Yeah, right. M. D., you certainly are not a classical liberal. Ans since you redefine as you continue, you can claim to be Bugs Bunny.
LOL! A libertarian, like the American conservative,
is a person who embraces the classical liberalism of the Anglo-American tradition, ya damn fool!
Have you seen this?
1. There is no shortage of hypotheses about what the tea party movement is. Some embrace it as a revival of traditional conservatism. Many insist it is ginned up by billionaire funders as a means to fight regulations. Others view it as arch-social conservative Republicans, motivated by divisive issues like abortion, gay rights or even racial angst.
2. But all these explanations are missing much of the story.
Libertarian attitudes are fueling roughly half the tea party activists, according to our new Cato Institute survey. These libertarian tea partiers believe the
less government the better and dont see a role for government in promoting traditional values. This is a big reason why the movement has largely focused on economic matters, resisting attempts to add social issues to its agenda.
3. Today,
libertarians and conservatives are united in their anger -- 79 percent of tea party libertarians are angry about Washington, compared to 74 percent of tea party conservatives. Libertarians may again have led the way.
Opinion: Tea party's other half - David Kirby and Emily Ekins - POLITICO.com
Well, no, not specifically. But I'm a Tea Partier and these articles accurately summarize the ebb and flow of the movement's membership. The only thing I would caution the reader about goes to the idea that the more libertarian faction of the Tea Party doesn't "see a role for government in promoting 'traditional values'."
The problem with that idea is that it's not the government's role to promote
any particular set of
cultural values at all. Period.
Wait for it. . . .
The government must, however, adhere to the commands of certain principles commonly lumped in with things that have come to be thought of as mere "traditional values" if it is to be a legitimate, just and stable government.
To the point: I'm a Lockean.
Locke, of course, was the preeminent influence on the socio-political theory of the Founders and as the father of lazier fair socio-economics he is generally regarded to be the leading philosopher of the Anglo-American tradition of classical liberalism. The less interference of the government in the affairs of the people, from the exchange of ideas to the exchange of goods and services, the better.
Hence, we have the common practicalities and vicissitudes of liberty relative to the limits of government power.
However, Locke extrapolated his theory of government from the socio-political ramifications of Judeo-Christianity's moral system of thought. He held that (1) the biological family of nature and (2) the sanctity of human life were the first principles of private property, the security of which, backed by an armed citizenry, serves as the practical bulwark against the ever-threatening usurpations of government against the free exercise of the natural rights imparted by the Creator.
Hence, the foundation of liberty.
Libertarianism is merely a semi-definitive constellation of limits on government power . . . suspended in mid-air.
Hence, the operative difference between the libertarian and the conservative, in terms of their shared political heritage, goes to a disruption, as it were, in the premise-to-conclusion flow of Lockean theory. One faction has a rather fluid notion of limited government, while the other emphasis the legitimate parameters of human behavior. The former is subject to endless revision and is unsustainable sans the guiding principles of the foundation. Both intellectual intuition and historical experience, especially recent historical experience, reveal the truth of that. The foundation consists of the socio-political aspects of specific moral imperatives grounded in Providence, the Source and Guarantor of human life and liberty.
(Note: one need not believe in the existence of God or in the entire slate of the mystical or theological teachings of Judeo-Christianity in order to appreciate the necessities of the foundation. Allow me to expose the ignorance or, in some cases, the disingenuousness of some contemporary thinkers who make much ado about nothing, with the smarminess of the pseudo-intellectual superiority routinely exhibited by lefty, over the fact that many of the Founders were Deists. First, most were not. Second, even if most
were . . . it's the socio-political ramifications of Judeo-Christianity's moral tradition that matters. Both the Deist and the Christian of the Anglo-American Enlightenment embraced the fundamentals of Judeo-Christianity's moral system of thought and, therefore, the latter's socio-political ramifications!)
The society that fails to properly balance the respective concerns of security and liberty, for example, will inevitably be blindsided by tyranny, so too will the society obsessed with freedom sans a respectful regard for the legitimate parameters of human behavior. The freedom of the latter is merely the stuff of license and perversion systematically imprisoning it. And while the foundation of liberty can never be emphasized enough, one who errantly concludes that the government must prohibit any number of immoral practices will never fully appreciate the self-sustaining properties of liberty, which naturally instill morally responsible behavior in the body politic.
Beyond certain imperatives, governmentally imposed morality in our post-feudal world will inevitably give way to the sentimental emotionalism of collectivist redistribution schemes raised against the fundamental concerns of private property and, therefore, individual liberty; it will inevitably be hijacked by Pollyannaish little pricks like C_Clayton_Jones-Ahmadinejad, boot-lick statists, brutish bureaucrats encouraging the depravity and dependency of fraudulent rights and entitlements.
In other words, there are in fact some things the government is obliged to do in order to uphold the fundamental rights of the people, maintain a just and stable social compact. There are certain things that the body politic must never willingly permit an individual to do, and there are certain things that the body politic should never officially condone, though it need not, necessarily, prohibit or condemn them. And, then, on the other hand, there are things government should never do.
If the body politic permits the government to disregard the common defense of the people, the common designs of nature relative to the natural state of man and/or the imperatives of nature's God: the actual outcome will always entail an illegitimate increase in the size and the scope and the power of the government. The bigger the government, the smaller the people. The extent to which the government is permitted to disregard these things is the extent to which the people's security in their private property and fundamental liberties will be lost.
Neither of today's parties adequately reflect the ethos of America's founding; however, in my opinion, all classical liberals should rally around the Republican Party and strive to make its platform and its representatives more faithfully adhere to the principles thereof, not waste their efforts on marginal parties or split their vote among them. Most of the participants in the Tea Party movement, including its more libertarian members, get that.
We are up against a Democratic Party that eschews the Anglo-American tradition of liberty forged during the Enlightenment in favor of the Continental European tradition of collectivist tyranny, that is to say, the moon-barking madness of Rousseaunian-Marxist Utopianism, which, in the West, is rooted in the Platonian political theory of
The Republic, that oh-so brave new world of ''enlightened'' bureaucracy, in truth, that authoritarian theocracy sans any gods but the self-anointed of the temporal realm.
Oh yes, indeed, it's an ancient, festering pile of statist crap handed down over the centuries under a slew of guises.