Quote:
Originally Posted by tomdemaine
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.
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.