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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (169008)	6/7/2006 8:46:05 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793717

Kos rightly points out that libertarians have very little in common with the GOP in its present incarnation. Support for tax cuts is obviously in common but there certainly are a number of areas of major difference. OTOH the GOP is millions of people. Its not just Bush a few leaders in the congress. There are quite a number of Republicans, even Republican politicians, who are more libertarian than Bush, Hastert, Ted Stevens etc. Still the GOP is hardly a strongly libertarian party, but then neither are the Democrats. Open individuals have an affinity for liberal, progressive, left-wing political views, whereas closed individuals prefer conservative, traditional, right wing views. Indeed, a case can be made for saying that variations in experiential openness are the major psychological determinant of political polarities. [Paper abstract.] Conservative has more than one meaning and so does liberal. Conservative does mean resistant to change and new experience, but that isn't the same thing as politically conservative. Welfare reform or invading Iraq where hardly conservative actions, in the sense of wanting to avoid change. And liberals support liberal orthodoxies all of the time. I'm not sure I'd say that political conservatives where more open to change a new directions than political liberals, but I don't see any evidence that they are clearly less open. The Libertarian Democrat understands that there is a third danger to personal liberty — the corporation. The Libertarian Dem understands that corporations, left unchecked, can be huge dangers to our personal liberties. Corporations can be negative but unless they get to the point where they effectively are the government or at least a quasi government with some government like powers, they are unlikely to be huge dangers to our personal liberties. At least not directly. They can of course lobby the government to restrict our personal liberties, and they do it occasionally, but so do the political parties, and various political campaigns and special interest groups. A corporation can become just another special interest group. This is really a reply to Kos, not to Will Wilkinson or Cato, because the rest of the article shows that Wilkinson agrees the main danger from corporations is having them use the government to restrict our liberty.