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Politics : Libertarian Discussion Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sdgla who wrote (11058)	6/21/2015 3:23:55 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 13056

Rand Paul doesn’t claim to be a libertarian, which is good because he isn’t. He's not a minarchist, but I'd say broadly he's a "soft" libertarian. For example, he is not a consistent noninterventionist in foreign policy I don't think that's necessary to be a libertarian. A libertarian would probably have some skepticism about the state in general that would extent to the state's ability to get a better outcome by waging war, but you don't actually have to be a consistent noninterventionist to be a libertarian. Intervention can be done to try to increase liberty, less commonly it can actually do so. Behold Wolfe’s indictment of the libertarian philosophy: For libertarianism is among the most rigid of modern ideologies. The theorists who formulated its core principles were seekers after political purity. They created an ideal world designed to work perfectly — but only if human beings acted consistently. Society, to them, was like a Swiss watch: Let every part play its designed role, and the whole thing would run on its own accord. This is pure polemics void of serious content. It’s just silly to say that libertarian theorists sought political purity as though that were an end in itself. Not just that, but its rather backwards. Libertarians would reject the idea of society as a swiss watch far more than statist would. The "parts" in society have their own opinions and agenda, not something assigned to them. Trying to design society and enforce the design will typically be very negative, and sometimes lead to disasters and monstrous evil. (But then I see that Richman goes on to make pretty much the same point, later in the post.)