I'd like to test a judgement put forth by Jim Ostrowski and by David Nolan. They've said, at times well separated from each other, that although "liberals" and "conservatives" each agree with libertarians in some broad policy areas, "liberals" and "conservatives" each put a higher priority on those areas wherein they agree with authoritarians. Therefore the net effect of the combined input of "liberals" and "conservatives" to gov't policy is to move from "where we are" in terms of gov't policy, within North America at least, at any given time during recent years, to a state of diminished freedom.
That may be true, or it may be a judgement distorted by the perspective of frustrated libertarians. If it's the latter, authoritarian observers would say the opposite. I'd like to do opinion polling to get an answer. First I'd assemble a list of policy opinion statements, all of which would have to have a clear impact on amount of liberty in different domains, chosen to get close to 50% agreement with each, averaged over the population, and also to discriminate "left" from "right". But besides asking whether they agree with individual opinion statements, I'd also have them rank them in terms of priority. I'd also have questions of fact chosen to determine how influential politically the respondent is; I'd try to sample in a way that included a greater than average number of influential respondents. (For instance, a frequent voter is slightly more influential than a non-voter.) What I'm looking for is correlations between "left-right" polarity, degree of interest & influence on public policy, and prioritizing of pro- vs. anti-liberty desiderata. I've no idea if I'll ever have time to do this scientifically. Anyway, if it does turn out that Ostrowski & Nolan were right, then it confirms my statement that to be influential all libertarian activists need to do is improve the PRIORITIES of activists on the left & right. In Your Sly Tribe, Robert _______________________________________________ Libnw mailing list [email protected] List info and subscriber options: http://immosys.com/mailman/listinfo/libnw Archives: http://immosys.com/mailman//pipermail/libnw
