Libertarians are basically Utopians. They believe an unproven view of human nature - that man's actions are determined by selfishness. The also believe that man is rational and will always select an option to maiximize things for themselves. They furthermore believe that because of these factors markets will regulate themselves and capitalism will be controlled by competition.

What makes their Utopianism so annoying is that they manage to hold these beliefs in the face of hundreds of years woth of experience with the capitalist system. Not once has it performed as they claim and never has a libertarian government actually ruled.

What they are looking for now is a way to move into the Democratic party and co-opt it, since they see that the Republicans have been using them for philosophical cover. What has happened is that the worst cases of greed and selfishness have hidden behind this facade of "liberty" as promoted by Cato, the Hoover Institution and other "think tanks" which are funded by the super wealthy.

The Dems would be wise to steer clear of any connections with the libertarians, all they will get for a handful of votes is a weakining of their egalitarian principles. If the libertarians don't like what they Republicans have been doing then they can chose the lesser of two evils (from their point of view). This doesn't mean the Dems have to court them.

--- Policies not Politics
          Daily Landscape

Actually, a quintile means 20%. You're thinking of quartile. If 31% of libertarians are in the top 20%, then a libertarians is 50% more likely to be wealthy than the average American.

Oh, right. I misread that. Thanks for the correction.

Still, if 69 percent of libertarians fall below the top quintile, then isn't the idea that they represent the interests of the wealthy exclusively somewhat overstated.

The trouble is that the libertarian label is used by everyone from moderate republicans to crazed wingnuts.

The philosophy itself is intellectually incoherent. Libertarians want a society with capitalism, a defense department, sometimes a police force, and a court system. And they claim to be opposed to intrusive government.

1. Capitalism depends on the existence of real property rights. If you can't own the property that your factory is standing on, you can't really get the capitalism thing going. The existence of real property depends on the state effectively owning it all, having taken it, usually by force, from someone else who was using it. For example, all the land in the US that is currently in private hands was taken by force (something that libertarians are opposed to) from other people. The government, by virtue of conquest or purchase from an earlier conqueror, owns the land, and sets rules for transferring ownership to individuals. This both violates the "theft" arguments they always make, and rips apart the notion of limited government.

Leave aside that the essential elements of any successful joint stock corporation and trading of shares in same requires extremely detailed and intrusive regulation.

2. A defense department can only exist if there is a regime of coercive taxation. The existence of a defense department demonstrates that they have no commitement to their core principle of no coercive taxation.

3. Courts and police. While they jabber on at length about tort enforcement being sufficient to regulate an economy, they fail to note that they have, again, appointed a collection of government officials to coerecively take property from one citizen and give it to another.

Once you establish policies of government ownership of real property, a monopoly on the use of force and a government run tort enforcement system, you're nothing but a collectivist. The question, as in all collectivist societies, is who pays and who benefits.

There has never been a libertarian society, and there never will be. The closest societies to a libertarian society are usufruct economies--hunter-gatherers and nomadic agriculturalists. But that's not where the folks at the Cato institute want to live.

They want to live in the US, with no welfare benefits and no intrusion into people's personal lives. That has little to do with the philosophy they claim underlies their views.

As for a liberal/libertarian alliance, one possibility is for both sides to support free trade regimes and oppose any regulation of reproductive and sexual practices. Oh, and to an end to corporate welfare.

The trouble with the free trade part of this is that there is no real commitment by anybody to free trade, nor any chance of controlling corporate welfare in our current election finance environment. And the libertarians would consider public financing of elections anathema.

What's really happening here is that pragmatic people who self-identify as libertarians are tired of holding their noses and voting for yahoos (or people who pretend to be yahoos--hard to know). And if they're gonna start voting for Democrats, they want some influence. There's no need for Democrats to listen. Opening a dialogue is a concession that the Democrats, at this point, don't smell as bad as the republicans,and that their electoral prospects are trending up.

To have an impact, they needed to speak out before the election, endorsing Democrats in close races. Too late now.

Libertarians are mostly right about religion, sex, drugs, gambling and other adult pastimes. But their economists are posessed of an uncannily Creationist ability to make things up as they go, explaining away the history of the 20'th century.

The stopped clock is right twice a day, but theirs is stopped on the losing end of a culture war. I don't think much of this "alliance."

-- Good people can have honest differences of opinion. Republicans tend to be neither.

Speaking as an independent/libertarian/liberal, the idea of a consolidation is very appealing. The Democrats have some attitude adjustments to make:

I never have understood why they are so wedded to the income tax. For all of my adult life I have watched the Republicans beat them over the head with the hammer of tax cuts and the Democrats just take it. Why not take the offensive and propose eliminating income taxes in their entirety and replace it with a progressive value-added tax? You could exempt food, most rents and necessities and still raise the same amount of money to fund the social welfare state.

Wouldn't it be wonderful to put the Republicans in the awkward position of defending income taxes? Most of the intelligent friends I have who vote Republican admit they are tax whores. "I never voted Republican until I had a six-figure income."
The Republicans would lose these votes in perpetuity.

There is another natural source of alliance between liberals and libertarians: The Patriot Act. The thought of jailing someone forever without trial is extremely repugnant to anyone who values personal liberty. The Republicans went over the top on this one and I know for a fact it influenced a lot of votes- and will continue to.

There is much more in common between the two libs than there is between libertarians and Republicans trying to jam their religious right agenda down our throats. This opportunity should be persued.

Way off base, read Rothbard, not Rand, andc do not conflate the odious faux libertarian wonks, as real libertarians could care less about a Democratic alignment.  What passes for libertarian theory presently has in great measure been funded by many of the same orgs and people that fund right-sided orgs.

Sourcewatch's Cato stub illuminates, a bit. 

their economists are posessed of an uncannily Creationist ability to make things up as they go, explaining away the history of the 20'th century.

You do not believe that a humans have a right to own the product of their work then? 

Do you honestly think it is just to tax a human who has consciously chosen not to procreate, because of a deeply held moral belief that the world has far too many humans already, and it is better if the population began to decrease more than a person who has procreated without conscious thougt regarding its implications? Isn't this a type of taxation on one's religious beliefs?

 Should I be obscenely coerced into supporting a war  i firmly believe is immoral through taxation, and if you answer yes, was Henry David Thoreau a libertarian?

Is it right that capital can with great liquidity flow across international borders, but humans are trapped behind them?  Does this fact alone not impair a true free market process, as well as natural liberty? 

we liberals support modest gun laws

All the while failing to understand the original reason for the second amendment, which was that a tyrannical government is sometimes best dealt with by a citizenry which is armed as well as the government. 

Granted, in this modern era of nukes and remote controlled air platforms, this is an antiquated view, but at the same time, the only legitimate means to impose 'modest gun control" is by amending the second in a proper manner achieving a super majority of assent.  To do it in any other manner greatly increases the probability that other natural rights delineated in the constitution will also be unlawfully stolen by mob rule of a simple majority.

 It can not be  proper in that manner, anymore that the theft of the 4th 5th and 6th amendments by Mr. Bush was proper.  Yet liberals often whine about it, because they are unable to convince a super majority of Americans that this is a righteous idea, and instead equivocate, weakening the system of our government in the process.

I agree he isn't a adherent to true Libertarianism.  My comment was supposed to be, he is someone who claims to be a Libertarian in the context of the current state of the Libertarian political movement (Goldberg, Bob Barr, et al.).  The way I stated it was sloppy and your comments were warranted and absolutely accurate.  To me Goldberg represents the people who have hijacked the Libertarian movement and are perverting the movement by endorsing social conservatism to reach their ends of smaller government and less taxes...which is only a small piece of what libertarianism is about.

Deconstructing the Cato Arse

(Note: For those who desire to read the full article, but do not desire to acquire a subscription to TNR, it can be found on Cato's website)

Brink Lindsey stretches credulity by posing a liberal libertarian alignment. Not because they are fundamentally antithetical political views, but because he is far from being a libertarian, and is instead a part of Cato's NeoConniving War Party

Lindsey in a 2002 Reason magazine article, when he was already allegedly a libertarian, because of his Cato position, advocated a War Upon Iraq. Furthermore, he stated that he would still be supportive of it, even if 911 had never occurred:

...Iraq is no joke: The crimes that the Baathist regime there has committed and may intend to commit in the future are deadly serious business. Under the reign of Saddam Hussein, Iraq has invaded two of its neighbors, lobbed missiles at two other countries in the region, systematically defied U.N. resolutions that demand its disarmament, fired on U.S. and coalition aircraft thousands of times over the past decade, and committed atrocious human rights abuses against its own citizens—including the waging of genocidal chemical warfare against Iraqi Kurds. In short, this is a regime that is responsible for hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of deaths.

...I would support military action against Iraq even if 9/11 had never happened and there were no such thing as Al Qaeda. After all, I supported the Gulf War back in 1991 in the hope of toppling Saddam Hussein's regime before it fulfilled its nuclear ambitions. Unfortunately, quagmire was plucked from the jaws of victory in that earlier conflict, and so today we are faced with concluding its unfinished business...

As to the headline question, "What's the rush?," my reply is: North Korea. In 1994 President Clinton, with the help of former President Carter, swept the Korean threat under the rug and trusted that "nature," or something, would deal with that "devil du jour." Now North Korea's psychopathic regime informs us that it has nuclear weapons—a fact that vastly complicates any efforts to prevent the situation from getting even worse. We can look forward to similar complications with Iraq unless we act soon...

Here is the grim reality: Radical Islamism is in arms against the West, and its fanatical followers have pledged their lives to killing as many of the infidel as they possibly can. American office workers in New York and Washington, French seamen in Yemen, Australian tourists in Bali, Russian theatergoers in Moscow—nobody is safe. However exactly this conflict arose, it is now in full flame. And let there be no mistake: This is a fight to the death. Either we crush radical Islamism's global jihad, or thousands—or even millions—more Americans will die.

Brink Lindsey, "No more 9/11s: The case for invading Iraq", Reason, October 29, 2002

The reality is that Brink is not a foreign policy expert, and should stick to his claimed area of expertise, economic analysis. Instead he continued on with even more specious 'facts'. He dubiously rationalised the War Upon Iraq as a necessary part of the War on Terror, basing it on 3 claims.

"First, Iraq's WMD programs threaten to stock the armory of Al Qaeda & Company. Saddam Hussein's regime has a long and inglorious history of reckless aggression and grievous miscalculation. The decision to use terrorist intermediaries to unleash, say, Iraqi bioweapons against the United States strikes me as an entirely plausible scenario...Given that more than a year has gone by since last fall's anthrax letter scare and we still have absolutely no idea who was responsible, the threat posed by Iraq's WMD programs is far from idle."

Sadam was not self-destructive, and al Qaeda was opposed to his secular rule. It was unlikely he would have ever given them WMDs. Implying the anthrax attacks in the USA were of Iraqi origins here is outrageous, and deceitful.

"Second, the resolution—one way or another—of our longstanding conflict with Iraq will have vitally important repercussions in the larger war against terror. If we proceeded to remove the Baathist regime from power, we would make it extremely clear that the United States means business in dealing with terrorism and its sponsors...if all the tough talk against Iraq turned out to have been hot air, U.S. credibility would sustain a major blow. Al Qaeda would be emboldened by perceived American weakness"

It was not US resolutions in question, they were UN Security Council Resolutions, and claiming the right to enforce UN resolutions unilaterally without UN sanctioning has had vitally important repercussions, and has emboldened US enemies.

"Finally, regime change in Iraq offers the opportunity to attack radical Islamism at its roots: the dismal prevalence of political repression and economic stagnation throughout the Muslim world."

A war upon a secular state is an opportunity to attack radical Islamism?

Lindsey is still unapologetic about his drumming for war, and in a contemporary conservative fashion points the finger of failure anywhere but towards his own stupidness. Lindsey begins "Liberaltarians" with a false prop to 'fusionism', the melding of Libertarianism and Conservatism. The real father of libertarianism, Murray Rothbard first renounced the concept of fusionism in 1969

He listed several instances of republican hypocrisies that has sent libertarians packing from the GOP:

• runaway federal spending
• creation of a massive new prescription-drug entitlement
• No Child Left Behind Act
• big run-up in farm subsidies
• extremist assertions of executive power
• atrociously bungled war in Iraq
• Katrina
• civil war in Iraq
• Mark Foley

He then spins a tale of Conservatism's corruptedness: "Conservatism has risen to power only to become squalid and corrupt, a Nixonian mélange of pandering to populist prejudices and distributing patronage to well-off cronies and Red Team constituencies." Pure crap, do not be confused, conservative did not become corrupted after their ascension to political dominence. they became politically dominant, because of their corrupted ideologies, and willingness to blame all on the left.

Lindsey then cites some successful leftist positioning, that are in syunc with libertarianism:

• the fall of Jim Crow
• the end of censorship
• legalization of abortion
• liberalization of divorce laws
• increased protection of the rights of the accused
• reopening of immigration

What Lindsey proposes as a Liberal/Libertarian fusion though is a pretty one-sided trade-off, where liberals shed some of their core belief, and libertarians give up almost zero in return. Not fusion at all, but instead, a drastic change in core Libaralism

Lindsey's analysis is distorted, because he failed to loudly speak of a real reason many libertarian thinkers voted democratic in this year's election, which had nothing to with most of his observations, mr. Bush has attacked and stolen the natural right to habeas corpus, and due process juridical rights, and because of this has become a tyrant, supported by the GOP.

Brink is an arse, it looks as if he still supported Bush in '04, screw him, he has no right to walk away now, and should face the enfilade of his moral awakening, instead of playing cut n run on his own complicity.

Granted, in this modern era of nukes and remote controlled air platforms, this is an antiquated view, but at the same time, the only legitimate means to impose 'modest gun control" is by amending the second in a proper manner achieving a super majority of assent.  To do it in any other manner greatly increases the probability that other natural rights delineated in the constitution will also be unlawfully stolen by mob rule of a simple majority.

To me that is why it is imperative that ALL Constitutional rights be protected, including and especially the 2nd.  You correctly state that the only legitimate way to limit the 2nd is by a super majority.  I hope that super majority is never reached because I don't like the idea of limiting any of the rights granted to we the people by our Founders.  The amendments are like the 10 Commandments of freedom.  And while in practice the 2nd won't be able to protect us from a tyrannical government it should always be a symbolic deterrent if nothing else.

Speaking as a Libertarian, I can honestly say that there is virtually no chance of a Liberal/Libertarian conversion.

I will grant you, though, that the future of the Republican Party may be inexorably tied with the Libertarians.

As I have argued before, Generations X and Y are increasingly tolerant and progressive as a whole. Racial issues, gender issues, and overall equality are better respected by the younger Americans.

With this being said, the days of the Social Conservatives may be numbered. The Jerry Falwell coalition that has so graciously served George W. Bush and the Neoconservatives is not a phenonmenon that will outlive the Baby Boom Generation.

Gens. X and Y are not only increasingly secular, but even those who do worship are good at keeping it a private practice.

What this boils down to is that the future of America will become more socially Liberal. Abortion, gay marriage, Federal funding for stem cell research, and maybe even human cloning are all things which will be commonplace in 30-50 years (if not sooner).

The rub, of course, is that even Gens. X and Y will produce fiscal conservatives that do not adhere to the tenets of the Democratic Party.

As such, I believe the Libertarian platform of fiscal conservatism and social liberalism may just become the mantra of the Republican Party in the not-so-distant future.

You don't like the person who is the one proposing a fusion so you're going to reject the entire possibility??!!

That's just sad.

And you're painting the Cato Institute with a broad pro-war brush when, in fact, there were other voices at the institute who opposed the war from the beginning.

This is what Ted Galen Carpenter, who is still the Cato Institute's Vice President for Foreign Policy and Defense Studies, wrote in late 2002.

If we declare a war on terrorism per se, we make other countries’ enemies our enemies, and I would argue we have enough enemies of our own. We don’t need to acquire others needlessly. In addition, the war on terrorism should not become a pretext for such things as settling old scores against Saddam Hussein.

A war against Iraq would be a dangerous distraction for the United States. If we go to war against Iraq, the happiest person in the world, assuming he is still alive, would be bin Laden, because we would take him out of the cross hairs and focus on Iraq and Saddam instead.

Here's a link to the article

And I can't find it now, but I believe the Cato Institute's official policy as an organization has been opposition to the war, even if Brink supported it.

The places where I would look at--in Rawls-- for defining differences between modern (not classic) liberalism and libertarianism are 1) The State of Nature and 2) The Social Contract. The Difference Principle is NOT incompatible with psychological egoism. In fact Rawls ASSUMES psychological egoism as his foundation. He ASSUMES that human beings are a) Rational and 2) Self-interested. The reason why the Difference Principle makes sense for Rawls is because there has to be a RATIONAL reason for those who wind up at the bottom of society to give their Tacit Consent to stay in the "Contract". Also I would remind people that Rawls' Veil of Ignorance requires the rational self-interested person to adopt the Difference Principle. Why is that? Because if you don’t know where you might wind up in society prior to the Veil of Ignorance being lifted, you will not know if you will wind up as one of the least fortunate so that it would be RATIONAL to “cover your bet” by providing for these least fortunate by something like the Difference Principle.
The deeper division between Rawls and Nozick is not that the former rejects psychological egoism and the latter not ( that is just plain false) but that the latter values Individual Freedom more than the former. This tension was already present in John Locke. Locke, we must remind ourselves, maintained that Man has two basic natural rights 1) Freedom from Undue Government Coercion ( all governments are coercive devices) and 2) Freedom to pursue happiness. Nozick opts to stress the former and winds up with the minimalist government. Rawls balances individual freedom with the responsibility of government to provide every member the opportunity to pursue happiness even if it means redistributive measures which are inherently coercive (through taxation and other measures).

As I stated above, I believe that economic liberty is logically inferred from the axiomatic rights of Libertarian theory, therefore they are corollary liberties, second tier. Yet I do not believe in government regulation of the economy, but do not confuse this with government regulation of corporations. It is utterly anti-libertarian to hold a public corporation as a person in a Federal courthouse, giving this fictional business construct, conceived as a method for individual owners to shield themselves from the true valuation of potential liabilities that flow from responsibilities associated with implementing business decisions, full due process. This is a shameful insult to personal liberty, as well as dereliction from the duty to accept responsibility for one's actions.

What is foisted off on America as a free market presently is often veiled crony capitalism, and quid pro quo back alley political chicanery, not an open implementation of a free market system.

Cato has for the most part worked against market solutions to environmental problems, is still almost entirely a greenhouse gas denier, and often claims that environmental solutions are nothing more than hare-brained leftist collectivism, seeking to redistribute income. They are doing Libertarianism a great disservice, and should instead be ideating free market solutions for environmental problems.

One solution I advocate for sequestration of greenhouse gases is simple; allow a future dollar valuation of present-day sequestration to be used when figuring the statement of earnings. Add to that a workable market for carbon sequestration credit trading, and there would be a significant movement towards dealing with greenhouse gases. What BP quickly discovered in their successful effort to meet Kyoto protocols in the late 90's was that carbon emissions equal a waste of assets, and that their curtailing carbon emissions before the fact by increasing efficiency was a plus for the asset side of their balance sheets. See, the free market can and will work for the benefit of the environment if the variables are properly applied to problem solving, but most solutions so far have been going at the problem ass backwards, and sequestering greenhouse gases after they have been released in an inefficient process. (ie smokestack scrubbers, and catalytic converters) If we are going to continue on stupidly burning petrochemicals, we should at least strive for higher burn rates, and obtain greater energy from it.

The Independent Institute has been much more productive in offering libertarian solutions to environmental issues than Cato, even though they continue to offer a loud and in the past corporate funded global warming critic, F. Fred Singer, wonk status under their namespace.

• Roger E. Meiners, Bruce Yandle, "The Common Law Solution to Water Pollution - The Path Not Taken", The Independent Institute, Research Report, April 1, 1992
• David J. Theroux, "Property Rights v. Environmental Ruin", Independent Institute, Research Report, August 1, 1994
• Randy T. Simmons, "Markets Key to Saving Our Endangered Species", Independent Institute, Research Report, January 1, 1995
• Jane S. Shaw, "Private Property Rights, Not Ideologies, Are the Crux"(PDF), The Independent Review, Volume 7 Number 1, Summer 2002
• Tracy Wates, "Banking in Endangered Species", Independent Institute Commentary, September 23, 2002
• Jeffrey R. Clark and Dwight R. Lee, "Global Warming and Its Dangers"(PDF), The Independent Review, Volume 8 Number 4, Spring 2004
• Franklin Lopez, "Sustainable Development and Institutional Failure: The Case of Ecuador"(PDF), The Independent Review, Volume 9 Number 3, Winter 2005
• Mark Pennington, "Liberty, Markets, and Environmental Values: A Hayekian Defense of Free-Market Environmentalism"(PDF), The Independent Review, Volume 10 Number 1, Summer 2005

I consider myself a Libertarian-leaning Democrat. I flirted with doctrinaire Libertarianism in my younger days. But, a Liberal-Libertarian coalition is a waste of time. Anyone who cherishes civil liberties can't help but recognize that America's organized Libertarians would vote themselves into a dicatatorship so long as it was a low-tax dictatorship. They exist solely to ensure that there is an extreme voice against business regulation/taxation and taxes on the wealthy. Their success can only be viewed in terms of how much they pull the GOP away from the center on these issues.