I agree with working against AGW and air pollution (which is a general property rights violation that can’t really be settled in court), and I agree with the provision of a few public goods and very, very light regulation, but that’s about the extent I think the government should be extended.

-Dr House

Republicans have drifted further from libertarianism in recent years with their support for the war, the Patriot Act, increased government spending, and corporate welfare. Even if libertarians found the party to be of use in the past this may no longer be true in the future.

There’s no viable vehicle for Libertarians to win elections as Democrats, as there is with Libertarians in the GOP.

In the entire history of the Modern Libertarian Movement since 1969 only one single Libertarian has ever won election as a Democrat – New Hampshire State Rep. Steve Vaillancourt in 1998, and that was a complete fluke. A year later he switched to Republican.

Compare that with hundreds of libertarians who’ve been elected to Congress, Governorships and State Legislatures as Republicans, like Jeff Flake, Dana Rohrabacher, Tom McClintock, Sarah Palin, Butch Otter, Leon Drolet, et.al.

There’s no reason for Libertarians to work with Liberals if we can’t get our candidates elected as Democrats.

Another problem with labels beyond what I mentioned in the post is that people attribute beliefs to groups based upon labels which might no longer hold as labels are used differently at different times. Liberals are currently the most pragmatic on economic issues, following modern economic theories, while other groups often base economic views based upon their ideology as opposed to what modern economic theory actually shows.

In the past the conventional wisdom was that libertarians were closer to conservatives in economics. In recent years it has become clearer that Republican economic polices concentrate more on corporate welfare and use of the tax code to redistribute wealth to the ultra-wealthy, even at the expense of the middle and upper middle classes. In contrast the influence of leftist economics has been minimalized among modern liberals.

There is no need for libertarians to change their principles to work with liberals in areas of common agreement. I don’t think many libertarians really expect to have a libertarian society in the near future (if ever) but we could have a far more libertarian society by pushing for areas of common agreement.

yours/
peter.

But I don’t see the benefit of libertarians changing their principles and becoming less libertarian so as to work together on non-libertarian goals, since it kind of, um, defeats the point of being a libertarian. One would think.

The arguments in this article could be taken to justify alliances between libertarians and either liberals or conservatives. It wasn’t clear where he stands from his examples. For example, he wrote on global warming:

We need to recognize that some of the current threats to liberty are outside of the old categories. I worry about pandemics and natural disasters, as well as global warming and climate change more generally (it doesn’t have to be carbon-induced to be a problem). These developments are big threats to the liberty of many people in the world, although not necessarily Americans. The best answers to these problems don’t always lie on the old liberty/power spectrum in a simple way. Defining property rights in clean air, or in a regular climate, isn’t that easy and it probably cannot be done without significant state intervention of some kind or another.

Yes, I know some of you are climate skeptics. But if the chance of mainstream science being right is only 20% (and assuredly it is much higher than that), we still have, in expected value terms, a massive tort. We don’t let people play involuntary Russian roulette on others with a probability of 17% (one bullet, six chambers), so we do need to worry about man-made global warming.

This sounds like someone with views leaning towards liberal views who is speaking to people influenced by conservatives. Of course climate change is now the consensus of scientific thought and hopefully not all conservatives buy into the attacks on the science.

If I was sure of his beliefs I might have written this a little different, stressing the point that if some libertarians could support (or at least tolerate) government in some areas this leaves room for other libertarians to find common ground with some liberals.