On 6/2/2011 8:18 PM, Ed Huntress wrote:

Authoritarian means, among other things, believing that you have the
right
to think for others. I don't happen to need or want that.

Hardly anyone does.

Yet the authoritarian left and right seem to need to do that for everyone.
And they do it so poorly!

One of the two basic strains of conservatism in America is highly
authoritarian ("law and order" conservatives -- the traditional type, who
have morphed into what we now call "social conservatives."). The other is
what's being called "libertarian" today. What they are, in their pure form,
is what Murray Rothbard called "anarcho-capitalists." That was a term of
approval by Rothbard, by the way, and it was in use for 12 or 15 years
before the invention of modern "libertarianism" and the Libertarian Party.

Now, how do you differ from that conservative type of libertarian? Do you
somehow restrict commerce or contracts to differentiate yourself from the
conservatives? Are there other differences between you and them?



What strikes me as funny about libertarianism is that we already had a
world that was like what the libertarians want. It was early America,
when the government did just about nothing except provide for defense
and the post office, and provide money and a legal system.

What we learned is that was wholly inadequate to satisfy the needs and
wants of the majority of the public. Hence the adoption of all the
things our modern state is involved in. The rest of the modern countries
have all followed a similar model. None of them, or us, want to go back
to a time when the government was virtually nonexistent. Because things
were clearly worse for everyone when we had the kind of government
libertarians want.

It's like libertarians are people who think history began in the 1950s.
Worse that that is they are in a fantasy about how bad things would be
if they actually got their way.

Hawke