dagblog - Comments for "Cataloging political species"

RE: tax-hate, if you believe

DF — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 19:28:03 +0000

In reply to Using your classifcations and

RE: tax-hate, if you believe in the existence of a state whatsoever there will always be taxes and not just for a social safety-net, but more on this later as I have a work in progress on this topic.

Using your classifcations and

Deadman — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 19:16:00 +0000

In reply to Cataloging political species

Using your classifcations and Genghis's scale I am:

Liberals:

Bleeding Heart - 4 (mostly empathetic to these kinds of causes, but i do feel like a small minority of needy people are just friggin lazy)

Unionist - 2 (they served their purpose and need to stick around to make sure basic rights are maintained but i think they do more harm than good nowadays.)

Libertarian - 5 (socially, man, lay off. what i do in the privacy of my own home is my own business. legalize all drugs, legalize prostitution, legalize gay marriage, etc. etc.)

Conservatives:

Libertarian - 3.5 (economically, I must admit I have a lot of faith in Adam Smith's invisible hand, tho I think DF and I jibe on how the free market isn't perfect)

moral Majority - 1 (this is kind of the antithesis of the Libertarian liberal category, which is why it's getting the exact opposite. So many hypocrites in this bunch it's frightening. But even if you practice what you preach and live life according to the Good Book, you have no right to exert your way onto me ... as long as my way doesn't harm others)

I-hate-taxes - 2 (dont get me wrong. i do hate taxes, and think government wastes way too much money. I wish people gave enough charity to make taxes irrelevant, but that's just fantasy-land)

Well, he was already

Nebton — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 18:59:08 +0000

In reply to Really? He found Obama's

Well, he was already predisposed to vote Republican because of his hatred of taxes…

Really? He found Obama's

DF — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 18:45:37 +0000

In reply to Yes, I was deliberately

Really? He found Obama's approach to faith in public life more egregious than McCain's selection of Sarah Palin?

Yes, I was deliberately

Nebton — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:09:32 +0000

In reply to Just to throw a bit of wrench

Yes, I was deliberately separating the two "halves" of libertarianism, into that half that tends to jibe more with the Democratic side of things and that half that tends to jibe more with the Republican side of things. Anyone I know personally who identifies as a Libertarian actually supports both of those groups of things, although they're usually forced to choose between the politician who supports the social half of their agenda vs. the politician who supports the economic half of their agenda. My closest Libertarian-ish friend (and the only one who I know how they voted in this recent election) chose McCain exactly for that reason. (As a fellow atheist, he was more concerned with Obama's frequent injection of his Christian faith into things than in the fallacious rumors of him being a Muslim, but it really just boiled down to economic policies.)

Just to throw a bit of wrench

DF — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 21:24:15 +0000

In reply to Cataloging political species

Just to throw a bit of wrench into the works here, I'd like to tease out some of the contrasting economic perspectives. Politics and economics are hard to separate, but I feel like economic perspectives get short shrift in a lot of these discussions.

Take the contemporary American libertarian for example. Socially, I have few disagreements with this set. I favor drug decriminalization and full legalization of substances like marijuana. I fully support federally qualified same-sex marriage. I don't think the state should have the power to execute. I think women of all ages should have unfettered access to safe, legal healthcare, including abortion.

However, economically the picture is very different. The reason for this is that the modern American libertarian is to the right of Milton Friedman economically. They are predominantly adherents to the Austrian School of economics, a dogmatic approach to economics that has hardly evolved in nearly a century. They believe, in keeping with their hero Ludwig von Mises, that all economic thought must be derived axiomatically. They believe that math has no place in economics as human affairs are too complicated to model mathematically (though apparently they can be modeled axiomatically leading to the curious situation where sets of plain-language axioms, subject to the same analytical flaws identified by Gödel, are somehow superior to analysis where the symbols are numbers.. still waiting for someone to explain this to me).

To say that they are fans of the invisible hand is to make the case mildly. In the most extreme examples, as in the case of Mises' protege Murray Rothbard, they are so vehemently anti-statist as to regard all state power as being exercised at gunpoint, and thusly being fundamentally coercive, with economic policies such as industrial regulation being no exception to this indictment in their view. They would take initiatives that Adam Smith himself would have balked at, like abolishing public schools, a social institution that Smith himself advocated for. They would eradicate the Fed, FDIC, FDA, DOE, etc. The only government they have interest in is one that operates a judicial system to enforce contracts, a police force to protect property and an army to protect the nation.

As a Californian, I'm very familiar with the anti-tax fundamentalists. I'm still trying to figure out if they're the same set as the Ron Paul-type Austrian school adherents.

All of this is just to say that you didn't really address any economic concerns in your liberal libertarian, but did with your conservative libertarian. I sometimes hear people identify as left-libertarian, but maybe that just means they're libertarians without painfully heterodox economic views.

Based on my research, they

Michael Wolraich — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 18:27:24 +0000

In reply to Um, does that mean you are a

Based on my research, they prefer to call themselves "traditionalists." But trifle-wad will do.

Um, does that mean you are a

Orlando — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 18:16:35 +0000

In reply to In that case, maybe we should

Um, does that mean you are a 1 on the moral majority scale?

And can we please call them something else, because they're so clearly not in the majority. I prefer anti-hedonists. Or trifle-wads.

In that case, maybe we should

Michael Wolraich — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 17:54:00 +0000

In reply to I notice you left off your

In that case, maybe we should drop the Dem/Repub categories and separate civil libertarians from fiscal libertarians:

Bleeding heart: 4
Unionist: 3
Civil libertarian: 4
Fiscal libertarian: 2
I-hate-taxes: 2
Moral majority: 1

I notice you left off your

Nebton — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 16:21:04 +0000

In reply to I love categories, but I

I notice you left off your rating for the other 3 species…