The fiscal war needs to take a back seat. No one at all with any possible degree of power wants to cut spending. Republicans want defence boondoggles and corporate handouts Democrats want free ponies and corporate handouts. The war on spending is currently unwinnable. Time to admit defeat for now and back off.

But we have evidence that the war on social freedoms is winnable legalising weed, freedoms for gay people, immigration, these are issues where the libertarians lead the way and public opinion is catching up. Libertarians need to drop the Republicans forget all tax and spend arguments and go hard against Obama from his left. Libertarians in coalition with the disaffected left have a chance to positively affect freedom on civil liberties and social issues in a way they can never affect taxation. Maybe just maybe once people begin to respect freedom in their personal life they will be more receptive to the idea of responsibility in their financial life.

Title of the thread should be changed to "Libertarians should abandon their principles".

So you want libertarians to vote Green Party.

Nope, just the ones that are pointless to hold. Not even abandon them just shelve them for now in favour of the principles that have a chance of affecting the world in a positive way.

First social libertarians would have to abandon the Libertarian Party. The power players (lol, but seriously) there give lip service to social issues but forced to choose they would go with fiscal issues every time. You'd have a better chance at convincing the green to focus solely on social issues.

I sincerely wish you the best of luck with this tom, but you will fail. The majority of the people who self-identify as libertarian will never be the sorts of people you want them to be.

Stealing my ideas?

The other thing is influencing social programs in ways that will improve them and prevent them from being complete boondoggles. Things like school choice (hell, limit it to public schools), etc... can be winnable things with lefties.

Doesn't matter, all you need to do is get lefties who care about these issues to start demanding change from candidates the same way teabaggers have done. Kick out the idiot Democrats and put them in with some serious bzns ones like Dennis Kucinich types. Those types of candidates don't need to be popular with Libertarians to win.

I suppose for this to work, one must accept the premise that some libertarian principles are far more important than others. If that's what you're saying, then yeah you're right.

forget weed and gays that stuff will inevitably be legalized, primary goal of libertarians/ACists should be to convince people that murdering innocent brown folk will not improve society. FFS there are still idiots on this forum that think the US gov doesn't murder people, it's only "collateral damage".

That's what lefties are actually doing considering all the states with ballot initiatives legalizing marijuana and gay marriage were blue.

Pretty good OP, fully agree. Especially with this part:

"Maybe just maybe once people begin to respect freedom in their personal life they will be more receptive to the idea of responsibility in their financial life."

Exactly, there is support here, so now let's get some national politicians who oppose this crap elected. Once there are federal raids in Colorado, maybe this can get support.

And which side is more likely to help on that. I agree that both on moral and economic arguments, this makes a ton of sense. You can appeal to lefties very easily by promising "more money at home for social spending". Even if this is flawed logic, the end results are considerably better. Ending militarism is the #1 priority for me of anything that's remotely viable.

The Koch brothers and whoever should fund a viable libertarian third party now that it's clear the GOP is in a demographic death spiral. God knows the white evangelical social conservatives aren't going to lose a civil war within the GOP.

I'm not sure y'all get to claim that. Plenty of Dems feel the exact same way on those issues.

The reason that libertarians aren't winning major fiscal battles isn't because the ignorant populace is behind our whip-smart, trail-blazing thought-processes on economics; quite the contrary. It's because most libertarians are systematically, categorically wrong about basic principles of microeconomics, and it shows when they talk. We've covered this ad nasueum, but, e.g., denying that there are public goods, saying that fiat currency is some sort of fraudulent conspiracy and we need to return to the gold standard, claiming that IP should be totally abolished, and saying that all taxation is the moral equivalent of armed robbery, all these things are embarrassingly ill-thought-out and make libertarians seem tone-deaf, self-absorbed, and misinformed. Libertarians aren't going to win these fights because their models of economic reality are driven by their moral convictions (rather than the other way around).

Thus, if your suggestion is using victories on social issues to bring in the Trojan Horse of the libertarian economic agenda, I respectfully cannot cosign; if you are, instead, gradually coming to the realization that the serious and important matters of personal liberty on which libertarians can make an important difference are social causes that many left-leaning people already approve (but can't find a voice for among Democrats), then I wholeheartedly agree.

Extending the issue of personal freedoms from gays and weed to include the surveillance state -- which loyal Dems are weak on -- would be most helpful.

Would be great if the Libertarians would drop the crackpot economic theories and become a social liberal movement that pressured both the Ds and the Rs.

Libertarians are absolutely great at criticizing government overreach and the erosion of liberties. Even if I'm not a Libertarian, I appreciate this aspect of what they do.

I too wish the bolded would stop identifying themselves as "Libertarian".

Koch brothers want to do everything they can to prop up the Republicans. The last thing they'd want is a replacement for the GOP.

libertarians want to abolish intellectual property? that sounds like something i'd expect karl rove to say about leftists.

lol wut

did you actually read the post and not just the thread title?

this only applies to a minority of libertarians.

Yep.

British and European Libertarians are not the same species as American Libertarians.

American Libertarians' refrain may not be, "You didn't build that", but it is, "I didn't write that".

just hit quads in a tourney, yo. i did build that!!!

Or the dealer built it, helped anyway, and the poker site, and, um, the internet, and um, microsoft, and NEC, and Comcast...oh forget it.

huh, I would have thought it applied the overwhelming majority.