From RR

• ‘Why minarchists are the enemy.’ Oh, great. More libertarian than thou. Sorry, Charlie. I’m not a Protestant; objective truth is backed by authority so I’m a minarchist right-libertarian leaning towards the trads and the Burkeans. A reason I keep the word conservative in the blog’s title. But I read anarchists.
• Libertarians aren’t politicians. The trouble with social conservatives is that they are not content with being social conservatives; they want everyone to be social conservatives. American culture belongs to them, they think. They are statists who want to dictate American culture by means of religious and political force. That is a major problem with the Republican Party in America and the main reason why they don’t win more elections. People are afraid of right-wing extremes, and they should be. Libertarians are conservative too, but content to be libertarian, and to let social conservatives be social conservatives. We don’t care about your culture. We believe that free individuals choose their own culture. We don’t want to force personal values on others. We know that the founding fathers of the United States of America were libertarian. There’s objective truth but one has the right to be wrong as long as you follow the golden rule in the form of the no-harm principle. So I opt out of the culture wars but call bullsh*t on left- and right-wing foolishness.
• The changing conservative movement. If social conservatives and neoconservatives hold on to their fears and resentments and refuse to make it the Constitution the foundation of the conservative ideology, there may very well be a decisive and permanent split with the Constitutionalists. This, in turn, may lead to a creation of a new third party, much better-funded and more popular than current third parties.
• Where multiculturalism is OK. For political purposes it is the idea that members of different cultures can co-exists within a given legal order. But what order might that be? (There is an untenable philosophical idea of multiculturalism which holds that every culture is equally sound, equally well suited to human community life, which is clearly bunk.)
• How to win an election. In a political democracy as opposed to a market democracy, choosing between two candidates is analogous going to Walmart and being presented with two shopping carts already filled with items. Everyone will leave the store with the same cart of goods. Each cart contains products that a person may want and products that one wouldn’t choose to have, but the voter is not able to take anything out of either cart.

Labels: libertarianism, politics