Brian Miller wrote: BM) I've already indicated how your scoring of politicians you don't like is inaccurate. (BM
I'm quite confident you've never addressed the substance of my scoring of Kucinich and Paul. If you disagree, then show your work. Was it the same mystery message where you claim you showed that Paul is "a statist on health care"? :-) BM) As for what is "libertarian," it still remains unanswered. (BM The answer is at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/message/1976. It doesn't involve the Nolan chart. BH) There is surely nobody on your list who cannot be described as libertarian (relative to some reference set) on either economic issues or on social issues. (BH BM) And if "libertarians" who get media attention start hawking the Patriot Act (and "submission to lawful authority" ala Giuliani), or DOMA and "Marriage Protection Acts" (ala Ron Paul), or single-payer health care and government-guaranteed income (ala Kucinich and Kos), the meaning is still lost. (BM Compared to the modal seeker of the Republican presidential nomination, Giuliani is indeed somewhat more libertarian in the limited sense that he tends to advocate fewer restrictions on personal liberty. Despite Ron Paul's flawed judgment on (among other things) whether liberty is maximized by minimizing federal involvement in certain issues and his mistakes on a couple of franchise issues, Paul's positions are overwhelmingly libertarian by any objective standard. Kucinich and Kos are clearly civil libertarians, but clearly not economic libertarians. Your complaint amounts to saying that "warm" has no meaning because it's not marked on thermometers. BM) for a large number who are in the "movement" itself, there's a nasty tendency to veer between purism and "compromise" based on where their guy is (BM Yes, I've enjoyed documenting all the ways that Ron Paul deviates from the Rothbardian anarcholibertarianism that is otherwise insisted on by the many LP radicals who are embracing Paul. I also like to point out that the notion of "libertarian purism" is recognizable as a syntax error to anybody non-ignorant of political philosophy: http://knowinghumans.net/2007/12/varieties-of-principled-libertarianism.html BM) It's a classic positioning nightmare and screeds aren't going to fix it (BM What screed? Methinks you doth protest to much. BM) -- a simple, strong, straightforward and consistent definition, backed up by candidates themselves, will. (BM The definitions I cite at the first link above qualify -- unless you're looking for a mechanical libertarianometer, or are blatantly trying to redefine libertarianism to mean an arbitrary choice of the various flavors of anarchism. BM) Something at least as easy-to-understand as "liberal" and "conservative." Neither of them need Nolan charts to be broadly characterized (BM Don't be so sure. Try to characterize them without invoking the economic/social dichotomy that is used to label the axes of the Nolan chart. The key insight of the Nolan chart is not that it allows for numeric scoring. The key insight of the Nolan chart is to divide most issues into the two clusters that reveal how liberals and conservatives differ in trading off security/equality and liberty. You can't accurately characterize liberalism or conservativism without identifying those two clusters. The closest you can come would be to try to name the interest groups appealed to by the respective movements, but you could define libertarianism to roughly the same (lack of) precision via the same technique. You're confusing 1) the amount of brand awareness laboriously achieved by these two incumbent ideologies with 2) how clear are the definitions that can be offered for them and for libertarianism by their respective advocates. Given that "economic issues" and "social issues" is an even easier-to-understand distinction than "liberal" vs. "conservative", as a minarchist I'm free to define libertarianism to a general audience as "economically conservative, socially liberal", and thus pass the test you assign above. See the 200-word LPCA statement of purpose I've proposed for the California voter guide below. It uses left/right as synonyms for liberal/conservative (because I don't like to concede the word "liberal" to leftists), but I contend it makes mainstream libertarianism easy to understand for any voter who can understand "liberal" and "conservative". If anybody can improve on the draft below while staying within the 200-word limit, let me know. I'm going to push hard to get this into the voter guide starting with the June election. Our voter guide SoP has been pretty lame over the years. My collection of them is at http://marketliberal.org/LPCA/Platforms/. _____ The Libertarian Party advocates the freedom and responsibility of peaceful honest adults to control their own bodies, actions, speech, and property, so long as they use neither force nor fraud to interfere with the same freedom of others. The Left doesn't trust you with your own money. The Right doesn't trust you with your own body. Libertarians trust you to with your own money AND your own body. The Left wants government to be your nanny. The Right wants government to be your chaperone. Libertarians want government to be just your referee and night watchman. Libertarians want the Right out of your bedroom, and the Left out of your wallet. If you believe that Left and Right are both half-wrong, then vote Libertarian to stand up against politics as usual. Stand up for the environment by legally recognizing its economic value. Stand up for customer choice and individual responsibility in education, health care, and retirement security. Stand up for the Bill of Rights and for limiting the federal government to its Constitutional role of protecting liberty and justice for all -- on American soil. Stand up, vote Libertarian, and win a free country .
