for government control of the people’ maybe you ought to think that they are in fact harming other people besides themselves. Or maybe you simply don’t care about people like me because we’re just too small a minority to matter? Or, to turn things around a bit, should I be able to spread anthrax spores around in a crowded bar? After all, I like the smell of them, and I’ve been inoculated against anthrax, so they won’t be causing ME any problems…

Kos’s other libertarian instinct is that, as long as people are protected against corporations, he thinks they’re great and that the government should offload more stuff onto them, and should ‘let the private sector’ fix problems rather than ‘expanding the government bureaucracy’. These are direct quotes, by the way. Basically, he thinks that the government shouldn’t be doing things that the private sector could take money from the government to do.

So I don’t see why libertarians don’t like him. He’s a libertarian, he just defines harm a little more broadly than you do. (As in, he cares about things that don’t harm HIM but do harm OTHER PEOPLE. Which admittedly isn’t typically a libertarian strength.)

I think he’s extremely dangerous to the Democratic party. Which is another reason I’m surprised that libertarians don’t like him more than they do.

-fred

First, you guys might be interested in the discussion of Kos vs. Paul at the Freedom Democrats website (http://freedomdemocrats.org/node/2151).

Otherwise, I just want to comment that there is a core libertarian movement in the USA that is older than this “Kos/Paul” phenomenon, and it has it’s own splits among the “left” and “right”. These Kos/Paul movements are basically just fads (temporary popular manifestations) with respect to libertarianism…they will fade with time, but the core will remain. The Paul movement has many connections to the libertarian core, but Kos libertarians are almost separate from that intellectual framework. I think the Freedom Democrats website can provide a good introduction to the “left-libertarian” community.

Also, I don’t know how you could exclude “Reason” from the libertarian reading list, since it is probably the most popular libertarian publication in existence. It even seems to have emphasized its “leftist” side over the past few years, so maybe Kos libertarians would appreciate it. Also, many libertarians like the Economist, for their neo-classical liberalism.

Finally, I think it’s odd that you connect libertarianism with conspiracy theories (unless you link every movement with a conspiracy theory) because libertarians are particularly immune to conspiracy theories due to the fact that their ideas are based on institutional analysis. Basically, libertarians believe that the state will behave badly no matter who is in charge. It’s non-libertarians who cling to the idea that bad behavior needs to be explained by hidden conspiracies.

Another ignorant person wrote:
“it didn’t take the smoking ban to find a bar that didn’t allow smoking. ”

Yes. It did. I don’t know what part of the country you were living in, but around here it would have taken at *least* a two-hour drive, probably four hours or more (I chose to stay away from bars entirely instead).

People are stupid. In particular, bar owners are stupid. In this area, patronage went up after the smoking ban went in, because so many people had stopped going to bars entirely.

While I don’t really think the smoking ban is the greatest idea, your facts are simply wrong.

You also haven’t considered the public air. Why exactly is smoking allowed on *public roads and sidewalks*, which we really aren’t able to avoid?

Incidentally, I was disgusted when the smokeless cigarette was killed by the FDA back in the 1980s, because it would have pretty much solved this entire secondhand smoke problem technologically.

Someone else wrote:

“And then you realize that if you legalize everything, then the FDA pretty much goes away… ”

Not true at all.

What you *don’t* legalize is *fraud*. If you’re selling PCP, it has to be real PCP, not PCP cut with rat poison (unless you advertise that it’s cut with rat poison). If you’re selling snake oil, you can’t claim that it cures cancer unless you have evidence that it does.

This is the concept behind the earliest FDA law, the Pure Food and Drug Act.

From a left-libertarian point of view, the FDA should be responsible for ensuring *truth in advertising*. Not for prohibiting the sales of anything.

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