An honest person can see that the President and his party have passed legislation to benefit the many (The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009), the PPACA (Obamacare) and both were opposed by the Republican Party by nearly every elected member of that caucus in Congress.
Here's the problem with your post.
I started out as a liberal thinking of doing things that were "better for the overall good." And I even got taught by the best liberal economic thinkers in the country.
But any independent minded person finally figures out that what people mean to do with their policies and the actual UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES of those policies are totally two different things.
If you want the best for the common good, get government out of as much as you possibly can, especially the federal government.
I see the Libertarian Model as dystopian, not because big government is necessarily good, but human nature left unfettered is self serving and will lead to (at best) chaos.
For the sake of argument, let's presume there is such as thing as "liberal thinking". I would agree there is, but such thought is framed by a sense of fairness, and a never ending effort to make things better. Beyond that, some liberal thinkers are pragmatic, some dogmatic and others self serving.
I would further argue, that conservative thinkers rarely think out of the box and are mostly dogmatic (at least those who post on this and other political message boards), rarely pragmatic, generally believe things were better in the past and seriously self serving.
As for Libertarians, I will leave that to you to define, my best guess is some are pragmatic, some idealistic, some progressive/liberal and others conservative, and many self serving.
Then we have the fans of Ayn Rand, clearly members of the idiot fringe who have not an ounce of pragmatism in their ideology.
